In my own words

Seeing my name in print will always give me a small thrill. Less so, perhaps, than when I was young and keen and chronicled my every article in a scrapbook – but a small thrill, nonetheless.

When your complete works consists of a dozen or so published articles, it’s easy to keep track. You can file them proudly, admire them often, and stare at your own name as if you almost can’t believe it’s there, in print. But when your total number of written articles gets into four-figure territory, you no longer have the time, energy or inclination to catalogue each one. Or any of them, for that matter.

What also gives me a thrill is seeing the bylines of writers I know, respect, like or love. I like recognising their writing style, admiring their wit, seeing the finished version of a story I know has been a hell of a lot of work in creating. Those quotes that took three days of phonecalls to get, finally there, for others to read.

The same quotes, incidentally, that someone includes in a blog a few days later, with no mention of the source, with no link to the original. Just a blatant lifting of text and passing off as someone else’s. And I’m seeing it over and over again.

One of the few things I remember from my degree (English literature – I have half-read a lot of classic books) is the idea of intertextuality, of nothing being original, of every piece of writing in the world resembling another. They say it’s the same with songs, that nothing is unique anymore, that one hit song has the exact same chord pattern as another. And that is true with words, and with pictures. Thanks to the internet and the improvements in technology, we are all musicians, writers, photographers, and there’s only so many chords/words/images to go round.

In the photography world, things are even worse and theft, copyright issues and plagiarism is rife. I have one professional image on my Facebook profile of me competing my horse in his first Combined Training event. I bought the print from the photographer, and I paid £3 extra to have a web resolution jpeg that was specifically allowed for use on websites, social media pages and adverts. Just £3. Not much to ask.

Yet I constantly see people with professional images, copied and pasted, often with watermark still intact. “I used my Photoshop skills to get rid of the watermark!” boasted one Facebook user recently, underneath a professional’s photo. Why not? Why should the photographer make any money? Yes he’s spent hours at a show, he’s bought all his equipment, he’s uploaded hundreds of images to his website, but surely he’s doing it all for fun? He doesn’t need to be paid for his efforts.

When I was a student, amid not finishing my set texts and worrying about intertextuality, I dreamed of being a journalist. So I wrote for the Student paper, I did work experience stints on a magazine where I mostly made coffees and hoped against hope to be asked to write something, and I spent a few weeks proofreading at a local newspaper where I could spell better than everyone else.

A decade on, and everyone is a writer. Everyone is a photographer. Everyone has a blog. Is there anyone left who is prepared to just make the coffees and hope?

My Mum’s husband wrote recently about people “finding their own way in this wonderful world of inventive words” and I thought that was a lovely sentiment – but at what cost? There are people who write, or take pictures, or make songs, because they love to, and it makes them happy, and that’s an amazing thing.

There are also people who want more, who hope to make careers in the creative world, who want to build up that elusive scrapbook of press cuttings, or their portfolio of images, and they’ll do anything and go anywhere for free, just to get that break into the industry, and I admire them too.

The danger is that when everyone wants to make it, when anyone will give their work away for free, when words and images are so plentiful that no one will ever deem them worthy of payment. Maybe we’re heading for a time when all creativity is a hobby, and there’ll be no professionals left at all.

Heard on the radio

Finding time to write a blog is tricky, so I’m just going to talk in this one.

Click here to listen to my latest European report for American radio station Horses in the Morning, where I talk about Kauto Star’s record-breaking King George VI win, Guy Williams incredible run of form, and my Olympic predictions for Team GBR.

I’m on from -21.07.

Can 2012 be even more electric than 2011?

It’s New Year, the time for resolutions, self-flagellation, endless denial – what a way to spend the bleakest, coldest, greyest month of the year. The time when no one is having fun, when alcohol sales slump, when gym memberships soar only to be cancelled soon after (well, 12 months later, thanks to those devious gym managers and their tricky cancellation policies).

Alas, I’m no different. This year, like every year since the age of about 11, I’m planning to eat less, spend less, swear less, work harder, exercise more. I’ve got a new resolution to add – update my blog more regularly too, since my original weekly blog has quickly turned into a monthly endeavour.

Day one of my new regime and it’s a rainy horrible afternoon in London – not the sort of day to inspire me to leave the sofa and venture outdoors. I’m also procrastinating (‘don’t procrastinate’ is my most-failed resolution so I’m not even going to try this year) because there’s racing from Cheltenham on television, and I refuse to go outside until it finishes.

It’s fitting that I should start the year watching racing, since it’s provided some of my most electric moments from 2011. Some I was lucky enough to witness in person – Hurricane Fly’s Champion Hurdle, the unbelievable spectacle and grandeur of the Dubai World Cup, Blue Bunting winning the 1,000 Guineas, Pour Moi winning the Derby, So You Think beating Workforce in the Eclipse, Moyenne Corniche in the Ebor, Frankel’s win on Champions Day at Ascot, Sizing Europe’s Tingle Creek and my favourite of all – Kauto Star winning his fifth King George.

For others I was back on the sofa, watching on TV – Big Buck’s at Cheltenham, Long Run’s Gold Cup win, Frankel’s unforgettable 2,000 Guineas win, mares dominating in the Arc, that thriller of a Betfair Chase at Haydock when we witnessed the return of King Kauto.

I’ve seen more sport this year than any other, possibly because my own horse Tricky was injured and I had an unusual amount of free weekends. I was at Twickenham when Scotland only just lost to England in the Six Nations, I saw Federer thrash Nadal in the ATP World Tour Finals. I sat glued to the television during the Rugby World Cup, Wimbledon and the Athletics World Championships.

And what a vintage year 2011 was for equestrian sport. I was there at Hickstead when Tina Fletcher became the first female winner of the Derby in 38 years. I witnessed Piggy French win the Olympic Test Event, on what was likely to be my only chance to watch the action in Greenwich Park. I spent six days immersed in Horse of the Year Show, and seven days at Olympia – a show at which the Brits dominated. On screen I watched Mark Todd win Badminton, I witnessed the British riders win European medals in dressage, jumping and eventing. While for me these past 12 months have been punctuated by some of the most difficult times of my life, in sport it’s been an incredible, electric, spine-tingling year.

Now 2012 is here, and I can’t help but feel that it’s going to be even better. It’s a significant year, one that I’ve written hundreds of times with some form of Olympic mention in nearly every interview and article I’ve penned. I don’t know where I’ll be during the Games, if I’ll still be living in nearby Canary Wharf, whether I’ll be watching from home, or on large screens in London parks, or if by some miracle I get the opportunity to be part of the 2012 Games and might see some of the action live.

There are some sports I love – anything involving horses, for a start, then there’s rugby, tennis, gymnastics and athletics – there’s some I barely understand (cricket, mostly) and some I have no intention of watching (football, golf, darts – I won’t list them all). But when it comes to the Olympics, I love every single sport, at least for the duration of the Games.

While January is all about forced penance for December’s indulgences, I’m hoping those 10 days in July and August do so much more in terms of inspiring people to do more, try harder, get fitter, enjoy life, and relish sport. I honestly think I’m going to spend the next 12 months with goosebumps. And I simply cannot wait.

Dear Diary…

It’s a curious thing, but the busier you are, the more you’re doing and seeing and squashing into your hectic schedule, the less time you have to write about it. Then, when you find a spare moment to write another blog instalment, there doesn’t seem to be anything to write about. For example, today I have worked at home all day, waited for a parcel that didn’t arrive, and I’m now watching ‘Don’t Tell the Bride’, eating pizza for supper, and attempting to write that ‘difficult’ second blog. This is not the sort of day that bloggers dream of – in fact, it’s been such a dull day I can barely remember what it was like to go out, have fun, and interact with my fellow human beings.

I was a keen diarist when I was younger, writing almost-daily updates from the age of about seven to 20. That was the age, incidentally, when I went back to university (second time lucky) and was having too much fun to bother writing about it. Diaries are mainly the preserve of teenage girls, who write endless missives about clothes, spots, fall outs with friends, and teenage boys, mostly. They’re rambling, pointless and self-indulgent, or at least mine was, and I have no idea why older brothers across the land have such a fascination with reading them.

Now my diary is used mainly for work, and is therefore full of scribbled notes and daily to-do lists, which never seem to get entirely crossed off. It does serve as a useful reminder of where I’ve been or what I’m supposed to be doing (today’s entry is all to-do’s and parcel deliveries – I didn’t bother to jot down the bit about eating pizza).

This week’s mainly been about the H&C Awards, that we launched yesterday. We’ve asked viewers to nominate their favourite riders from the worlds of dressage, showjumping, eventing, showing, racing, para dressage and alternative disciplines, and I really hope it’s a big success. And I also hope that the winners attend Olympia Horse Show in some means or form, so that Jenny Rudall and I can hunt them down and present the winners with their lasting memento.

I’ve also had a bit of a cinema frenzy, something to do with pre-Christmas poverty and an unlimited Cineworld card. In the past 10 days I’ve seen five films at the cinema – excessive, non? In brief (with marks out of 10) I’ve seen Twilight: Breaking Dawn (3/10, and those 3 are all for the prettiness of Robert Pattinson); My Week With Marilyn (7/10), Arthur Christmas (8/10) and Moneyball (8/10).

The fifth film, incidentally, was War Horse - Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited adaptation of Michael Morpugos’ novel. Unfortunately reviews are embargoed until 25 December so you will have to wait until Christmas morning for my score, when logging on to the H&C site will be the absolute first thing you do before opening any presents.

Talking of cinemas, I made my first trip to Notting Hill’s Electric Cinema for the launch of the new H&C series ‘Getting to Greenwich’. If you haven’t yet seen in, do tune in on Monday’s at 9pm – reactions to the first two episodes have been really positive.

Aside from watching too many films, I did get to go to the O2 recently for the ATP Tennis Finals. It was a belated birthday present, carefully devised so that I would see Andy Murray in action. As the number four seed, Andy was likely to be playing on the Tuesday, and we had tickets for both the afternoon and evening sessions. However, Andy then leap-frogged Federer in the rankings and ended up playing the day previously. What are the chances? All turned out alright in the end though – Murray pulled out anyway, and I did get to see Federer thrash Nadal 6-3, 6-0.

This blog is far too long – so I should go. I have a film to watch.

Better late than never

I have to confess that I’m a slightly reluctant latecomer to the world of ‘blogging’.

For a start, writing is what I do. I spend most of my waking hours staring at a laptop, typing away, hitting word counts. There is always another news story to write, someone else’s blog to edit, an email to send, and rarely do I have a moment to write for the pure enjoyment of it. And writing for free, well, sort of goes against the idea of writing ‘for a living’. I have a tax bill to deal with, shoes to buy, and a horse to pay for, and his ‘rent’ costs more than my own.

When I worked full time in magazine publishing, so desperate was I to write a book that I would come home from work and sit down to diligently type out a further 1,000 words per day. With the result that I now have a finished work of fiction, sitting on my shelf, sadly without the multi-thousand pound publishing deal I hoped it would bring (I once got vaguely close, but that’s a story for another day, and one I shall bore my grandchildren with in decades to come. I might make them read the book, too. When they’re old enough. Maybe).

After leaving full-time employment to go freelance last year, I thought I’d have lots of time to write. I don’t. I have two books languishing at the 20,000 word mark (about a fifth complete). I have a film script that I want to write, but I also have a co-writer who keeps rudely disagreeing with me about how the film should end, and he’s as busy as I am.  I might have a spare minute or two to write a poem, but NO ONE wants to know about that. No, really.

Then there’s the endless time vacuum that is social media. I made it relatively unscathed through those dire years of Friendster, Friends Reunited, Bebo and (shudder) Myspace, but then I got hooked by Facebook (thanks Mark Zuckerberg). A considerable part of my job involves updating Facebook multiple times a day, and I’m an avid twitterer. But with those, LinkedIn, and even updating my own website, it can sometimes seem like an Aegean task to stay on top of it all. And no, I don’t want to join Foursquare. It makes no sense, and what’s the point in being a Major of somewhere if you don’t get to wear one of the massive gold necklaces?

But several people asked me why I don’t have a blog, and I’ve finally relented. I’ll try to update it regularly, with tales of what I’m working on, where I’ve been, and what’s been happening. I hope at least one person might read it (hello Mum).