Sam Hill

What in the Sam Hill is going on here? Tom Meltzer, a 21 year old, has a column in the Guardian's G2 supplement today. Apparently, he is doing work experience at the Guardian and he has been allowed to fill in for Charlie Brooker this week (Charlie Brooker has a herniated C7 disc and cannot write his column at the moment).

The more keen-brained among you will have realised, upon discovering this blog, that I have some ambitions in the direction of being allowed to write things for newspapers. Opening G2 this morning to find that a 21 year old had written a column was galling. I felt much like what I imagine an Olympic sprinter would feel like if while he was wandering around behind the starting blocks with his trousers still on and doing a bit of stretching, another runner set off three minutes before the gun, jogged to the finish line and was declared the winner. Here I am putting my toe in the water with a little blog and pathetically grateful to have garbled versions of my articles in the fucking student newspaper, and there he is swilling around the Guardian offices gayly tossing off columns for national consumption.

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The student newspaper's campaign to ruin my embryonic Reputation As A Journalist continued this week. I wrote into the paper following the publication of my article last week: "Dear Student Direct, [Fouls] has obviously not being watching the same The Wire as me otherwise he wouldn't have called it 'a typical US drama.' Yours faithfully, [Fouls]." I later regretted this but thought that anyone who read it would, at worse, dismiss it as nonsense spouted by a misguided eccentric. It did not feature as a letter. Instead it cropped up in the "Text Us" section minus the "Yours faithfully, [Fouls]" bit. This, you will realise, removed the point. My attempt to make a mild jibe at the paper's overly alteration-happy sub-editing and make clear where I stand on the subject of The Wire has been deflected back at me. Student Direct is like a bully who, having grabbed my hands, is asking me, "Why are you hitting yourself Fouls? Stop hitting yourself," while pummelling me in the face... maybe over-egged it a bit there, but perhaps you see what I am trying to say.

I was more pleased to discover that there was a letter of complaint about my article from someone other than me. My article was described as "almost comically cynical". I had to read this a few times but I think that we are meant to understand "comically cynical" to be a bad thing.