The river of liquid cheese slowly coursed its way through the greasy lamb and bacon landscape, navigating the occasional deep-fried onion ring, before slipping over the burger bun and dripping, with the gentlest of patter, onto my chip-infested plate.

“You’re not taking this race training very seriously are you?” said Frosty.  Looking back at him across the Wetherspoon’s table, I took a sip of my pint as I considered his question.

Sunday 13 September

The sky was an early morning shade of grey and Regent’s Park thronged with runners. Maybe I should have been more concerned with my lack of training but my little head was revelling in the fact that I had woken up at 5am and was not tired, had eaten breakfast and that the t-shirt in my race pack meant I had successfully infiltrated this herd of joggers.

Shortly after Gingell and I arrived, Matt (aka blankbadge) showed up.  It was good to finally meet him, although he maintains this has happened before.  After being spoilt for choice when it came to picking out a portaloo, we made our way to a wet bench where we busied ourselves safety-pinning our race numbers to our tops (475, since you ask) and fastening our timing chips to our laces to measure our start and finish times.  It may also be worth remembering that the top of your race number should line up with the base of your breastbone, remember this well else the real runners may turn on you.

Eventually we were led through a presumably thorough warm up, although I don’t really have anything to compare it to, before being separated off into our holding pens.  There were four; ranging from orange, for those whose predicted running times were a death wish, through white (Gingell) and onto more sensible segments such as green (yours truly) and pink (Matt).

Then we waited.  The excitement began to fade and the cold set in, and then half an half hour later there was a stirring and we began the slow collective walk to the start line.  In front of me a grey haired man with a beige hearing aid, a young girl with a big wig and a neck tattoo, a middle aged couple repeatedly sucking face, all of humanity decked out in garish white shoes.

And then we were off.  The group slowly spread out and with that I was able to find a comfortable speed without tripping over anyone.

If you want to talk training and technique then it’s probably best to head on over to Gingell’s blog but at that stage all I knew was this; if I don’t finish this race Gingell will mock me relentlessly, therefore I must finish this race.  The reason I fail at running is because I don’t pace myself, therefore I must keep pace with these running experts around me.

Whether they were running experts or not I shall never know but it seemed to work.  The first two kilometres were pleasant; I took in the park scenery and was generally impressed by lots of smiley marshals who had matched their yellow tops with metallic accessories.

After that I began to experience the dullest of aches in my belly but it was nothing compared with my usual running pains, this was probably because I was keeping a sensible pace. At three kilometres there was a water stand, further on someone attempted to play the didgeridoo (either that or someone spiked the water stand), at four people were chanting my name (well, they were chanting the name Jon, that’s good enough for me) and then onto five, seconds before crossing the finish line I saw Gingell cheering me on and then it was over.

I had run five kilometres in 30 minutes 42 seconds, which for a non-runner is rather impressive.

As I picked up my goodie bag I felt drained but I also felt a real sense of achievement.  After stretching (I just copied Gingell) I sat, wrapped in my space blanket, sucking on my Powerade, thinking.

Prior to the run Matt had asked me why I was doing this race and I hadn’t really been able to come up with a satisfactory answer.  Running was a way to bond with Gingell, running was something people wouldn’t expect me to do, running was something that I was good at, yet also a sport.

Ultimately, I may be forced to admit that I like running.

Related Posts

Bupa Great Capital Run – Race Report
It’s been a very full weekend

While I was out the electricity managed to trip the switch and when I returned home I thought I’d been cut off, therefore;

1. Call npower because “if we do not hear from you within the next 14 days we may take steps to disconnect your energy supply for safety reasons.” [Am now bessie friends with all my utility buddies.]

2. Pay water bill and ask to pay monthly, get housies to set-up a Direct Debit when they get here.

3. Have words with my bank about them trying to charge me £30 in fees.  Write a letter in the style of Rebecca Bloomwood if necessary.

4. Activate my new sim card with Vodafone and get them to send me the bill breakdown that they promised.

5. Read all the paperwork about the protection on my new bank card and figure out what I’m doing with that. [Cancel it and save £6 a month.]

6. Fill out the voter registration form for the house.

7. Change my address with the following people;

• Work
• The council (need to sort out my council tax payments)
• The National Blood Service (think it’s probably time to give again)
• My insurance people
• My building society
• Doctors
• Opticians (very tempted to trial some contact lenses)
• National Savings and Investments (maybe even pick up some bonds along the way)
• Amnesty International (think they might still be sending stuff to an address I had three years ago, also I need to set up a Direct Debit on my new account)

8. Replace my stolen Nectar card (I miss that thing).

9. Pay off student loan over calculation repayment.

10. Pay off dad.

11. Invest in driving lessons.

12. Look into getting my NCTJs (apparently only £386).

13. See if I can transfer credits from Staffs Uni to Open University and how much an English Literature degree costs.

14. Will add more fun-sucking activities as and when I think of them, should probably speak to someone about ISAs.

15. Replace passport, apparently I need a new passport form and a LS01. [Maybe if the Post Office even stocked them, just do it online instead.]

16. Get a student associate card and a young person’s railcard.

17. Fill out another voter registration form for the house because the council are incompetent (and obviously didn’t read number 6 on this list).

18. Pay the gas bill.

Working nine to five may be the way Dolly Parton intended but for a time it severely sapped my urge to blog. After spending all day sat at a computer typing, when I got home all I wanted to do was make a drink, watch some tv and crawl into bed.

When I wasn’t tired, I was busy. Since we last spoke I’ve moved house twice, which has involved a lot of sorting, a lot of packing and a few trips to the charity shop. It’s also meant working my way through a variety of internet connections, most of them unreliable or non-existent, and spending too long on the phone trying to change my address details with numerous faceless corporations.

I guess the other big thing that’s happened to me is that I got mugged. Here’s the account I gave to The Sentinel. It’s been over three weeks now since my attack so I think I’m over it, although it took a lot longer to replace my bank card than it should have done. For some reason my local branch only opens during office hours and doesn’t open at all over the weekend. This would be a brilliant business strategy if unemployed people had any money.

So, now I’ve fixed my sleeping pattern, settled into my new house and have almost sorted all my records, it’s time to pick myself up and get back on the blogging horse.

I’d like to start with a comment Clara left on my Facebook wall in relation to my new job.

very very good Jon! Quite proud of you at the moment! I will be checking in on the website to see fundamental changes to the graph

Now this might cause confusion for some of you but that’s understandable, I’m not saying it’s a long time since I created graphs to represent my debt but it’s probably before you were born.

Finance June

Week commencing 1st June (three posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £10 food
• £728 rent
• £67 council tax
• £18 Vodafone
• £10 entertainment (I went barfuss at Trentham and I bought Front Magazine)

Total: £833

End of Week Total: -£3,046

Week commencing 8th June (one post)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £38 food
• £48 transport (catching all those trains to go to Sky School)
• £100 utilities

Total: £186

End of Week Total: -£3,232

Week commencing 15th June (0 posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £38 food
• £3 drink (I bought a medium Pepsi at the cinema because I didn’t realise they had a coffee machine, it was sickly sweet and apparently medium now means bigger than my head)
• £20 student loan over calculation repayment
• £15 insurance
• £6 entertainment (I went to see Night at the Museum 2 at the cinema and it was a lot better than I imagined it would have been)

Total: £82

End of Week Total: -£3,314

Week commencing 22nd June (two posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £50 food
• £20 transport
• £1 stationery (an address book I needed for work)
• £9 rounding error (haven’t a clue)

Total: £80

End of Week Total: -£3,394

Week commencing 29th June (one post)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £26 food
• £10 drink
• £20 transport

Total: £56

End of Month Total: -£3,540

The Poverty Line, for the month of June*

For those a little perturbed by the re-appearance of the graph, here’s one last photo from the phone with some words of wisdom that it’d be worth you heeding.

* Figures are rounded up and my student loan debt, which has now risen to £19,993.48, is not included.

Think work might have drained me of all my words (yes, I have been rehabilitated into the working world). I promise that I will try and write something on the train when I go to see Peterborough play Villa on Saturday (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d type).  I’m attending the game as part of Jason’s birthday celebrations, so anyone who knows anything about this football thing feel free to leave comments, preferably comments I can memorise and recite in an attempt to appear knowledgeable.

In the meantime here’s a 30 second animation I made while at university, I feel it deserves a home on the internet and hopefully it’ll put paid to all those rumours that I never did any work.

Soundtrack is a 30 second sample of Better Version of Me by Fiona Apple (the unreleased version, as produced by John Brion) overlaid with some sound effects from somewhere I have long since repressed.

Some people say I haven’t been doing anything, I say my work is everywhere.*

Since I started this website in November two things have surprised me about blogging.  First, how many people read my posts.  In my head scribbleboy.co.uk is a dust covered tome tucked away in some corner of the internet bookcase read by half a dozen close friends.  In reality hundreds of people paw over these pages in a forlorn search for Megan Fox’s breasts.  I don’t have them.  Nor do I have Alesha Dixon’s legs or Abbey Clancy’s ass.  I am not some kind of pervert butcher.  Those who aren’t on a quest to discover the choicest celebrity cuts, or at least pause in their search, seem to enjoy what I write.  Sometimes they even leave comments.

The second thing that surprises me is that people don’t just read my words but are influenced and inspired by them.  Maybe Gingell said it best when she said;

Scribs was the first (and only) person I knew to maintain a blog about nothing…which went some way in to convincing me I could start this one.

Yesterday marked her 50th post on Running from Zombies, congratulations.

Another blog that I helped out with, and maybe in some ways helped to inspire, is Sound Guy Guy.  It’s been a while since Guy updated properly but it sounds like his computer is now fixed, so if you’ve finally caught up with his travel diary, too bad.  If however, you’ve been suffering from a dearth of Megan Fox based content, rejoice (wasn’t July’s GQ enough for you?)

Frosty, who documented our adventures through Asia last year, is back in the blogging game with Work Hard Play Hard, a blog that takes a few pointers (and plugins) from this very site.  Unlike last year’s thoroughly comprehensive travel blog this one will be a selection of edited highlights and will continue to document the adventures of Frosty long after he has returned to the UK.

Here’s an awesome time-lapse video of a Malaysian sunset that Frosty filmed.  There’s plenty more footage, photos and observations like this on his blog.

A blog where my touch is at its most obvious is TWKM.  It’s a blog about a guy trying to improve his life by completing challenges suggested by readers, or as Stanford puts it;

It’s a blatant rip off of scribbleboy, but I don’t care because it’s a good one.

Have a read of Stanford’s challenges here and suggest one of your own.  He’s already suggested one for me to complete;

I challenge you to regularly answer an ad on gumtree, craiglist or similar websites, be it serious (which can lead to expanding your skills, social circle, or jobs) or funny (asking to swap a hexopus (an octopus with six legs) for a wii remote for instance).

Post results (with anonymity kept) for all to see.

Restriction is that it shouldn’t be rude or destructive to the ad poster.

I’ll be trying to do this weekly myself, depending on how realistic it is.

I will get onto this challenge (challenge 21) soon and blog my results.

To give you a little bit of context, Stanford is one of Antonio’s friend whom I met at Annabel and John’s New Year’s Eve party (I make the briefest of references to the party here).  It was one of the most civilised parties I’ve been to in a long time with dips, fireworks and champagne at midnight.  An indication of how classy it was is that Stanford’s pictures are in black and white.  To gain a greater understanding of who Stanford is and the mind behind TWKM I recommend reading his about page.  I also recommend reading the nine blog posts he’s made in just over a week.  I don’t recommend comparing his output with mine, that will just make me look bad.

The penultimate blog I’m going to take a look at is FeatherQuest.  This site is written and maintained by Holly, who you might remember made me eat apples all through April.  Holly’s blog is about… well, I’ll let her say it;

This blog is based on the idea that I need to shape my life a little better. I need more control other than just random drifting and I had an idea that maybe my friends could set me challenges. Things I could do to improve my life or become a better person. I also aim to do reviews and general stuff to further my writing.

I have challenged her to get some of her written work published and to share the stages of her creative process with readers.  This ties in nicely with the freelancing challenge I have set myself (challenge 1e).

I’m going to wrap this up with the most literal example of me inspiring a blog post;

This is a portrait of me by Antonio of hellocatfood.com that I’ve been meaning to post for a long time.  You could read his blog but I wouldn’t recommend doing it too quickly because he updates even less regularly than I do.  Before I sign off a few quick shout outs to blogs that are not tainted by me but are still worth reading;

Life Through God’s Sunglasses – My former housemate Baines’ site.  What with her leaving and Gingell going out so much I have been forced to strike up conversations with inanimate objects.  Will be worth keeping an eye on this page for updates of Baines’ adventures in Nepal.

Wheels on Fire – Ally keeps a record of how he is ritually humiliated and beaten by his girlfriend his training, sometimes this involves Gingell.  I know I plugged it before but it’s come a long way since then and you can get a better idea of his weekly routine, plus it now has pictures.

Night,

Scribs

*If I was God this is the kind of thing I would say.

On Friday 22nd May I replied to a vaguely worded job description posted on reed.co.uk. It read;

DO YOU HAVE THE X – FACTOR ?

Birmingham based Advertising company looking for individuals with a great attitude to work within a lively outgoing environment.

We are looking for people with that special X – Factor that can be trained up to join our busy PR team.

Must have excellent skills in customer service, confidence in their communication levels and be willing to be trained from scratch.

Full training given with opportunities for advancement for the career minded.

Please forward your CV to us for consideration.

Ten days later they made contact.  According to the man on the phone I had enough “X – Factor” to get an interview.  When I returned home there was an email from Scorpia Corporation informing me that I was also being considered for their “Business Development Program”.  Further details could be found on their website, ANB Promotions.

This is when I became suspicious.  Scorp Corp had placed the advert on behalf of The Cobra Group, part of which was ANB Promotions LTD, the company I would be working for if my interview was successful.*

Ignore that scorpions and cobras poison their prey, ignore that ANB stands for A New Beginning and sounds like a new-age cult, just look at the website.  It looks very professional, with a lot of stock photography and very little detail.  If I was part of an undercover operation this is the kind of site I’d put together to try and convince the public that we were legitimate.  Look at their contact page, their location pulsates, as if at any moment it will vanish, and the man in the dark glasses looks nothing if not shady.

It was at this point that I wondered if ANB Promotions was my Credit Dauphin, if like Sydney Bristow in Alias I’d be recruited for what on the surface appears to be a banking corporation but in reality turns out to be a criminal organisation.  When a business says they’re “a leading below-the-line direct marketing specialist representing an array of national and international clients” you wonder what you’re going to be asked to do.  As it turned out it wasn’t ripping off jumpsuits to reveal slinky cocktail dresses and abseiling in heels, although it was seven floors up from a cross-dressing strip club.

ANB Promotions is located in Chinatown in Birmingham and provides other businesses with new customers.  One of their most recent clients is Sky TV.  Sky currently have 9.3 million customers in the UK and are aiming for 10m in the next five years.  Here are some facts that make ANB happy; Sky’s closest competition is Virgin who are losing 2,500 customers a month.  Some people are just trying to save money, others are unemployed, both are watching more tv and scrutinising how much they pay for this service.

I passed the first interview.

Then I completed the evaluation day.

Then I passed the second interview.

Then I was invited back for the training week.

Then, if I passed the end of week test, I would have a job selling pay tv door-to-door.  This job would be commission based, so if no one bought Sky then I wouldn’t get paid.

The training week began on Monday at 9:30am with some of the most detailed paperwork I have seen in a long time.  Hair colour, eye colour, height.  A five year history of all employment, unemployment and education to the exact date with no omissions or overlaps.  I was also required to arrive with eight different documents, including a reference I had to source and print over the weekend.

Afterwards we went into a boardroom.  We were given talks and we took tests, I dubbed this part Sky School.  Most days we didn’t finish until at least nine at night.

On Wednesday I got to go out in the field with my Sky Buddy Kristel, as I had done on the evaluation day.  Kristel was born in Estonia, lived in Norway and has worked with ANB Promotions for over a year now.  She has an amazing sense of humour, bought me an umbrella when it rained and is very good at what she does.

Then on Thursday we did the same again, only this time with less rain, flying bugs, and unfortunately, less sales.  Every day each field representative is given a walk sheet (note my correct usage of technical terms there) detailing 100 names and addresses of people who can afford Sky tv but are currently with someone else.  The average success rate is seven.  For the entire week.

Friday I quit.

I met some great people and I learnt a lot about sales, psychology and body language but this job was not for me.  In the short term I had to jump through a lot of hoops to make money that wouldn’t have covered my transport costs.  Long term this job could have been quite profitable but I’d be trapped in a tiring, repetitious, mentally draining job.

The job hunt continues on Monday.

* A subsection of The Cobra Group is Appco Direct LTD.  ANB Promotions and Lifestyle Advertising are both subsections of Appco Direct.  While the email suggested I’d be working for ANB it turned out I was working for Lifestyle.  Both companies share the same office and do exactly the same things, only with different coloured folders.  Mine was red.

On Tuesday I went walking barefoot and it wasn’t because they repossessed my shoes, although surely this is only a matter of time. Gingell, Baines, Lauren and I spent an afternoon at Trentham Gardens and while we were there we tried out the Trentham Estate Barfuss Park (because writing barefoot in German just gives it that exotic edge).

The idea behind the barefoot walk comes from a German priest called Sebastian Kneipp who according to Trentham Gardens was born in the 1900s (as Kneipp lived between 1821 and 1897 they presumably mean the 19th century).  Kneipp apparently cured himself of TB by bathing thrice weekly in the Danube during the winter of 1849.  Trentham are a little less specific, stating that “having reputedly cured himself of a serious disease he became famous and the welfare practices that he developed became equally famous throughout Germany.”

The Catholic Encyclopedia says that since Kneipp’s death, “his methods are being lost sight of, showing that it was the personality of the man rather than his system which gave him fame. He discovered nothing new, but systematized what was known before and had been allowed to lapse.”

While walking barefoot is undoubtedly good for you, Kneipp’s contribution seems sketchy at best, this however is not the point.  Anyone can have a walkway but it’s only with Kneipp as a scientific fig leaf that Trentham can claim to have a unique attraction (I still argue that anywhere can be a barefoot walk depending on your mentality).

Nonetheless, it was fun; a thousand metres of pathway, a variety of surfaces and no shoes.  We walked over earth, sand and stone, traversed a tree branch bridge, passed through water and waded through mud.  Sliding my feet in wide cresecent shapes one in front of the other gave me a chance to feel more of the textures, Gingell referring to this as my supermodel walk, her balance still somewhat impeded by the receding, yet ever present, T-virus.

On such a warm day the water and deep mud were cooling but the most rewarding textures were some of the gravels.  Sun warmed grit allowed you to really stretch your feet and gain sensation in parts of your foot that rarely touch the floor.  Gingell seemed to struggle with these, which I found odd for someone whom I think of as so active and outdoorsy.  Lauren theorised that my legs are so thin that the nerve endings couldn’t squeeze all the way to the bottom.  This is more than likely true.

While it’s an attraction that would be easy to mock, it was enjoyable and had a certain novelty value to it.  If you happen to visit Trentham Gardens there’s no harm in trying it out, it’ll certainly be safer than going barfuss in Shelton.

[This may strike you as a somewhat odd blog post and I think you'd be right.  Not only is it a strange topic but it also seems closer to a journal entry than one of my more traditional challenge-focused blog posts.  Hopefully I'll write some more of these, I realise quite a lot happens that slips through the blog net.  In other news, while I was almost up to my knees in thick, dark, suspiciously fragrant mud I got a phone call inviting me to a job interview.  That, however, is a story for another day.]

Related Posts

Barefoot Adventure Part 1: Trentham

Just because I don’t talk to you, break the promises I make and ignore you for days, don’t ever say that. Just because I cheat on you with real life doesn’t mean I don’t love you, darling blog reader.

Unlike most normal people, who use their blogs to document activity, I use mine to avoid activity or maybe to document inactivity.  This week has been rather busy (by my standards anyway); I’ve been accepted for a job, rejected for a job, hooked up with some more work experience, voted, been to two interviews, walked a 1,000 metre barefoot walk (twice) and completed a nine hour evaluation day.

This weekend is going to be packed with fun activities such as photocopying photocopies, making calls to get documents scanned and trying to find people to write references for me.  On Monday I and these eight documents will be commuting to Birmingham, hopefully arriving at 9:30am and taking part in a training week.

Somewhere in amongst all of this I’ll try and crank out some words, in the meantime I would recommend reading Gingell’s guest post for Zombie Command, it’s a well written piece that brings the funny.

XOXO

Scribs

Today the sun shone and I was offered a job, for a time it almost felt like I wasn’t in Stoke. In the email that offers me the job, just after the date, it says “PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL”.  I’m not quite sure why they’re shouting but it’s probably because they know that one of my favourite hobbies is running my mouth.  All I’ll say is that I’m going to get paid for some of my words sometime soon.  In the meantime I have been given a very promising job tip which I will be following up tomorrow.

In other news, I’m still broke but didn’t get round to fully documenting it on Finance Friday.  Expect a Finance Tuesday, Finance Wednesday or Finance Whenever I Feel Like It sometime this week.

Also today was the first of June which means I probably should have done deskscape, maybe later in the week.  There is little to report; my desk is looking rather tidy, in a moment of boredom I arranged my loose change around my drink coaster, tennis player Ana Ivanovic takes on the mantle of Miss June in the FHM calendar.

If I have learnt one thing from this calendar it is that women can either dress themselves competently or be successful, but unfortunately not both.  Ana fixes the viewer with a steely gaze, apparently oblivious to the fact that her black halter neck top is far too low cut and exposes her bright white bra to the world.  She’s going to be so embarrassed when she finds out.

Another thing I’m slipping behind with is the set of icons I’m designing to represent all the challenges on this blog.  Before I unveil the new batch let’s deal with some of the gripes from last time.

Challenge number three was to give blood.  The first blood drop I drew was too tall, the second too tubby and the third one (unless you say otherwise) is just right.  The blood people sent me a letter the other day.  It says that I pump O-, a blood group that is shared by only 7% of the population but can be pumped into anyone (apparently “It’s often the only safe option when a patient’s blood group is unknown in an emergency, or in some specialised procedures for unborn babies.”)

Hopefully this will put a stop to the persistent rumours that if you cut me I bleed black unsweetened tea.

My fourth challenge is to get up at a reasonable time each morning.  To make it more obvious I turned what was originally just a clock face into an alarm clock, by adding breasts.  This was a mistake.  I tried reshaping the breasts, I tried making them look like scary robot breasts and finally settled on making the breasts flatter, the nipples less erect and strapping them together. These are not breasts and anyone who says otherwise is a pervert.

6. Learn to Drive

This looks like a steering wheel to me, what does it look like to you?  Feel free to answer honestly, this is just a set of icons and definitely not some kind of psychometric assessment.  If I had any money at the moment I’d be spending it on rent and council tax (because those are my two favourite things) and not driving lessons, so not much progress is being made on this front.

7. Complete my Degree

The closest I ever got to explaining my degree situation properly was probably in this post;  I have one third of a degree in Creative Writing and Journalism plus a handful of additional credits.  The only journalism degree worth finishing would be one that is accredited by the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), the only benefit of this being that you pick up the NCTJ certificates as you go.  However, as 60% of people who enter journalism don’t have a degree in it you have the opportunity to pick up all the necessary NCTJ certificates in the first six months of the job.  This makes me think the degree is pointless and maybe I should go for something more generalised such as English Literature (maybe through Open University) just to show a willingness to learn.

Above you can see the mortar boarded icon, now with added glasses based on Gingell’s suggestion.

8. Keep Eating Steak and Crumpets

One of the more creative icons but then again one of the more creative challenges.  This is how the Yin-Yang would have looked if it had been designed by Doctor Atkins.

Well, that’s only three icons but it seems like enough for tonight.  Gingell has gone down with some Stokie strain of the T-virus but if she makes it through the night we’re all going on a house outing to Trentham Gardens to walk barefoot (they have a website, I didn’t make that up).

Have fun, walk barefoot.

Scribs

You’ve stuck with me through job applications, jobs rejections, actual jobs and temp work so it seems like you deserve a read of this. As promised, here is my application for my dream job, a Social Media Internship out in Asia with Ogilvy PR.

While I was writing this and since I’ve sent it off I’ve been reading through all the pages on what Ogilvy and Thomas Crampton do.  I said to Baines, “These people must be big, they’ve worked with the Smurfs.“  When I said that this afternoon it was a flippant comment, now it’s starting to sink in how big they are.

As this is a social networking job I’ve started following Thomas Crampton on various social networking sites.  On my LinkedIn profile I class myself as a journalist based on a year’s worth of a journalism degree, an NCTJ Law qualification and a handful of articles published in the local press.  Then I looked at Thomas Crampton’s about page, feeling a little humbled right about now.

Hi Thomas,

Two of the key things I love in life are travelling and meeting new people.  Last year I spent the most amazing summer of my life backpacking around Asia with four friends from university.

Starting off in Shanghai, we headed across China and into Tibet before flying to Hong Kong.  Along the way I walked part of the Great Wall, admired the terracotta army, travelled to Everest Base Camp and saw the world’s largest seated Buddha statue carved into a mountainside.

For six weeks Lonely Planet China was my Bible and this along with the help of the locals allowed me to learn a lot about the culture.  My friend took thousands of pictures and I documented the trip by selecting and captioning the best ones in Facebook albums.

Since I returned from Asia, social media has allowed me to keep in touch with a lot of the people that I met along the way and has helped to improve my life in the UK, this very job was recommended to me by one of my followers on Twitter.

I joined Twitter back in February and since then have amassed over 150 followers, making me the seventh most popular Twitterer in my area.  In this time I have experimented with a wide variety of Twitter clients, favouring TweetDeck for Windows and Gwipper for Ubuntu (TweetDeck still seems to be having teething issues with 64 bit Ubuntu and Gwipper gives me the option to add additional micro-blogging sites).

I tweet each of my blog posts with the hashtag #scribblog and it is for this reason that my  favourite short URL service is ow.ly.  I can use ow.ly in conjunction with Hootsuite to monitor my stats and see which links are the most popular.  Hootsuite is also used by friends at my local newspaper to manage multiple accounts and has proven to be very useful.

My blog www.scribbleboy.co.uk is a record my life and my attempts to complete challenges as suggested by readers.  I update the blog regularly and spend a lot of time playing around with WordPress plugins, trying to get them to both work properly and be standards compliant.

Alongside my passion for social media and blogging I also have a set of well developed traditional communication skills.  I currently work with Totem Films, a media production company, as  a freelance writer.  I work in a office environment and spend a lot of time approaching potential clients via email.  I am also responsible for drafting any necessary press releases and most recently have written a short piece for The Main Event (the industry magazine for event organisers) about what companies need to consider when commissioning a promotional video of their event.

I am currently based in the UK but would love to move.  I have attached a copy of my CV to showcase some of my more traditional skills and have listed all my contact details below.  I look forward to hearing from you soon,