A Chance Encounter…

Noses

It’s been a while since your trusty reviewer has put pen to paper. Truth be told Heapnose has been on the move: Toronto to Cardiff to Manchester to Edinburgh to Belfast to London to Toronto. Ah the jet set lifestyle of a freelancer. Or as Pat Heap prefers to call it, the vagrant lifestyle of a freeloader.

A chance encounter with an acquaintance of a former acquaintance steered this old nose back to the grindstone, as it were.

To my surprise, and to the unabashed surprise of those who know me, I find myself working on a highly intellectual quiz show. A casual conversation with a contestant put this nose back in touch with an old colleague from law school, who, like me, having dedicated 3 (or in his case 4) years of his life to the (concededly miserable) task of studying law at one of this country’s finest academic institutions, opted to pursue a career in television.

The subsequent flurry of email exchanges which ensued revealed that far from being a penniless brother in arms, scraping a living on daytime property shows (and secretly hoping that one day when Alexa Chung, Myleeene Klass, or to be honest, even Angela Griffin calls in sick, they’ll shove me in front of the camera to bedazzle the nation), my freelancing ‘comrade’ was in fact a hard hitting and universally respected news producer. Arse.

There comes a point in one’s mid twenties where one ceases to revel in the success of others. In fact, if a story about an old school friend doesn’t end with “…and then she got fat”, frankly, I am not your audience.

Upon closer inspection, and after a restorative bottle of red wine, my freelancing comrade’s email revealed that the future divergences in our respective media paths were apparent before we even left law school.

“I bet you had the Professor Eleftheriadis talk where he begged you to continue with law and told you that the legal profession would be a worse place without you…?” (He wrote)

“Erm..yeah!” (I replied)

Actually I remember that after three tortuous years, the much revered Professor Eleftheriadis called my career at law school “disappointingly mediocre” and said that “mentioning lesbians in every essay on EC Trade Law was not really in keeping with the academic ambitions that the University of Oxford had in mind for its undergraduates.”

Further discrepancies in our  professional lives revealed themselves when he referred to

“Bumping into old law school chums on the steps of the courthouse”.

Well, unless any Oxford alumni find themselves collecting their impounded car from a yard in Niagara Falls, thus unwittingly becoming the stars of a cable show about people who get yelled at in their jobs, then there’s little chance of my “bumping into” any old law school chums in my professional future.

The upshot of this email exchange with my “comrade” was much tedious twenty-something soul searching about my life, its direction or lack thereof, the feasibility of a Trans-Atlantic career, the pitfalls of life as a freelancer, my shortcomings as a daughter / girlfriend / British Taxpayer, and the realistic long term sustainability of being peroxide blonde.

That, and a return to this blog.

His parting shot was a query as to when Heapnose might once again be back online. And thanks to his email, it now is.

I may even write about perfume next time….if anyone’s still interested?

Heapnose x