New tales from a redundant journo: Part 6

The soundtrack to my job search

Watching Alexandre Aja’s OK remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes the other night, I fall on ruminating about how much My Life Has Eyes - or, rather, I’s - at the moment.

Every day, I slash my way through the jungle thicket of job vacancies, hacking out job applications and waiting for that career-centred Livingstone-Stanley interview interface situation (I’m sorry: I’ve read so may job adverts in the past weeks I’m starting to think like them. Can I be a Communications Manager, please?). I do all this on my iMac.

And while I’m doing this, I’m of course fiddling about making up playlists of songs to listen to in iTunes and constantly changing the settings of the iTunes DJ to ludicrously unlikely parameters to see what comes up next. For some reason it seems always to be Shania Twain’s Ka-Ching, the only track of the estimable Mrs “Mutt” Lange’s I have ever owned - I think I downloaded it as part of some newspaper’s crappy online promotion years ago (“Aw yeah!” I hear you say).

In these financially-straitened times, a song about money and having lots of it is not really what I want or need to hear. And why of all the millions of copies of iTunes in use around the world e’en as we speak did I get the one with a DJ who is so besotted with MOR country pop? It’s not as though I don’t have thousands of other choices.

Time for the spoken word. And this is where iPlayer comes into its own. Despite the always amusing antics of Charles Moore and the deeply intellectual arguments of Noel Edmonds against it, I’ve always been in favour of the TV licence, and for my money, the iPlayer is worth the licence fee alone. Particularly when it comes to picking and choosing radio programmes to listen to during the necessary, if unstimulating, task of hunting and gathering jobs.

Unlike many journos I know, I’ve never been much of a Radio 4 junkie. Others would come in of a morning, excitedly babbling away about how John Humphrys had wound up Harriet Harman or what James Naughtie had said to the LibDem shadow spokesman on climate change in the community, or whatever, and my only contribution would be some lame joke Johnny Vaughan had made to Denise van Outen on Capital Breakfast. Not the stuff of searing political debate, you might say.

But Today aside, there’s plenty of good stuff on Radio 4, and iPlayer lets you pick ‘n’ mix. So this morning, I have listened to, in no particular order, David Attenborough on Life Stories talking about trilobites, Tim Harford investigating statistics in the news on More or Less, Stephen Fry talking about the English language in English Delight and Dan Cruickshank exploring New Zealand and its history.

In that time I have learned:

1. Attenborough once excitedly bought a fake fossil purportedly of copulating trilobites, before he realised that’s not how they “did it”

2. Contrary to the oft-quoted statistic, we do not throw away a third of our food: the more likely proportion is a fifth, and that includes teabags, bones, potato peelings etc

3. 'Hallo' is a word that has no single meaning and is defined purely by its context. And no-one knows where it came from, either

4. Either stingrays are quite docile, friendly creatures, or Dan Cruickshanks are, unless you attempt to tickle them (sorry, someone came to the door during this one).

Hah! I defy Shania Twain to teach me as much as that during a morning’s job search.