Tugging on the Shoots

It's a weird old world, the media world. Everything is so rushed, everyone's working to a deadline and the rules of common decency are crushed in the race to get that front page laid out. Phone a newsroom in a newspaper office or a radio station and you'll generally get some junior newshound answering the phone with an urgent "News!" as if your call is jeopardising world security. In another world, that kind of tone would be met with a swift reprimand and sent to bed without supper. And what happens to that news he or she (the women are often worse) is putting to bed while you're trying to sell your story or get an email address? It's used to light your fire or clean up the puppy's latest mistake.

Yet it's time, I realise at the grand old age of 44, that makes the greatest stories. I'm updating my book on Jamie Oliver at the moment for a second edition and while once, not so long ago, the idea of my writing a blog/morning pages/having another coffee instead of stressing about meeting my deadline, would have sent me into headspin, I realise now that the less time I write and the more I let the ideas simmer, the better they are.

The book, when it came out, was sold by the publishers as "the unauthorised biography", intimating, while not exactly promising, a tittle tattle of a tale. Most of the people I wrote it for would have dismissed it without even reading it; 'if Jamie didn't authorise it, we won't read it because he's our best cover star/he writes recipes for us/we're his fans'. And the many who did would have been looking through for the dirt on Jools, and found a melting pot of foodie superstars telling a very different kind of story.

Two years on, I get the chance to add another couple of chapters, bringing Jamie's role in our food revolution up to date and folding in my own messages, the authorial voice that I was too scared to raise back then. Time will make this book a better read.

But it's not the content of the book I need to rework. Two years on, I know more of the pitfalls of publishing. I know that I have to sell this book, that if I can get sales and marketing, rights and editorial talking to each other and to me at this stage in the game, we've got a chance of a single message emerging from the project. And would the world end if I didn't get it in bang on next Friday's deadline in order to make that meeting happen?

I'm 45 on April 7th, and it's such a relief. Time is teaching me to breathe a little more often, to slow down and consider what's really important. I've learnt that there's no point in tugging on the shoots in Spring, that once the soil is dug, the compost mixed in, the seeds sown, the only course is to water them reguarly, and to sit back and watch them grow.