The Daily Grind

This summer, I have undertaken two internships in our beloved capital. One I will refer to as The Music Job, the other as The Press Job. 

The former all started with me sending one of those ‘omg I love you let me come and see you and work at least in smelling distance of you’ emails. Can I just say it was well worth the risk. People love having their egos stroked, try it: just send an email… one of the greatest things about the internet is that cold hard rejection can just be dragged into the trash can at the bottom of your desktop. And no one can see you cry. While you’re at it, why not be inventive? I once worked in a shop where the manager received a hand written, Dickens-style CV in the post on lavender scented paper, no less. Anyway what I’m trying to say is… there’s no harm in putting yourself out there with a bit of flamboyancy. 

So, Day 1 at The Music Job. I’m on the tube, it’s 30 degrees in London, I can’t tell if I’m sweaty from the nerves of working for a record label which I admire or because the London Underground refuses to install air-con, a basic human right. After disembarking the train and trundling along in the humid, London smog I finally find the office. Google Maps, I am eternally grateful. I knocked on the door and that’s where it all began. Everyone was lovely. I looked around the room. Everyone had a Macbook Pro. Sheepishly pulling my 8-tonne Dell, the width of my shoulders, from its case (when I say case I mean old, crum-ridden Sainsbury’s bag I’d fashioned as a rain shield), I made a mental note: surrender to Apple. It’s time.

I am now on Day 37, and the internship is going great. Music industry veterans are human too. In terms of meeting like minded people and learning how to use industry websites such as Fatdrop and Wordpress, the experience has been a great extension of my skill set. That sentence is going in my CV. I have encountered, though, some slight obstacles during my time at The Music Job. Can someone answer me this: How to write an album review without sounding like a pretentious twat? Or in my case, how to write ANYTHING without sounding like a pretentious twat. The strangest thing about music journalism is the inclination to use crazy imagery to personify sound, e.g: “Check out this dreamily hallucinogenic yet naughty mind-fuck of a choon with tremors of spice running through it.” Am I describing the effects of LSD or a chicken korma? I don’t know anymore!

Another issue I have is placing names and faces. I walked in on Four Tet in the loo the other day and it was only after I giddily described the incident to my manager as ‘oops I just stumbled upon a tall dark stranger in the toilet!’ that she informed me it was Him.

Feeling a little overwhelmed, I took a week off so that I could take part in The Press Job.

Interning at a national newspaper requires me to buy several publications every morning. I read these on the tube, where I spend most of my life. The tube, as mentioned earlier, is warm and moist. Therefore the newspaper ink is warm and moist. Consequently by the end of my morning commute I am left with fingers covered in warm, moist ink which has leaked, like tears, from the miserable coverage of the day’s events. The ramifications of this whole predicament are endless: inky hands, inky face (looks I have moustache after wiping away my SULA* and a beard after scratching my chin in deep thought) and profound embarrassment at not being able to fold a broadsheet without elbowing an elderly person in the ribs. 

And if this wasn’t emotional enough for 8 o’clock on a Monday morning, the latest events from around the world are so depressing and the images of despair are so moving that I am reduced to weeping in public. Ok, mornings are challenging anyway. At least there’s usually an over-sympathetic yet slightly handsy fellow commuter on your carriage to dry your tears… or rub your thigh.

The excitement, however, of working in the media and breaking news stories, interviewing inspirational people and probably pissing a lot of them off is worth a bit of harmless flirting on the tube. It’s an addictive industry for which I may have sacrificed some of my values, albeit after 5 days.

If you can get over the constant sense of drowning/feeling out of your depth for the first couple of days, then I’d recommend interning to everybody. Students with long summers especially. Forget tanning (and by tanning I mean sleeping 'til sunset/contracting chlamydia/getting a tattoo you’ll regret) in Thailand and, in the words of André 3000, ‘Git Up, Git Out”! There’s nothing more satisfying than a hard day’s work. Except perhaps a nice long slice of salami with crumbled feta and fresh rocket on a bed of sea salt and rosemary focaccia. I’ll end on that note as I’ve just remembered that there’s a gourmet sandwich in the Italian Delhi across the road with my name on it.

*SULA = Sweaty Upper Lip Alert

India

Last summer, the four of us embarked on a trip to bright, colourful, intoxicating India. For anyone who has not yet been, this country is captivating in that it conquers every sense. The tastes and smells are rich and undeniably potent. The feel of the heat on your skin is staggering. The sights are moving and unforgettable and the sounds are, well, constant.

On our first night in Delhi, I had the pleasure of sharing my, um, very reasonably priced bedroom-type space with a thousand mosquitos and the delightful Kaitlyn. At first, I was being difficult. I refused to have the ceiling fan on because it was dangling by a thread and I did not want decapitation to be the death of me. Please note that it was early July and 40° C+ outside in a city so populated that there are twelve Delhiites per square meter. Several hours before, our emotional mothers had hugged us (squeezed the breath out of us) whilst choking back the tears at Heathrow, stuffing miniature electric fans into each of our rucksacks just in case. Due to my stubborn refusal to turn on the ceiling fan, Kaitlyn drained the batteries of both of our mini fans within ten hours of being in India’s capital, insisting on sleeping with them practically glued to her perspiring forehead.

The following morning, feeling surprisingly spritely, we managed to hire a driver for the remaining three weeks of our trip. His name is Aineul, a gentle, timid man with very limited yet endearing English and no idea what was coming to him. We, (Kaitlyn, Lizzie, Mairead and I) piled into the back of his car and began our adventure. Mairead was particularly keen to be in an enclosed area as she was terrified that somebody would cut off her astonishingly long and silky hair and sell it at the market for a million rupees. I sat in the front, and was therefore referred to from that point on as “Ellie boss”. The front of Aineul’s car was spacious, I recall smugly, and embellished with religious décor including a shrine to Sikhism on the dashboard. The first place he took us to was the Red Fort. It took us a week of visiting various forts and temples in various cities in Rajasthan to realise that it was just too hot to do endless sight-seeing, so we channelled our concentration into getting to know the locals, eating A LOT of curry and playing chase with children in the street. In the end, we felt that we saw more of the true India this way. I think Aineul will always remember us as being the four sweaty blonde girls who came to India and refused to see any temples.

When I said a lot of curry, what I meant was Aloo Gobi for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We made the mistake of trying western food in India once. Lizzie, who will usually eat anything, couldn’t even look at her pasta again. It was thick with a tomato sauce which tasted sweeter than angel delight. When in Rome… eat Indian food.

Getting a driver was definitely a good idea for us. Aineul was fantastic (after he understood that no, we didn’t want to be taken to his cousin’s, uncle’s, brother’s “mall” with beautiful scarves made out of something pretending to be bamboo) he took us to the most incredible places. After Delhi, we went to Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Pushkar, Jaipur and Agra. Jaisalmer was our favourite; the people were so welcoming and high-spirited. It was not far from Jaisalmer where the four of us took a camel ride into the desert. Here, accompanied by the camel and his guard, we played drinking games and listened, agog, whilst Manuel the camel guard told us about his despair at having to marry a woman he didn’t love in the coming months. After this, our minds contemplating the vast difference between our world and his, we fell asleep under the stars. We also saw a bug. Not just any bug, a glow in the dark, skeletal, futuristic looking creature the size of my hand which looked like it could kill a man.

Udaipur, the city of lakes, was another highlight. We all have fond memories of sitting at the edge of a pool, drinking Kingfishers…stronger than you think… and playing endless card games with some Scottish boys we adopted for a few days – one of whom saved me from being trampled by a large cow on one occasion.

Later, we visited Jaipur, where everything and everyone moves so fast and so erratically that it’s a blur. This is a huge city for industry in India and we found refuge in its cinema. Going to the movies in India is an experience. Men and women queue separately, the seat tariffs range from “Pearl” to “Platinum” depending on where you’re placed. Decoration inside is nothing less than extravagant. The cinema was showing the latest Bollywood blockbuster, “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag”, a film about an Indian sportsman whose life was tragically complicated by the India-Pakistan partition. Despite none of us speaking a word of Hindi, we were all in floods of tears by the closing credits, moved as we were by Farhan Akhtar’s ripped torso and the incredibly catchy soundtrack.

Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, quite deservedly one of the wonders of the world, is where we parted with Aineul. It was the only part of India where we experienced the full extent of the monsoon; I saw more rain in 2 minutes than I have whilst living in France during a whole year. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see much of the city itself as we arrived very late and awoke at 4am in order to see the palace at sunrise. So, as promised, at 4am, Aineul knocked on the door. Sleepy-eyed and with a mouth as dry as Gandhi’s flip flop, I opened it. Aineul informed me that we needed to leave in the next 30 minutes in order to be on time. It was at this ungodly hour that I had one of the most bizarre conversations of my life:

Me: …Yawn… “Good morning Aineul”

A: “Ellie Boss! Good morning!”

Me: “Could you please bring us some water?”

A:“Samosa?!”

I cannot for the life of me understand why he thought I would want a samosa at that time. This encounter pretty much sums up the language barrier between us. I miss Aineul.

Although we were sad to leave Aineul and his lovely ways, we were relieved to be out of that car. In India, the motorways are havoc. Massive craters cover the concrete, cows weave in and out of beeping cars and the drivers all play a game of chicken. On one occasion, Aineul was driving head on towards a lorry coming in the opposite direction at 70 miles an hour only to dodge out of the way at the last minute. So, to put it mildly, we were looking forward to train travel from Agra to Calcutta via Varanasi. One slight problem: our train tickets said platform 23, there are only about 10 platforms at Agra train station…  We did make it to Calcutta and then on to Thailand, eventually! India was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. The food was out of this world, the people were enchanting and the wildlife was... wild. I’m just glad I lived to tell the tale.