DO you write a column about your bourgeois life for a national newspaper? Need topics? Try these to get you started:
Not losing weight
Anyone can lose weight, but pretending it’s empowering to be porky is the stuff of great columns. And since it’s something you’re not doing it’s as thrilling as an account of not visiting Thailand. Six months later get a personal trainer, lose the blubber and brag about how great you feel.
Your child’s academic achievements
You have a national platform, so why not use it to grind your own personal axe about Felix or Persephone not getting into Oxford? Be highly melodramatic about it, with headlines like, ‘My daughter was rejected by Corpus Christie. Will her heart ever heal?’
Domestic repair work
Houses are always needing to be fixed or repaired or extended, and your deadline’s now and there’s a bloke in the house with spanners, so why not write 1,200 words about him?
Your middle-class partner
Make them really sensible while you’re a daffy one-off, or use them to animate your tiresome cliches ie ‘sometimes I think Peter loves his shed more than me!’ Actually Peter rarely visits his shed because he’s busy managing the property empire bought with your faux-naive columns.
Anything that only affects you
Never hesitate to bang on about an issue that 99.91 per cent of the population will never encounter. Council refusing you planning permission for a moat? Moan about it like it’s a national concern up there with child poverty.
Actually writing the column
You’ve reached the bottom of the barrel, but keep scraping. Readers love 900 words about being too distracted to write 900 words, or intermittent home broadband.
