A big load of stuff I did: August 2018

Mike Rampton
Sep 1, 2018 · 9 min read

My name is Mike, and I am a freelance writer. Here are some things I did and didn’t do this month. Hey, why not commission me, or offer me a lucrative, satisfying job?


Mr Hyde, there, looking at a pigeon

I spent most of August doing shifts at Mr Hyde, the fun daily email newsletter sent out by Shortlist Media. It’s a fun one to work for — it’s all short, punchy and upbeat, although feels like it should involve me spending more time eating than it does. It’s annoying to link to, partly because of a clever thing they do where your name can be integrated into the subject line that results in a crazy-looking url, and partly because it’s an email newsletter, not a website. Sending links to people is always a case of “Yeah, now press Page Down, like, three times? That bit!” Kind of like when I first worked in print and would proudly show somebody a tiny quarter-page story I’d done, and the other stuff on the page would inevitably be the thing that impressed them more. I quite like it. Non-baffling permalinks are for dorks. Highlights have included a look at how London has changed in the twenty years since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels came out, looking into (but sadly not devouring) underrated cuts of meat, celebrating international fast food and investigating death-filled secret London spots. Fun!


This is not what me working ever looks like. I drink really big coffees and use very cheap pens.

I realised a while ago that I’ll probably always be a freelance writer now, even if it is on top of a full-time job. I’m extremely unlikely to ever be in a position where an extra hundred quid wouldn’t come in handy. The hope would be that I could reach a point where I would only ever write stuff I wanted to or was really excited about, and it could feel more like a hobby I was lucky enough to get paid for (and then had to do accounts for, but whatevs).

I think I’m definitely reaching the point where I want to find a full-time job though. I love writing for different places, working with different people and constantly learning new things. It’s great in a lot of ways. But the flipside is, I’m panicked all the time about what’s around the corner, worrying about money, about whether my daughter will be impacted by the mistakes I’m making and the opportunities I’m missing out on, about how reliant I am on work from a handful of people who knew me when I was still fun and wasn’t an exhausted, stressed husk.

I also miss being a big part of something. It’s really nice to contribute small things to lots of places, but I’d like to be in a position where I was making decisions again, helping to shape something, feeling like an important part of a team rather than, as I frequently am at the moment, someone who comes in for a few days at a time when someone else is on holiday and does what he’s told.

I had a job interview this month for a great role at a really interesting start-up. I thought the interview went really well, but I was told afterwards that I had offered them tactics where they wanted strategies. Asking different people what they think that means, I’ve been told both that I was probably too vague and that I was probably too specific. Maybe, magically, I found a way to be both.


I did a few news shifts at Shortlist online (my author page is here) the other week, and have done a couple of phoners for the magazine (Mark Gatiss and Brendan Gleeson ran this month I believe, and there’s another one coming out next week). I’ve been really lucky with them — the website has been by far my biggest employer since going freelance, and they’re fun to work for, open to some of my sillier ideas and have a really nice team. Mr Hyde, Shortlist and Shortlist online are all in the same big office, which is nice. I nick a lot of books from there.

I wrote the script for a branded video made for Brita, the water filter company, by Shortlist Family (same company, but the building across the road I believe). I was in the meeting where the idea was hatched, which was a lot of fun, and wrote two full versions of the script — the first one was spiked for, as far as I can tell, being completely rubbish, which is the best reason to spike something really. I haven’t watched the video. I will do so at some point, I just feel uncomfortable at the thought of doing so — if it’s different to what I wrote I’ll feel bad, and if it’s what I wrote but not very good I’ll feel bad. The good news is, thinking about it now, I can’t really remember what I wrote (it came out this month but was written a while ago) so it’s all probably irrelevant. It’s probably really good!


This is not what it looks like when I write. I use cheap biros and draw a lot of deeply baffling diagrams.

I was writing a novel, once. I think I was about 50,000 words in last time I worked on it. At the moment I can’t justify spending any time on it. If I can find time between shifts and commuting and trying to be a good husband and father to sit down at a computer, how can I then justify not getting paid for it when there are things I could be typing that I would be rewarded for? My wife and daughter went to Spain this month and I didn’t go, because I had some shifts booked and didn’t feel we could financially justify me not doing them. But what about next time? I don’t know where the point would be, while entirely freelance, where I’d be able to go, “Yeah, that’s enough money earned, I can relax now.”

But then — what if what I’ve written is good, or nearly good, or even just potentially good? Hopefully when things are a bit more consistent I can go back to it and either continue it or, my fresh-ish eyes horrified by my hideous prose, sack it off and start something new.

I feel like I have been in-between things for years now. Waiting, always waiting, thinking that once this massive thing that is coming up is dealt with, I’ll have more time. Planning a wedding. Having a baby. Buying a house. Finding a job. My wife finding a job. Everything will be easier once we’re through this next bit, surely. I worry I’m going to turn around and find that I’m old, that I’ve missed everything, that I’ve accidentally spent my whole life just trying to get through brief tricky bit after brief tricky bit, and nothing was brief, and nothing was a bit, and it’s all over.


The crop of my screengrab is odd, but that is the top of a biscuit shaped like a thumbs-up.

The second thing I did for the Guardian Weekend magazine came out this month, about all the issues surrounding praising children. I did a thing for them before, about trying not to swear around your kids. They’re both just small bits, and ones that make more sense in a magazine layout than as an online article, but it’s still really exciting to me that I’ve written for the Guardian.


Wild horses, which I don’t understand.

We went to Cambridge at the beginning of the month— a good friend of ours is moving to San Francisco — and I had my second ever poyke, which as far as I can tell is an Israeli interpretation of a South African dish. Whatever its origins, it involves digging a big hole and setting it on fire, which I completely applaud. Also I love Cambridge. I met my wife there. I nearly fell out of a punt there once. Lovely town.

We went to Swansea last weekend. I think the last time I was there was about 2003, when I was violently sick in the NCP carpark either before, during or after a Hell Is For Heroes gig. Possibly all three. It’s really nice now, what I saw of it anyway — I was on baby duty when the Wind Street visit took place. We visited the Gower, and had a lovely time at King Arthur’s Stone and the Wyrm’s Head. All nice and outdoorsy and vaguely metal. My daughter met a wild horse and thought it was a big dog (she does a little bark, “Roo roo roo roo roo,” when she sees a dog). Lovely stuff.


Less lovely, Every Shit You’ll Ever Do was commissioned by a pretty big lifestyle site who then decided it was off-brand and they weren’t going to run it. I thought it was funny, and figured I’d spent time writing it, and might get some work I actually got paid for if the right people read it and enjoyed it, so spent 90 minutes mucking about with code and made it into the longest-scrolling microsite in the world. It made it into Web Curios and the b3ta newsletter, which I was very pleased about. Does that make up for not getting paid for it? No, no it doesn’t.


Oh yes.

I saw Iron Maiden at the O2 when my family were away, courtesy of a free ticket from a pal. Whoa. I don’t think it even counted as a gig, it was a show, a massive, silly, theatrical, over-the-top celebration of excess and lunacy and too many solos and Bruce, mighty Bruce, unkillable, flying Bruce, never walking anywhere when he could run, never running when there was something he could be jumping off. Bruce, running through the legs of a giant stilt-walking Eddie. It was so, so good. The O2 remains awful though. They wanted £7 — SEVEN POUNDS STERLING — for a beer. There were families clad entirely in Maiden shirts (the Law of Metal Shirts, where you wear the shirt of a different band, doesn’t apply to Iron Maiden) that must have spent £500.


Crash bang wallop, what a video

I love doing stuff for Kerrang!, because it usually involves drinking lots of coffee and completely losing my mind for about three hours, meaning I get to enjoy reading the piece because I don’t necessarily remember writing it. I’m doing a few deep dives into music videos for them, where somehow I manage to make watching through a video once take all morning and produce 2,000 words. It works out as a terrible word rate but a pretty good hourly one. I sat in my garden going slowly crackers to Freak On A Leash, then spent a lunch hour, sneaky post-work pub visit and extremely early morning investigating Heart-Shaped Box.


Would you like me to do anything for you? Get in touch. My email address is exactly what you’d guess it was, mikerampton at gmail dot com, and I am on Twitter. Thanks!

Good pictures are from Pixabay, dodgy ones are by me, things obviously grabbed from websites are obviously grabbed from websites. Cheers!

Mike Rampton

Written by

Well-meaning idiot. Please pay me.

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