I eat too fast to be a journalist…

I’ve just eaten a boxfull of rice, peas and leftover mushroom burger in the time it’s taken me to write this first sentence. It was meant to last me the whole article.

This is in fact how I read, or at least am trying to: that when I sit down to dinner in the evening I make myself read an essay from the London Review of Books (for example, Mary McCarthy’s article on Ideas and the Novel), and I reward myself with a mouthful of food for every paragaph. The LRB has long paragraphs. This is a good thing. It slows down my eating.

Eating more slowly is the number one thing I would change about myself. It has become, as my LRB-dinner-eating-habits suggest, a bit of an obsession. And for good reason. Eating quickly, as the Daily Mail perhaps only slightly sensationally suggests, can lead to an early grave. More importantly (more important than that?!) is that after eating quickly one is likely to feel less satisfied, eat more calories, and also feel more tired.

And this is why it’s bad for being a journalist, you see — I need that energy for writing, researching, finding sources, and editing. Right now, half way through this article, I’m already feeling woozy. I really should right now be exploring all the topics we covered today: curiosity, where ideas come from, how to be an ideas person, how the Idea Person is a myth, and all that stuff, but I’m too, well, stuffed. I’ll just watch a video instead…

There’s a serious side to this — not least because on the weekend I had food poisoning… if I’d eaten more slowly, would I have known the food was toxic? There are other toxic causes of fast eating too, which may be ingrained from childhood — often, as Irene Rubaum-Keller suggests, it is to do with learnt anxiety around eating, and often from competing with siblings. We eat on the go, at our desks, skip meals and splurge later, all to do with our over-fast-paced culture.

There’s a slow food movement, of course, helping us to reconnect with our food, including how we eat. And the slow food movement has spawned some interesting lookalikes, such as a slow journalism movement. That is, moving away from the churnalism (as Nick Davies tagged it in his book, Flat Earth News) of repetitive and too quick reporting of mainly press releases, to a more enjoyable, satisfying journalism where we as the journalists take our time to enter the subject, find a story, cultivate sources, and cultivate our passionate curiosity.

There’s probably something to be said for a slow teaching, too. Oh, look, I just googled it, and it’s already there!

for a growing community of educators who share the principles of Slow Education:
• Time for deep learning experiences with real outcomes.
• Time for curiosity, passion and reflection to be at the heart of learning experiences.
• Time for dynamic, collaborative, democratic and supportive relationships for learning.

Well doesn’t that sound great! A way of engaging with subjects and students to find out more about them than the module guide and teaching timetable allows for. My attempts to focus on curiosity and obsessions at the beginning of each new intake makes a start at this — and the more I learn about my students, the more I can help them (if I’m not comatose on the desk from having eating lunch too quickly). What I’ve learnt today so far is that they have passions for:

• Esoteric philosophy
• Events and participation, meeting people
• The Great Gatsby
• Hip-Hop (and ONLY hip-hop ;-) )
• Maria Sharapova
• Historical Re-enactment
• The Fiddle, playing not on the
• Poverty
• Diets, especially veganism and vegetarianism (yay!)
• Film Festivals

There are more of course. But this is a good start. I’d even go as far as to say, great. And I’m still awake. Maybe I didn’t eat so fast after all. I’ve still got half a tupperware box left.

Anyway, I guess what I am trying to say is that even if one has overeaten at lunchtime one can still put together an article within the deadline as long as one is open to being curious about the process of writing, and where it might take you. I didn’t know what I was going to write when I sat down. But I looked at hugh garry’s tips for ideas:

1. Be a collector
2. re-use ideas
3. Notice
4. Visit new places
5. Connect the dots

And I connected together what I noticed (I’d eaten my lunch too fast) with some ideas I’ve used before (about curiosity) and connected the dots to make a new piece, an inaugural article for this group blog for the 2016–17 MA Journalism & MA Magazine Journalism at The University of Sunderland.

So now over to them (you) and comments, please. What is your experience of being an ideas person, or not? What drives your curiosity? What have you learnt about yourself this week and your levels of openness to experience, uncertainty, and practicising curiosity that you didn’t know before? And what did you have for lunch?!

• by Alex Lockwood