The Daily Novel

They are sometimes totally incompetant.

And I mean totally.

Many manic depressives are quite incapable of work in either the manic mood or the depressive mood.

And I mean totally incompetant.

In the manic mood the flow of ideas is so fast and furious that it is difficult to concentrate on one thing. In the depressive mood, there is a lack of energy and a total lack of motivation. You don’t want to do anything and when you are forced to do something you tend to make terrible mistakes.

Happily this has not caused me too much trouble in life. This is at least partly because of my first career as a journalist. This is best explained by anecdote.

I started my career as a journalist for a weekly paper. Journalists are often perceived by others as lazy types. Because a lot of their work involves activities which would are not generally considered ‘work’. In my case it involved long lunches (two hours the norm, three hours quite common, four and a half hours, my record). Lunches which involved eating food I had not even dreamed of and drinking wines of a quality never even seen in the off-licences of Wolvehampton. And engaging in conversation of a wide range of subjects, often leavened with wit and humour.

I still had to do the ‘real work’ of writing the article when I got back to the office. When I was in deep depression I spent hours staring at a blank page iin the typewriter. But since working for a weekly you only have a real deadline on one day a week. And since in normal moods I have always written quickly, and in manic moods, very quickly, I always managed to do sufficient by the final day to survive.

I had more difficulty when I was working in America for a bi-weekly magazine. With two weeks in front of me I became over-optimistic about how much I could achieve on the final deadline day. By contrast, when I eventually ended up on a daily newspaper, I enjoyed my work more than ever. Because most days I managed to produce a printable story, so went home without guilt or too much worrying. And nobody bothered if I did not get anything in the paper some days. Because in The Times of those days there was intense competition between journalists to get stories in the paper. Even highly experienced journalists were getting some of their stories ’spiked’ (the term comes from the block of wood with the long spike attached on the chief sub’s desk, on which he impaled, frequently with a satisfied flourish, those stories which he deemed unworthy of tomorrow’s paper.)

Looked at from the viewpoint of the manager, this just goes to show that the newspaper was employing too many journalists, and therefore wasting the shareholders’ money. Looked at from the view-point of journalism, the best journalism comes when editors have too much copy when the deadline arrives, so they can throw out what is not as good as the stuff they actually print. Obviously I would not have survived unless I managed to produce good work on my better days. So my personal biography might have turned out differently if I had started out on a daily, rather than come to a daily after establishing a reputation over twelve years.
But I have digressed from the main theme of this post.

Manic depressives are sometimes totally incompetant. Where I was frequently totally incompetant, particularly in the depressive phase, was in social situations. Even today, occasionally, I am totally incapable of joining in with conversation, engaging in the sort of pleasantries that are part of most human interactions that are engaged in automatically. Both in ‘work’ social situations, like parties at which journalists mix with politicians, businessmen and other people with power, and in family and friendship gatherings.

This is a substantial disadvantage for a journalist. But I was lucky. Thanks to my other skills I mostly managed to avoid getting fired for it.