TRADE SECRETS

Aug 23, 2008 Features / Columnists

Day after day when in his mother’s land, Bill turns in 400 pithy words. Day after day. Where does he get his ideas and stories? In the meeja, ideas are our currency. Without them we are dead or very dull. With them we Buzz.

You can quickly tell the journos with ideas and those sadly bereft. The latter far outnumber the former. We call them hacks.

Ideas do not come out of thin air. You have got to make your luck. Bill is a gadfly. He flits all over the place – as he tells Jagdeo PPP=Party! Party! Party!

As soon he lands he is on the lookout. When LATE finally granted me my luggage, I soon got encouragement from a Customs Officer. He waved me on saying ’Go laong your way. I read all your stuff about the Guyanese Mafia. Pip! Pip!

Why do the Guyanese like the double pip so much? Taxi drivers are milked for gossip, half truths, rumours, morsels, tittle tattle. Anything that moves.

The people who look after Bill in the Imperial Garden are chatted up too. Bill likes the common view; often jaundiced but interesting all the same.

Bill punishes the phones to old Guyanese contacts and young ones too. Lady friends real and imagined. Some put the phone down – did they not like the last sting or what? All contacts are warmed up. Some are lunched – always a major source of gossip.

The contacts that have gone dry, he lubricates in the hope they become active again. Usually they do. He puts himself about watering holes like the Oasis, the Bourda, the Peg-a-suss, the Everest, Waterchris and Julian’s.

All conversations are a part of the jigsaw of working out the gossip geography of Guyana. Fascinating stuff.

He reads voraciously too. As Bill tells his students “Good readers make good writers’. He is up with the lark and by 06.00 across the major news stories in Guyana, the UK and Oxfordshire too.

Read, contextualize, talk and write. Bill could pass “Mastermind’ on the Guyanese papers – even the Guyana Times which has more writers than readers.

Bill calls it journalism-networking, contacts, talking. Stories and ideas come from people not from thin air. Journalism is fun; sometimes too much so. But at least it is never dull. Pip! Pip!