Well, well, well. Been a bit of an eventful few months, hasn’t it?
I’m writing this at 6am as dawn seeps into daylight outside my window. I’m in Quito, jet lagged and still unbored of the novelty of waking up to a view of a volcano, and the clouds below me. I am leaving the curtains open and letting the birds and the sun wake me up, and I’m wondering how long I can go before I need to turn an alarm on again.
Entering a new timezone has been the first peace and quiet I’ve had in what feels like a long time. 2 months ago I left VICE News and went freelance, a desire I’ve had since I was still a BBC journalist, but urged by a spiralling media industry where jobs are disappearing and the sorts of areas I’ve specialised in - experimental social video, sexual and reproductive health, platform accountability and digital culture - don’t quite fit into existing team or career hierarchies in mainstream media organisations. They do, however, fit into a diversified and fun freelance life, and it’s been non-stop work since I started; I’ve been working evenings and weekends on top of during the day, which is not sustainable. But I’m being galvanised by the energy of working for myself. It’s thrilling.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all 3 staff jobs I’ve had in journalism so far were all brand new, whether they were the amalgamation of jobs whacked together but someone who has never done them in cost-cutting efforts or novel roles invented because a new team launched or because an ambitious review of content had been written. I have always been hired as the content-gap-filler, the new-story-doer. Getting hired to do a job that somebody else had already done once before would feel rather glamorous. I feel ambivalent about having a staff job again; it would probably be nice, and I’d love the security and the pub trips. But what can you be assured of after you’ve learned a permanent role is rarely permanent?
I realised this week that a bunch of people still think I work at VICE. I left in September. Apart from longing for my independence, I couldn’t work there anymore after finding out about our editorial independence being impacted by some kind of relationship with Saudi Arabia. Check out Private Eye or the Guardian if that information is new to you. Opportunities I had been promised when hired never materialised. Add that to the months of uncertainty after the bankruptcy, people I admired getting laid off and a bunch of other things and I decided, for the first time in my life, that my health and my ambition were more important than a stable salary.
Going mercenary (a ‘free lance’ was originally a soldier-for-hire in the medieval period)
Ok, enough of the gloom. I love what I’ve learned in my journalism jobs up until this point, and that’s why my freelance life mimicks it. I am still doing investigations. I’m now also developing podcasts. I’m making radio documentaries again. I’m writing interesting features again. I can now do sponsored posts. I’m using everything I’ve learned to design content strategies and consult on storytelling for different organisations, perking up parts of my brain that have never been used before. A lot of the things I did either in my BBC jobs or VICE job are now merging together, a bit like I’m now doing all of the jobs I’ve ever done at once, just for different people. I’ve been too busy to do what I thought I’d actually end up doing as a freelancer, which was making loads of TikToks. I am, when I can. I feel zero pressure - just vibes.
Although I am eager to get more original content time. There are YouTube videos I want to make, but just haven’t had the headspace. I am so happy my Instagram followers loved my first Eatymology video - if you haven’t seen it, you’ll see me telling the word story of aubergine, and how it entered European languages via Arabic (like LOTS of food has). I have never peeled an aubergine in my life before, and if you want to see me redefine ‘dexterity’, check out the video. As I say in it: I am very much not a cook.
It is extremely difficult researching historic recipes on the internet, and I think there is a big gap in the content market for cool, old recipes. If the series does well I’m going to need to do some archival research in the long run and smell loads of old, glorious books in big libraries, what a shame! What a hardship! But sometimes I’ll probably be using more modern recipes too, out of necessity. If I get the time and good filming moments, I’ll try and make one in Ecuador; the etymological home of quinoa and potato via the Andean language of Quechua (its variety is called Kichwa here), and the botanical home of chocolate. Oddly enough we get our chocolate word from Nahuatl, not an indigenous Ecuadorian language.
I’m here teaching Ecuadorian journalists how to use TikTok, and then doing some research next week for a writing project that I can hopefully share with you soon (!). The last time I had to present something in Spanish I was a 22-year-old Durham undergraduate. I’m now 29, and my linguistic skills are all mouldy. A lot of dust had to be blown off the Spanish corner of my brain this week, which is why I said yes when they asked me to come. Nothing gets a language going again like being scared of cocking up in front of hundreds of people.
This newsletter is going to mainly expand on my interest in languages, my learning journey and news and research in areas like psychology, language acquisition…all of the good stuff. But it’s also going to share a little of my life when I have updates for you. My current updates are that I’m building a language learning planner I hope to share soon; I had a bunch of early-testers play around with my first iteration and the feedback was wonderfully positive. I’ve been making content around languages for four years now on TikTok - it feels appropriate to give people something more tangible.
Soon I will also be building a Skillshare course around algorithmic storytelling and vertical video soon. And, as per usual, I’m doing a million events; this last month I’ve debated at the Oxford Union against Love Island’s Ekin-Su and critiqued the new (and brilliant) How To Have Sex indie film. I was thrilled to be invited to insect restaurant YumBug, Marina Abramović’s stunning ENO debut and the Vagina Museum where one of my VICE stories is now a museum exhibit in their new endometriosis exhibition. I also ran a Body Atlas edit-a-thon in Cambridge; if you’re up for improving global access to information about reproductive and sexual health and you live in London, you can come to my next Wikipedia edit-a-thon on 22nd November at the Wellcome Collection. We urgently need multilingual fans to take part!
Lastly I want to say an enormous thank you to three phenomenal individuals who have gone above and beyond and have bought paid subscriptions for me to write this newsletter, not only before I even wrote the first one, but when I didn’t even have payments turned on. It is so important to me that this newsletter stays free (you can take the girl out of public service journalism etc etc…), and I’ll be able to stick to that goal so long as I have paid work. The contributions these special people have made to this newsletter have been a big help in getting this first one out, and it also means that they have made this content freely available for others. It is a very wholesome contribution to the internet, and to me: thank you.
I’ll now leave you with some language news and content - some mine, some from others. Enjoy!
The real life harm caused by dehumanising language - my recent feature for BBC Future. The use of dehumanising language must be spotlit and stopped in the Israel-Hamas war; all of the experts in this piece connected it to the death of civilians.
If peace is your bag - which I very much hope it is - you might want to meditatively listen to this Aramaic peace prayer, delivered in Jesus’ main language, that was recently led at the Vatican.
France is suing the European Commission over prioritising English in job applications - I made a video about it on my IG and TikTok. Interestingly, Luxembourg and Portugal are the two countries that demand the most English speakers in job applications, despite not having English as an official language, in Europe.
A research team at Cardiff University is working with Waikato University to examine language revitalisation through music with both Welsh and te reo Māori.
So glad to see more language-themed blogs on Substack! Welcome to the club, super looking forward to updates from you!