WHEN I – remember that I, second word in – first went into journalism; drummed into me was the maxim: You are not the story. And never, never, use the personal pronoun. Facts are sacred when being a news reporter.
Actually, no one needed to tell me that. I had, still have, an angry, fervent belief in reportage as a cold, detached skill.
In the midst of emotion and sometimes horror, the recorder has to dispassionately detail what she/he is witnessing. I believe it is all the more powerful for its lack of adverbs or breast thumping.
Yes, it is often hard not to reveal one’s disgust or fury at scenes being witnessed.
But the finest war reporters have always conveyed those atrocities with a clinical scalpel where one’s own imagination supplies the vision.
Click bait allied to social media and mobile cameras, has chipped away, if not destroyed, these long held principles, which formed the hard core of our trade.
I still find it extraordinary that reporters and political writers, for example, openly nail their colours to a mast. How can one trust their actual reportage?
How indeed, when it is, to me, painfully obvious that news is twisted to reflect a newspaper’s stance.
Once that stance was only openly revealed in the editorial column on the left hand side of the page. No longer.
Anyway, at this point you may well be asking: What the hell has this to do with France?
In truth, probably not a lot except that I write a column – by its essence personal and, hopefully, truthful, and something which does not come under the standards applied to news. But of course there is a cost to that and it continually surprises me what that cost has been to my life here.
Now, I’ve said, and told you, the readers, and therefore the important people, that, of course, my truth is subjective. Here are my opinions, my thoughts, and there is no truth that is absolute.
What I see is through a prism of past experience, present emotions, which will not be those of my neighbours or other immigrants.
How can it be otherwise?
Anyway, over the years of writing I’ve offended some who have written round robins describing me as "a serpent in our midst", tried to get me fired, put comments under the column stating everybody hates me, even the French, and generally ignored anything positive.
I think they have an alert system on my column when the words expat or Brit are used and like Pavlov’s dogs they salivate and spew forth.
Few, apart from the French and a tiny handful, invite me anywhere now.
So I no longer walk into a drinks party and wonder why some strange woman or man gives me the evil eye and shakes my outstretched hand with a slithery touch of distaste.
At first it confused me. Hell, at least get to know me before you decide to dislike me. I might be quite nice, you know.
Well, not perhaps nice, nice, but interesting? Sort of funny, at times? Non?
Then I found it mildly amusing and took pleasure in being so winning and delightful they were forced to smile and laugh.
Then I got bored with making such an effort for limited reward and few laughs with ultimately boring people.
And finally, I realised that, however lonely it can get in my splendid isolation, it’s 10 times better than chewing the fat with mind-numbingly grey individuals who refuse to live other than ‘the dream.’
So, why am I even talking about this again?
Well, it seems even in my withdrawal, I am causing ‘them’ problems.
A man who did work for me a number of years ago called in to see how I was doing the other day. He’s English and still works all around the area.
It seems on, not just one, but several occasions, he has been accosted with the words: You’ve done work for Fidelma Cook, haven’t you? Have you seen what she’s written this week?’
Copies of my column have been produced and placed in front of him.
"Look what she’s said here," he’s been told. "Isn’t that outrageous? It’s about us of course."
He has scanned it, not wishing to be involved. "Haven’t a clue what they’re on about but I’m not going to be linked with you and lose work so I just shake my head."
He laughed and had another drink from my bottle of wine. I moved it further up the table.
Erm, excuse me? Am I so toxic that you can’t defend me when you know how ridiculous they are?
He shrugged. "Look, I just do work here. I don’t get involved. I don’t tell them what I feel.
"I know it’s stupid. You know it’s stupid. But that’s how they are and I have a living to make."
Bloody hell. People can have their living compromised by being friends with me?
So, that’s why I’m telling you this and why I’m quietly shocked.
Have a go at me by all means but not the people who work for me or may have become friends.
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