Deck The Halls With Pints And Brolly
St Patrick's Day turned out to be fabulous, but I never want to celebrate it like that again
The Week
As the only Irish person in all of Sweden, St. Patrick’s Week is always nuts - this year it was equally nuts, but for a different reason.
The calls usually start a month out, everything from PR companies to TV programs looking for Irish angles for their March 17 festivities. The entire Irish community seems to have decided that I’m the man for the job, so I get pushed (not ungratefully) into doing many of them.
I’ll take any chance I get to talk up Ireland and its people (though maybe not its politicians…), in English or Swedish.
My kids have been on TV with me, a brilliant musician named Brian Burns and an embarrassingly ill-informed host who seemed to be reading from a card of stuff some researcher had found on Google.
This year though, it was deathly quiet - no parades and no pubs open past eight o’clock meant no interest in how we would celebrate.
For our family it meant a large pot of stew before I hightailed back into my little office for our online evening with Joe Brolly, the Gaelic footballer-turned-pundit who is just about the only person you should celebrate the day with.
He held forth for an hour as we raised money for Nordic GAA, and was his usual brilliant, witty self, drinking from a glass of porter as he whisked us from RUC interrogations to the bullet-riddled ceilings of North Antrim dressing-rooms.
By the end of it I was exhausted - streaming is no bother, but producing the stream and being responsible for the ticket sales and everyone being able to see it online was a bridge too far, so I’m hoping that by this time next year we’ll all be vaccinated and we can go back to celebrating these things in person.
The Cold
Friday morning was spent with the Fridays For Future crew in Stockholm as they had their first global protest of 2021. Perhaps unsurprisingly during a pandemic, it was tiny, and that was on purpose.
The activists, with Greta Thunberg among them, limited themselves to eight people at any one time, taking turns to stand at a freezing Sergels Torg in Stockholm with signs made by others.
Greta has long wanted others to take the lead in terms of the media, and Isabelle Axelsson is someone I have always tried to lift - a well-spoken student now attending university, she’s excellent on camera but for the most part the editors around the world only want to hear from Greta.
Which is a problem when it's about -4 in the shade and Greta has been delayed, meaning I have to stand there with my camera for 90 minutes waiting. Camera batteries are particularly sensitive to the cold, and a good big battery that will usually give you three hours might only last an hour in cold conditions.
I’m also senstive to the cold, so I’m all for Greta’s idea of someone else answering the questions, if only until the summer…
The Loss
After filming the Greta interview I made my way back to my office a couple of stops away on the green line of the underground, dropping off the camera before going to the restaurant at the top of the street for lunch.
On Friday there is always some sort of steak on the menu and it’s a good way to start winding down ahead of the weekend, regardless of the fact that I work most weekends anyway.
I was just having my coffee afterwards when I saw the tweet that informed me of the death of Stephen Browne, Politico’s chief editor and the man who did more than anyone to put me on the path I’m on.
When I joined Reuters almost 20 years ago I did so as a technician, not a journalist, but I did so with every intention of becoming one. I knew that if I could just get in the door I would engineer a chance for myself, and Stephen was the man who gave it to me.
I was writing internal stuff and doing well, and one day he asked me if I would drive him home after work and fix his broadband. No sooner had we sat in the car on the way out to his huge rented house than he lambasted me for wasting me time with technical stuff and internal communications.
“You clearly want to be a journalist here, so why don’t you just fucking do it?”
“I can’t! I don’t have the education!”
Then he said the sentence that has stuck with me ever since.
“Journalism is an art, not a trade. You learn to do it by hard fucking work.”
Art was maybe not my thing, but I was no stranger to hard fucking work.
He had me send him match reports and stories in Word documents that he would edit mercilessly, stripping out all the unnecessary rubbish and leaving only what was relevant, which in many cases wasn’t very much. At least, not in the beginning.
He ran a team of extraordinary people, leading them by getting out of their way. He was tough but he had a crooked little smile and a way of telling stories from his treasure-chest of experiences that made you feel like you were the only one ever to hear them.
He championed solid journalism and truly believed in its power, and finally, years after that conversation in the car, I got my first Reuters byeline, but by then he had moved on to Rome. I had chickened out and studied journalism and media and communications science first before deciding to put my eggs in the basket he told me they belonged in.
He left The Baron (as many ex-employees call Reuters, after the Baron that founded the original company) five years ago to become editor at Politico and did a tremendous job building it into something new and vibrant.
We bounced ideas around but I never got to write for him there, and now I never will.
If he read this, he’d go fucking nuts.
“What is this sentimental bollocks?! Get rid of half of it - any fucking half will do - and get to the fucking point!”
The point is that Stephen Browne was a brilliant journalist, and everything I have attained over the last 15 years has mostly been down to him.
The Podcast
… didn’t happen this week. Two guests were booked but the return of Zlatan Ibrahimovic ruined pretty much everything, as did the writing of one simple article which took FOREVER. It’ll be back again next week.
The Challenge
Given the stresses and strains on social media the last while, pick someone and just say something - anything - nice about them. Regardless of vaccinations and falling death tolls, it’s going to be a while before things get better again, and social media is at Level 5 in terms of aggression lately. Anything we can do to tone that down is a good thing.
Have a great week, wherever you are in the world - and if you have a mentor or a friend like Stephen Browne, drop them a line and let them know before it’s too late.
Look after yourselves.