Postscript
Born Tired
Patrick Marnham
Journalism is an occupation for under- achievers. It attracts the idle, those who consider that the world owes them a living, and people with a deep and well justified diffidence about their own abilities. In journalism men who should be running the Raj manage large news agencies; men who should be running large news agencies edit small magazines; and men who should be editing small magazines exhaust themselves in a desperate attempt to deliver 700 words by a weekly deadline and then collapse in a pool of alcohol and self-pity (sometimes called El Vino's).
Ambitious and able journalists have to learn how to disguise their true nature or they are turned on by their colleagues and driven out into the wasteland of party politics or public relations.
So a man who earns about 00,000 a year in freelance articles, and rarely allows a day to pass without delivering two of them, will pose as a hopeless drunk and roué. When senior executives with powers of hire and fire exercise the latter, they always go to the pub — in the case of the Daily Express aptly nicknamed The Stab in the Back — and pretend to be suffering from shock and grief on account of the ruthless action they have been forced to take. Those are the terms on which they are allowed to con- tinue. There have been many theories 'advanced as to why journalism should have
'We still believe that the old methods are best, Mrs Simmonds.'
become so fashionable in the last 20 years. Graduates and those who might once have been expected to enter the Civil Service or the professions or industry now flock to Fleet Street. The answer must be that an oc- cupation for under-achievers sounds just right for the ambitious and able young per- son in Britain today.
It would now seem appropriate for the elite of modern journalists to band together in some sort of association for the idle and the under-achievers of the world. For- tunately, prospective members have no need to exert themselves to think of a name for this club because the Italians have already invented it and called it Nati Stan- chi, the Born Tired. Born Tired is most unlikely to acquire a premises or a book of rules or even a secretary. The creme de la creme of the nation's time wasters do not need one. We recognise each other at once. We already enjoy similar habits. We are not only journalists; we are also some of the more talented and underpaid publishers, cashiered army officers and even those politicians who resign from ministerial of- fice apparently on grounds of principle (ac- tually boredom) and are never heard of again, except by the staff of the House of Commons wages' office, for the next 20 years.
Wherever two or three are gathered together for their lunch at 11.30 a.m., there is a chapter of Nati Stanchi in session. Wherever the finest minds of their genera- tion are intent on drowning their sorrows and pickling another two million grey cells before 3.30 p.m., we know that Born Tired is building up to ramming speed.
There will be a women's section called Nate con Mal di Testa — Born with a Headache. It would not be in the spirit of Nati Stanchi to continue these thoughts to the foot of the column.
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