Telly Superstar finds his Marbles

Edit: the app has put this on the wrong day, was supposed to be Tuesday, and it won't let me change it, so it'll just have to be today's entry.

http://player.stv.tv/programmes/fountainbridge-show/2015-03-31-1905/

I’m sitting in my brother’s wee house in Aberdeen, wondering where, why and how it all started to go right… Okay, so winning the lottery would actually be the best ‘gone right’ outcome, but after 38.9167 years on this little watery rock, I appear to be getting somewhere. It’s nowhere near the end, but certainly the beginning of the beginning. Or something.

The new job is clearly in the very early honeymoon stages, probably just waiting for the taxi to go to the airport, but I’m getting that sense of being a bit more connected with what I’m doing – dealing with the actual people who need the help with things, and not simply helping shuffle about unimaginable sums of electronic money from one place to another for a percentage gain. This is why I’m in Aberdeen, or rather I’m working in Brechin and staying in Aberdeen, but after a couple of weeks here I’ll be working from home.

Then, after years of narcissistically making videos on YouTube, and peddling the belief that I can present, the opportunity to try it for real lands in my lap, gets some very kind and lovely feedback on various social media sites, and has lead to a request from STV Edinburgh that we ‘definitely’ do more of the ‘Cycling Historian’ (if you’re interested there’s a link at the start, I’m the first segment on the Fountainbridge Show from Tuesday night – unpolished, but learned a lot, and really keen to do some more). Shouts out to Michael MacLeod who decided I was worthy of someone looking at, Moray Borthwick for actually taking that chance and for his coaching and fleshing out of my basic idea, and Blair Stewart for just being a creative genius and ‘video journalist’ par exellence’.

I’m also now lined up to cover my first cycle sport event ‘properly’ in three weeks (i.e. for an evolved cycling news service, run by a rather lovely chap called Mark McGhee), which in itself could lead to actual proper paid and credited use of my words and photos. After years, a decade or so, of writing about, and photographing, cycling for my own websites, and never managing to make it pay, this is somewhat exciting. I’ll be jumping into the world of the Scottish BMX Championships, right in the midst in my photographer tabard – and in the future might even be able to get access to the centre-world of the Velodrome. This is seriously cool.

And there’s more more more that I’ve thought I could do for ages that I actually finished while ‘in between’ things (a nice bit of writing) that has got an independent review thumbs up, that will most certainly lead me developing and re-writing and submitting in the incredibly near future.

This could possibly be one of my cheeriest posts ever on Blip (excluding engagement day, wedding day, that kind of thing). It may yet all come crashing down, but at the moment my head is crammed full of ‘WTF’, and it’d be nice to hold onto that feeling.

Oh, and I saw three Puffins and three Dolphins out to see from the cliffs at RSPB Fowlsheugh on the way back to Aberdeen….