Hello!

What in tarnation is this

File under: Writing, journalism, who am I, fights.

People who know me from my previous life would be justified in asking what the hell this is. Didn’t I knock the writing on the head and become a personal trainer? Why, then am I darkening the doorstep of your inbox AGAIN with my fucking inanities.

The answer is yes, I did become a personal trainer. I have a tiny gym (in my flat. Well, actually technically speaking in my mother’s flat, hi mum) where I trained people until the world went into lockdown. Now I train people on Zoom which has been surprisingly fun, mostly because it has forced me to develop new coaching skills; I have to find words to describe what I want my clients to do rather than simply physically assaulting them with my hands. This is a useful life skill for other areas of life which shall not be named.

The personal training is wonderful and a breath of fresh air after journalism. I was a journalist from 2005 until 2014. My beat was: Depressing Things; human rights, torture, police brutality etc. My last story was about a rape. When I left the job I was S-P-E-N-T. I’m not particularly keen on journalists who make the story about themselves. Who cares. Also nobody was forcing me to do the job. I only mention the toll it took on me because it is related to why I stopped blogging. I had a moderately successful blog with a tiny band of hardcore followers. I was also very active on Twitter; I got through dull, tiny protests from 2008-ish – 2011 largely by amusing myself by writing childish tweets about events.

But Twitter was also a cesspit of nastiness. This was in the 140 character days, when you simply couldn’t fit nuance in a tweet, and MAN, the hours lost on that thing squeezing rage at anonymous trolls into tiny yet PUNCHY carefully crafted ripostes.

A certain foreign journalist once who has since left with the flock of foreign journalists who have migrated out of Egypt referred to “Sarah Carr and her poison dagger keyboard”. I didn’t have much time for him, but the description is apt. I spent a lot of time online engaged in the following activities: criticising, taking the piss, being snarky and writing about terrible things that humans do to each other. I still do three of these things if I’m honest, but far less frequently, and all the darkness is offset by the personal training which is ultimately about making humans feel better about themselves.

SIDEBAR ABOUT THE FOREIGN JOURNALIST MENTIONED ABOVE: His wife loved me about as much as he did. Once, during a crowded demo at Mohamed Mahmoud, she spat in my face as she walked past, Jerry Springer guest fight style. It took me a moment to register who she was, and by the time I did, she had been carried off in the crowd. An hour later I saw her standing in front of one of the walls built in Mohamed Mahmoud and I went into FULL trash TV mode. We had a physical fight lolololol against a soundtrack of the gunfire and chanting of the demo behind us. It was bonkers and something I’m clearly not proud of - particularly since having your first physical fight at the age of 35 is pretty lame. Anyway, lady wrestler if you’re reading this, no hard feelings.

Back to the emotional grind of news journalism. I don’t know how people do it for years or even decades. Hats off to them. I hated much of the job. The only things I liked about it was writing and finding myself in the middle of interesting things to write about. I haaaaaaaated bothering people for interviews, haaaaaaaated writing short news pieces, haaaaaaated having a deadline. I cared very much about the stories and people I wrote about, but ultimately felt like a vulture swooping in on the corpses of their suffering, and that really my articles weren’t really useful for anything other than keeping English-readers up to date on terrible events and terrible cinema (I used to review terrible Egyptian commercial films for a laugh). It would have been different (and far riskier) if I was able to report in Arabic.

That was the frame of mind I was in when I put my blog (Inanities) out to pasture. Or rather sent it to the glue factory because I stopped paying for the domain, and now it only lives in my dad’s computer (hi dad!). In any case writing about the things I wrote about then would be impossible now even if I wanted to because Egypt kicks it North Korea style.

OK thank you for bearing with Grandma on her nostalgic tangent (a nostalgent! ©) and reading so far. I’ll get to the point. I intend to use this Substack thing as a place to write about topics that interest me. These are primarily exercise, nutrition, training people, training dogs, reading books, getting through life in one piece and Cruffins. I am not an authority on any of these things, but can make up for what I lack in the expert department with childish humour and hilarious stories. In any case, I will make it easier for you to skip things you find yawn by stating at the top of each thing what the thing is about. Isn’t that nice of me.

That’s all for now. BYEEEEEE.