最强英音：Samuel West 驾驭五十多部有声书的纯正英音

  I failed into journalism. If I’d been a better barman or painter, a better shop assistant or warehouseman or gardener, I’d have stayed doing that. Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, do PE, but those who can’t even teach PE, report, and those who can’t report, write columns.

  At Tatler, Jo Drinkwater was an unlikely editor. She was jolly and a typical public school Sloane Ranger, who adored the royal family, knew how to address a divorced duchess, held sobbing views on the sanctity of the English countryside and the essential godly goodness of country-house weekends and Fulham dinner parties. And Earls. And cavalry regiments. She was also a naturally dexterous editor with perfect pitch for the rhythm of a sentence. Jo and I got on. She took endless care and time with my cliché-ridden copy, going through a column, putting in paragraph breaks and reprimanding all the sentences starting with “but”.  What I really learned at Jo’s desk was the heartbeat pentameter of first-person writing. It’s all in the pulse.

  As I was writing for Tatler, the rest of the press was enjoying a bit of a purple patch. Papers would boastfully halloo their monthly readership figures. The cost of newsprint and printing was falling, advertising of all sorts of soft, expensive and chic consumer stuff was rising, there was no Internet to speak of—downloading a picture on a computer took an hour and sounded like it was making a smoothie.

  Editors were in the market for some popular culture features, but not many traditional journalists could or wanted to write that kind of stuff. So they started press-ganging from magazines to get writers to go to consumer journalism. So I started to write small pieces for the newly made Style and Travel sections of the Sunday Times. You had to write fast to a brief. Speed and dependability are the essence of newspaper writing. The newsroom was then as male and hierarchical as a prep school.

  One of the things that helped me as a writer was that I came to it late. Everyone I was competing with was ten years younger. They had emerged from university, where they’d read English or Classics or PPE (philosophy, politics and economics). Most of them knew everything and had experienced virtually nothing. I had done lots and lots of menial things, of disreputable, humiliating, repetitive, pointless things. I discovered in writing, that experience always trumps cleverness.

  Those thousands of hours spent learning the wrong thing left me with an analytical eye combined with a natural skepticism. I don’t know a drunk or a junkie who can’t decipher the relationships and the power and the insecurity and the vanity in a room. Mendacious, duplicitous, wounded, we examine minutely and see everything. I knew as soon as I wrote my first story that I wanted to be a journalist.  I found the thing I was meant to do. Meant to be.

  The last of the things that I like about journalism is that it is ephemeral. We write for deadlines not posterity. We are like monumental masons working on medieval cathedrals; we carve our gargoyles and inscriptions and then we vanish, but the church remains—what it stands for, its litany, its service, while those who made and maintained it are dust. I find that comforting.

dexterous /ˈdek.stər.əs/ : adj 灵巧的

pentameter /penˈtæm.ɪ.tə/ ：n 五音步诗行（音步为诗歌中音节强弱变化规律）

chic /ʃiːk/ : adj 别致的 时髦的

press-gang /ˈpres.ɡæŋ/ v. 抓水手壮丁（维多利亚时代海军大规模扩建时的行为）

hierarchical /ˌhaɪəˈrɑː.kɪkəl/ : adj 按等级划分的

mendacious /menˈdeɪ.ʃəs/ : adj 撒谎的 虚假的

duplicitous /dʒuˈplɪs.ɪ.təs/: adj 搞两面派的