Dinner with the Redmonds. Day to reflect upon. Liver.
Wonderful evening with Phil Redmond and his wife Alexis. Dinner at their beautiful home in the Cheshire countryside. A few miles from the city now, but they still live, breathe, love Liverpool.
Phil is working at many things, including mass-market culture engagment projects for 2007 and 2008. I always find his creativity inspirational. The same creativity that constucted brilliantly innovative plotlines for Brookside serves him well in any number of spheres.
Interestingly his take on it is that his pre-TV career as a Quantity Surveyor was the key to his success in the creative industries. He reckoned there's not a single TV challenge he encountered that couldn't be addressed using experience he'd picked up on construction projects.
Alexis was equally fascinating on how she arrived in TV as an accountant, to encounter a world beyond logic and reason.
Lynne usually caves in by 10pm. She was still going strong at 11.30. A super night.
Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. Work all hours, never see the kids, loads of complaints about the Echo, that sort of thing.
Yesterday I worked from 7am to 9.30am putting together that night's Echo as the news agenda changed by the minute.
From 9.30am to 1pm I met and interviewed 10 graduates applying for trainee jobs with our company. Heard about their lives, their ambitions, assessed their confidence and their competence.
Rushed down to a two-hour meeting with the managing director and the marketing team to debate a major piece of research into what makes the Echo so special and where we go next with it.
Straight into a meeting with my news editor Maria Breslin and Assistant News Editor Andrew Edwards to talk about where I wanted our news coverage to go and the areas where I felt we needed to focus.
From there into town to meet a contact then back to the office to sort out some paperwork. On to the Resturant Bar and Grill in Brunswick Street and another story from another contact.
Promised to be home by six and made it by seven. A typical day, so diverse, so fascinating.
What a great job I have, I thought. How dare I ever feel sorry for myself?
'Daddy', asked Morgan, a couole of weeks ago, 'do you drink alcohol'?
'Sometimes', I replied.
'Then your liver will be very lumpy,'
That's what happens if you leave them in the TV room when the National Geograpic Channel is on.
