Paper planes

WHEN we kicked off this blog I promised you some newsroom gossip and as regular readers will know, that's been in pretty short supply.

Well, it's about time I made up for that.

I'll start off with the young tyke sitting next to me, Bedworth Echo sports reporter Johnny Harris.

John-boy is the king of many things in our office, from the singing of football songs throughout the day (and I'm talking all day, every day) to philosophising about the wooing of women.

The latter involves a night watching football on the telly with a Chinese takeaway and a few beers.

It's the Bedworth way apparently, and it seems to have worked for him as he's been with his good lady for seven years.

But by far what John does best is annoy photographers. Admittedly, this isn't too hard as they are grumpy by
nature.

It's like the old adage about goalkeepers being crazy. Happy snappers (a phrase guaranteed to raise their blood pressure) are miserable so-and-sos by birth.

Having said that, the two lads in our office are pretty good on that score, but John knows how to find their photographic finger - it's like their Achilles heel, accept more annoying.

At any given time, John will have a mound of screwed up pieces of paper on his desk.

He stockpiles them for a time, balling up whatever waste paper he finds, then unleashes across the room at the photographic department.

He tries to find the most inopportune moment to do this, and generally succeeds.

Scoop, as he likes to call himself, also likes to make paper airplanes so for Christmas I bought him one of those desk calendars that has a different plane for every day of the year.

It has proved to be a rip-roaring success and our office can sometimes look like an airshow in miniature when we all let fly when the pressure of work becomes too much and we want a bit of a break.

It's the little things that get you through the day.

Newsrooms are quite different to your normal run-of-the-mill office, and that's part of why we love our jobs so much.

So if you see a low-flying paper airplane coming your way, it probably took off from here.