Preserving Our Planet

How Castle Lite can change your life A chance meeting Moving into writing for a living is a challenge. Just getting people to take your work seriously is your first hurdle. My professional writing journey started with a chance, fleeting meeting in Zimbabwe. I was living in Tanzania at the time and in 2011, I travelled from East to West coast across Africa. Writing about how much fun I had, and can, recommend, was a great way to enjoy Castle Lite lager.  Incidentally, Castle Lite is a great catalyst for getting your literary juices going. It also distracts you from the fact a buffalo is staring at you menacingly from twenty feet away. TIA (This Is Africa - a long-standing joke for varying situations you find yourself in only on this continent). It was after a near heart-attack bungee jumping over Victoria Falls that I fell into my easiest writing project to date. I was soothing my nerves with a Castle Lite in a dilapidated wooden café when a complete stranger asked me ...

Transferring your skills from the classroom to the advertising sector might just be more worthy than you think. Part two: the mechanical metamorphosis. Part two of my considerations of how well you can transform from the classroom to the digital marketing world focuses on a more technological and mechanical approach to advertising - something I know I need more practise in to succeed. This is not exhaustive and serves as an introduction to my transition from the pedagogical world to the commercial one. •  Computer skills - analytical knowledge No-one can get far these days without knowledge of technology. My mother has never worked out how to find certain features on her digital TV. Unfortunately for her, the how-to guide is on the TV and she has never found it. It’s a vicious circle; teachers use computers all day every day. Look closely and you can see this in their goggle eyes as impossible algorithms shoot past their irises. Kids these days know more than the teachers...

Transferring your pedagogical skills from the classroom to the commercial sector might just be more worthy than you think. This blog explores the possibilities of which skills could be more beneficial than you first deem. Part one: be amiable and artistic. In 2014, having taught English Language, Literature and Media Studies for 7 years professionally, I was completely disillusioned with the post-Gove legacy. I’d been flattened thinner than a short-sighted hedgehog on the motorway by ridiculous pre-Ofsted expectations to mark 200+ books per week; mark the same piece of work 3 times in coloured-coded comments to show progress and being pressured into manipulating results to show all pupils were above target, exceeding target or unexpectedly exceeding target. At the end of the day, you can’t polish a turd – take heed, Greening. Being of the stubborn age of somewhere between 30 and 40, I decided it was time to change. I’d wanted to be a writer since I was 17 and who was I to ar...