Will Harris says goodbye to his readers
A lot can change in five years; governments can rise, banks can fall, a heart can be broken, mended and broken again. We talk about five year plans as if they actually mean something, but the truth is that the you of 2017 inhabits as alien a space as your current life today would have seemed five years ago.
Looking back, it wasn’t me who penned my first column for this magazine in July 2007, but a fresh-faced stranger with ham-handed literary aspirations and too much gel in his hair. “In recent years,” he droned, squeezed between an advert for laser hair removal and the crossword solution, “we’ve come a long way in disproving a lot of gay stereotypes.” (He then spent untold column inches unwittingly re-proving every one of them, but hindsight’s a wonderful thing).
The last five years have brought immeasurable change to my life, much of which I’ve been able to share with you. I don’t kid myself that you’ve hung on my every word, or that you spare my little patch of nonsense more than a second glance as you thumb eagerly onwards in search of Andrew’s latest gut-buster or Jo’s celeb dispatches, but having this regular outlet for the triumphs and idiocies of my day-to-day has been a privilege.
“Its silent presence accompanies you everywhere”
Some writers describe the blank page as an invitation; others as an obstacle to be overcome. What they neglect to add is it’s also the cheapest form of therapy going. Open your life to the scrutiny of ‘a readership’, and it’s not long before you find its silent presence accompanies you everywhere, into boardrooms and bedrooms, sucking the marrow out of every conversation, eavesdropping on the confidences of friends. It watches over your shoulder, assessing, analysing, making sense of the insensible. Being asked to write my experiences down week after week has given me a degree of introspection I wouldn’t otherwise have, and it hasn’t cost me a penny.
All this, you will have gathered, is basically a roundabout way of saying goodbye. After five years, I’ve decided it’s time for somebody else to have a go (provided there is a somebody else, of course, and they don’t replace me with an advert for Ristorante Donatello or, God forbid, a Sudoku).
So, as the curtain falls on a short-lived literary cul-de-sac, all I have left to give is my thanks: to my dear, long-suffering cast of initials – Helen, Mike, Katie, Nadia; to all the men who drove me to the edge of insanity (including the one who dropped a brick on the pedal and vaulted out the window); to Jo and Clare, without whom none of this would have happened; and of course to you, for putting up with my frequently pompous, sometimes rushed, and almost entirely self indulgent prose. You’ve been nothing short of marvellous.
