To round off July, I thought I'd catch up with a couple of bits of writing I unexpectedly ended up doing for BBC News Online this month.
The first actually resulted, indirectly, from the Mr Pastry piece I did for Secret Norfolk and News Online in June. A man called Philip Yull heard the Pastry episode of Secret Norfolk, found it interesting and emailed the station to ask if we might be interested in another little story from the county's history.
This one was from back in 1976, when James Hunt - in the very year he won the Formula One World Championship - had come to Norfolk to take part in a rally, and ended up crashing into a tree... along with his co-driver for the event, Noel Edmonds.
I happened to be working when this email dropped into the inbox and immediately thought this might make a Secret Norfolk episode. So not only did I email Philip back to ask if he'd be prepared to have a chat about it, I also decided to take the chance of emailing Noel Edmonds' agent to ask if he would too. And he said yes!
Emma who does Secret Norfolk was keen, News Online liked the idea of a tie-in piece, so the whole thing came together in just a few days. BBC Sounds piece, radio package cut-down of it, and News Online article.
There's something quite nice about getting a feature done like that just off-the-cuff, without extensive planning, and it still turning out quite well. But the other bit I did this month had an even shorter timespan.
After the death of Sir Garfield Sobers, my colleague Matthew who was on weekend news recorded a chat with our former colleague, now retired, Richard Bond, about a story they'd discussed in the newsroom in the past - when Richard had met Sobers when he was a child, and his father had invited him round their house when he was playing a match in Norfolk.
It's a nice little story, and on the Monday after I asked my colleague Dave who's in charge of all things Norfolk for BBC News whether he was getting it written up for online. He did like the story but didn't have anyone spare to do it. As that day was a relatively quiet one on my shift, I knew I probably had the time to give it a go so I asked if he'd mind if I put together an online article from Matthew's interview with Richard. He didn't mind, so that one ended up coming together just on the day. A bit of a contrast from my usual weeks or months of putting something together, but that was one of the reasons I wanted to do it - to test the skills of trying to put something decent together just in a couple of hours, while doing the actual work I was being paid to do in between.
