Post-ed Life I

I feel I should mention - or maybe I'm just reminding myself? - that leaving the news editor job does not sever my connection with ITG: far from it.

Firstly, I'm still a member, natch.

Nextly, I'm still on the board. I was (to my astonishment) elected there and it is in no way contingent upon my editing job. Indeed there's always the faint hope that I might make a better board member once I'm no longer editing. Who knows? I am, for example, a member of a technical committee on which I have as yet done nothing, nada, zilch, nichts and rien. Doing even slightly-more-than-nothing would thus be an improvement, even though I do, of course, recognize very clearly the need to avoid, in the post-editing vacuum, Taking Too Much On and its cousin Regretting It Later.

Thirdlymost, I still hope to go on writing as a conference reporter for as many conferences as I can manage, as long as Gary wants me to. This is a particularly nice job and one I've always enjoyed. (Indeed it's the route via which I came to the editing job. I was a conference reporter for ITG 2002 in Manchester before I took the editing post in 2003.) It's certainly no sinecure - quite demanding in its own way, but, crucially, it has a beginning and an end, rather than my just going home to an infinite stack of guilt. So when I shake hands and say goodbye to my friends and colleagues that's pretty much it for a year.

Lastly, as I have babbled on about elsewhere, I want to do more writing. This is a general ambition and not specifically trumpet-related, but it is not of course impossible that some of that writing would indeed be about the Accursed Bugle and those who bravely sit behind it. I know it's unlikely that I'll ever be writing proper academic journal articles about Weidinger's different mouthpieces or what Gottfried Reiche liked best for breakfast (it was toast and marmalade and a nice cup of PG Tips, since you ask) or whatever, but things like the so-far-unfinished Proms Brass Day article might be an occasional possibility for a news article.

So, I will be out of this post, but not finished with the Guild, not by a long chalk.

Another, perhaps more interesting question might be what I could do outside my ITG life once I am now longer editing...