Daily grind

Show dailies – they’re good money, ultimately satisfying but hugely stressful. For those that don’t know the terminology, show dailies are the newspapers that come out at exhibitions – a what’s on guide, plus news from the show type newsletter, generally done with a skeletal staff and amid incredibly tight deadlines … and often with designers who are a couple of bulbs short of a chandelier (or, at least, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it!).
For regular readers you’ll have noticed a strange, frankly worrying appreciation I have with things that I find are difficult or irritating.
The latest show daily I was asked to do was in Dubai in mid-December. There was an Ozzie company exhibiting just opposite where our show daily office was and the guy manning their stand described perfectly the frustrations, stress and all round madness that I endure editing these show dailies.
“At the beginning of the day, your hair was relatively neat,” he said, a kind lie given that I sorta pride myself by how few times a comb has ever touched my bonce! “But as the day went on your hair went more and more wild,” he relayed, “ I could see you literally tearing it out! By the end of the day your hair looked like someone who had been electrified.”
Therein lies the joys of editing and writing show dailies, but they do they get me around the world. Sometimes, though, the pressure does tell, such as in Greece this year where for the BOLD front page headline we managed to spell ‘heralds’ as ‘hearlds’ to much consternation the following day, scrawled large across 5,000 odd copies at one of Greece’s largest exhibitions. Nevertheless, this is me saying I’m a scribe for hire for any and all exhibition show dailies!