Tuesday Nov 14th
Launch of Tamezin Young Journalist Award for 2007. What is Tamezin? Magazine for girls, started by a youth group based at Tamezin Club, run at Dawliffe Hall on London's Chelsea Embankment. Now a good glossy, attractive magazine and ready to expand. My involvement? I visit schools to promote the magazine, by running a Journalism Workshop: this means plunging into a classroom of (often sullen-faced) adolescents, and introducing them to journalism, how to write news, do interviews, understand how a newspaper/magazine works.....satisfying to watch them move from inert oksoheresavisitingspeakerbetshe'shopelesslet'sjustlookcool to real interest. I do mock interviews, demonstrate shorthand, get them writing headlines, do a mock press conference......usually have a colleague with me and we give ideas about features we need for the magazine, show them how they can write for us.....each school is a new experience. We decline (usually revolting) staffroom coffee with (invariably extremely nice, often heroic) teacher(s) and relish great mugfuls of real coffee in the best coffee shop we can find (sometimes even fleeing to our favourite one in London, near Victoria station).....

Your involvement? Right. Read on. We need help. You can;

get a subscription to the magazine for your daughter/granddaughter/god-daughter/niece
arrange a workshop at a local girls' school if you are in the UK
send a donation to help with funds
invite me to come and talk about the whole project to your church/women's group
or you can be boring and ignore the venture and allow this useful project, which offers a real alternative to the gross and pornographic magazines now pushed at girls, to drift away through lack of encouragement and support....

Over to you.

The Launch of the Young Journalist Award today was great: we offer a £300 cash prize plus a week's work experience with a TV network or national newspaper.....this year's theme for the competitoon is "inspirational interviewing" and entrants have to do an interview and then write it up.....

Details of everything connected to Tamzein magazine available from: Tamezin, 1 Chelsea Embankment, London SW3.

The launch was fun: coffee and pastries, a good presentation by one of the young founders of the magazine, a brief talk from me, and a song from Sara Mello to round things off.....

Sara is blind - she came to London yesterday and I met her at Marylebone and brought her back to stay the night. Whenever I am with her, I am always so touched by the way everyone - absolutely everyone - is terrifically helpful. The bus driver wouldn't accept a fare for Sara. People open doors, make way on stairs, proffer a helping hand. As soon as we enter a bus or train, people stand to offer seats, usher Sara to a comfortable place. At the kerbside, people chat, exchange a pleasant greeting. Ticket-sellers at the tube station, people selling coffee, fellow-passengers on the train....everyone is nice.

Sara simply doesn't notice this most of the time, although she responded very nicely to everyone who chatted to her, and was especially thrilled to talk to a couple of dear old Chelsea Pensioners! (Note to American readers: if you don't know what a Chelsea Pensioner is....look it up on any website about London tourism!).

After taking S. back to her train - where a helper from the railway staff was waiting, all pre-arranged - I hurried on to Premier Radio. I recorded five talks, to be broadcast next week. I wrote them v. late last night, had no time to revise them, but all seemed well. Also did one to be broadcast as part of a pre-Christmas series, about St Lucy (feast-day Dec 13th, nice tradition of young girls dressing up to be a "Lucy bride", a sort of Christmas angel-figure). Premier Radio is Christian radio - has too much American evangelical preaching (does anyone listen? One just tunes it out, it makes a sort of background noise!) and also much mushy wellweallgreedon'twe vaguely Christian woffle masquerading as serious disciussion about the week's news, but there is some good stuff too and anyway it's Christian and an affeort in the right direction..... they do have some awfully silly music, all 1970s American-accented folksy stuff occasionally rising to a screechy jazz noise. Yuk. Have urged them to use some of the glorious music from centuries of Christian heritage....you can hear some wonderful stuff at churches across London, notably Westminster Cathgedral, Brompton Oratory, St Etheldreda's Ely Place, where this wonderful music finds its place in the setting for which it was intended ie the Mass. But it makes good radio, too!!! I think Premier has one hour a week os classical music!!! Oh, dear.....

At home, many letters and messages: I'm invited to the Academic Mass at Westminster Cathedral this Sunday, and to a book launch at Farm Street Jesuit Church in a couple of weeks' time.