Over the last few days I’ve been inundated with tweets, comments and emails from anonymous accounts, all with the same thinly veiled message. Here’s a couple of the charmers…
Bizarre that this should all start up again, I thought, especially on Twitter, where my profile clearly states:
…So if someone has gone to the trouble of looking me up on Twitter (or Instagram or any other social media) to send targeted, deliberate and frankly unimaginative abuse, how could they fail to notice that I HAVE A JOB.
So, once and for all I thought I’d scribble a brief but handy rebuttal to the anonymous abusers, to save me the bother of replying repeatedly to their piteous attempt at venom and spite:
I have a job. I have a few, actually, which I a bonus, because for a long time I didn’t have one at all, and that was fairly crummy. Curious?
I’m an AUTHOR – two books out there in the big wide world already for purchase, and two more in my head and in the creating stages. To shed a little light on the matter, books don’t write themselves, and neither do recipes. Recipes need to be dreamed up or researched, then cooked and tested a few times, rewritten, and put into a pile. That pile is eventually shuffled into chapters, any chapters that are a bit light on material need more recipes put in, so more dreaming, researching, writing, cooking, testing, cooking, testing, rewriting. The chapters need introductions, then indexing, and a few more words put in to bind the whole thing together. Then, the recipes get cooked again to be photographed, usually over a week or two or three, and then it all gets put together into a book. That book gets sent to me as a first draft, I read it studiously for a week, looking for errors or anything I want to change, and send it back with any amendments. This happens a few times until everyone is happy with it, and then it goes to print. Between printing and publication I’ll spend hours on radio stations, being interviewed by the press, on television sofas, about The Book. Sounds like a full time job? It is.
But on top of that, I’m also a JOURNALIST and COLUMNIST. So while that’s all going on, that book writing recipe testing proof reading thing, I’m also churning out a weekly recipe for the Guardian, and writing about politics.
And then there’s the freelance journalism, political and comment pieces for the Huffington Post, Guardian, Independent, Daily Mirror to name a few, as well as cooking for the Guardian, BBC Good Food, Waitrose Kitchen and Sainsburys.
And THEN there’s the charity stuff, work with Oxfam, Child Poverty Action Group, the Trussell Trust, various speeches at housing associations and social enterprises over the last few years…
And on top of all of that, I occasionally work in a real live restaurant kitchen, at Blackfoot in Exmouth Market, cooking in a set of chefs whites with my own knives and having a (hard working) lot of fun.
There’s stuff I’ve missed – this week I’m filming for a campaign, have a few meetings with similar things, some radio pre-records, interviews, et cetera. I also do some consultancy work and recipe development for big high street names that I have to keep to myself, that sometimes munch two full days out of a weeks schedule.
At the moment, I’m trying to do all that with a broken foot and a sprained shoulder(!!) I often work before the kids wake up, and most nights after they’ve gone to bed.
So to the idiot who says I’m a poor role model to my kids, they see me get up in the morning and sharpen my knives and pack my bag. They see me writing at the table. They can identify my books in the supermarket or book shop. They ask most days what I’ve done at work. They know I work. They know I have a job. They know what I do. And now, trolls and strangers that feel compelled to abuse people they don’t know from the safety of anonymous internet accounts, so do you.
Jack Monroe. Follow me on Twitter & Instagram @MsJackMonroe