When Proscenium Programmes eventually folded and I was offered the editorship of a ‘glossy local lifestyle magazine’ I grabbed it gratefully with both hands. I didn’t feel qualified and certainly didn’t come from the right background – I was local but I wasn’t from Bath, and I certainly didn’t have anything approaching a glossy lifestyle – but with a new family to feed, needs must. It was only afterwards that I realised how I could have done the job better – indeed, how I should have been doing it from the start, ie, treating everything as an advert and not a commentary. Just type up the press releases and give the pretty pictures room to do their work. Only by then it was too late, the thing had crashed and burned despite my best efforts (Jonah? Moi? No. As usual, it was all about the money behind the scenes, and I never got to see any of that). Ah well, at least it gave me a bit more useful experience at the coal face even if, as F Scott Fitzgerald or was it Oscar Wilde, pointed out, experience is the name we give to our mistakes.

The budget was somewhat less glossy than the sheen of the heavyweight paper the mag was printed on, so I was grateful for the continuing efforts of many faithful and stalwart contributors who had been working for the publication a lot longer than I had. Most of the content came from them, bulked out by a plethora of press releases seeking free publicity for everything from local schools and businesses to fundraisers and restaurants. Fine by me. I had sixty-odd pages to fill every two months, and that was the kind of editing I knew how to do.

Backed up by the venerable art director Rod Hobbs, my main job was to order the content along traditional lines – articles and interviews first, out-and-about sections, the jazz and motoring pages, big pictures of pretty girls in the fashion sections, book reviews and gardening at the back – and make sure I saved all the plum jobs for myself. I did a lot of book reviews, for example, which enabled me to take home hugely expensive hardbacks like histories of Georgian interiors and the collected illustrations of Norman Rockwell, which had been sent to the office for review on spec and which I would never have been able to afford myself. Under the auspices of Bath & West Life I also got to meet and interview such interesting over-achievers as swimmer Sharron Davies, the broadcaster and author Adam Hart-Davis and singer/songwriter Pete Atkin (see elsewhere on this website). I had the chance to motor around the area visiting a birds of prey centre and local fishing spots at unearthly hours of the morning. And I got to eat some fabulous meals in return for obviously favourable reviews, and found out that ballet dancers backstage can have a filthy sense of humour and a boisterousness of demeanour completely at odds with their poised elegance in front of an audience. I had to write so many bits and pieces that I ran out of plausible pseudonyms – though my disguised toddlers, Peter Williams and Julia Francis, continued to make further appearances here and there – until in the end I gave up altogether: if the piece didn’t have a byline, it was probably by me.

Here is a brief taste of what the high life looked like down my way in the late 1990s.