I am not a journalist, although I do tend to do a lot of writing in my work, whether that’s briefings, answering correspondence, letters to editors, talking points, etc etc. You’d think I’d be sick of writing, but I thought I’d give it a go.

Over lunch last week with Andrei, we were discussing how scary it was that Arnold Schwarzenegger might become Governor of California, and we then started to apply the “celebrity as politician” idea to Australian politics – particularly with regard to someone who could replace Simon Crean. I suggested Andrew Denton as the perfect choice for leader of the ALP, and we had a good laugh, in the way that we do, before moving on to joke about other choices, such as sportspeople (imagining, and imitating, Mark Taylor, Richie Benaud and others). Anyway, the thought struck me that it might make a good Heckler article.

So, yesterday as I’m walking back to the office after lunch I figured, “I’m not too busy, I have some time free, I should do it”. So, I sat down, wrote it in about half an hour, emailed it to the Herald, and got a reply that afternoon to say it was going in today (Friday). You can read it here.

It was actually fun to write, and another funny thing was that the SMH editor made less changes to my article than my managers at work do! That’s the beauty of free-form writing for your own benefit and not having to fit a certain style, as someone pointed out to me.

Thanks for those who said nice things to me after reading it.

One interesting observation: Schwarzenegger is a standard word in the dictionary that comes with MS Office XP. And I now know to spell it with an ‘e’ immediately after the ‘z’