On days when my editor isn’t around, I call the shots.

It’s a confronting thought that someone who wears a shirt that reads “Merry Christmas ya filthy animal” all year round sets the news agenda for a population of actual people, but that’s the world we live in.

Usually the plonking of my juicy rear into the editor’s chair is short lived; restricted to an afternoon here and there. But the most recent occurrence of this lasted three whole days. This meant I oversaw the production of two publications. Two, guys.

To make matters worse, it was a slow news week. Most of the material from the last council meeting had been squandered and the upcoming meeting was too far away. The court list was dull. None of our elected officials had eaten raw root vegetables in weeks. The situation was worrisome.

Those are the times when you have to go digging for stories, squeezing yarns out of nowhere, collecting the juice and seeing what you end up with, as one does when looking at the tissue after pinching the blackheady area of their nose. Sometimes you crack into the honey pot, other times you just end up red-faced and disappointed.

Thankfully, the sebaceous glands of the community were clogged up with metaphorical dirt and oily residue was building below the surface, ready to be popped. Something had been brewing, and it was pure gold: a cat show.

Our trusty weekend photographer had once again come to the rescue, with the majestic kind of photos you would expect to come out of an event in which numerous groomed cats and their dedicated owners were gathered in the one place. A plucky co-worker selected the best one, and we all laughed along at the suggestion the story make the front page.

Our editor loves animals, but put it this way, she is a dog person. And in this world of black and white, hot and cold, intelligent or someone who watches You’re Back in the Room – you’re either one or the other. So the idea that she would use the photo on the most prestigious part of the paper was laughable. Thinking she would be back the next day to pull us into line, I jokingly assigned the photo to page one.

But by the next day, food poising settled in, and I was informed my 2IC was once again simply IC, and I had to steer the ship (i.e. the paper) through the storm (i.e. the balls to the wall mad rush to fill the thing) to the harbour (i.e. the printery). I was taking the helm. I felt like a new sea captain in a low budget made for television movie. It was up to me. Storm clouds were brewing, the compass was fucked and Navmans hadn’t been invented. I had to get us home, captain or no captain.

In my mind, I paced the captain’s cabin. I didn’t have much time. I knew the course my fearless leader would have taken, but conditions that way were choppy. I knew what my instincts were telling me, but it was a risky move. Pull it off and we’re lauded as heroes, but get it wrong and we’re adrift. Either way, I had to make the call. Time was ticking and the weather was turning.

Maybe it was the salt in my veins (from the horrifically processed chicken I live off) or the hydrogen bubble in my brain (can’t explain that one) but in the end I followed my gut and I charted my own course.

“Hoist the sales, man the poop deck” I certainly didn’t say to my team as I called a meeting in the captain’s quarters.

What I did say went something more like: “You know what, let’s just put the bloody cat on the front. It’s fantastic.”

So we did. And have never been more proud of what I have become.

Because this is a story the people needed to read. This was an important issue our readers had a right to know about. You look at this face and tell me that it’s not in the public interest:

Yeah. I stand by my decision.

In surprising news, I saw out that week still employed. Land ho!

As it turns out, I was allowed to compare a play to chicken nugget in my review.

For those playing along at home, you’ll know what I’m on about. For those raising a quizzical brow right now, click here for clarity.

I handed the page to my editor and told her she wasn’t allowed to fire me. But, to my surprise, she didn’t shred the page, set it alight and then burn some sage for good measure. She didn’t just let it go through, she said it was aright reading.

She let me keep the line about Clueless, and let me say “this play was about as pretentious as a chicken nugget, and just as delicious”.

However, there was quite a bit of meat cut from the printed piece and I would like to rectify the situation. This is an unfortunate reality in newspapers; you can only bang on for as long as the ad stack allows.

Sometimes even the greatest yarns have to have to be slashed open, the guts ripped out and then stitched back together – like bypassing the whole small intestine and hooking the stomach right up to the bowels. Sometimes, things are cut right down to their skeletal frames, and sometimes they need to stick to an all carb diet to fatten up.

But, like in life, I find myself never needing to add more bread to the equation. I have a tendency to overwrite and so I end up having to cut back on the treats. There’s so much I would have loved to have seen in actual print, however, like a bulging thigh being violently shoved into a jegging leg, it just wouldn’t fit the space.

I’d already desperately squeezed into every millimetre of space I could, sneakily cramming things in like a stash of hidden chocolate bars in a child’s room. I kerned words down, I took out spaces, I grouped sentences into paragraphs instead of keeping to the standard rule of hitting enter after each full stop. I was ruthless in my bid to fit more in, as if I was standing at the fridge in the first five minutes home after finishing work, shovelling as much of anything edible into my mouth as possible. Unfortunately in both cases, when you try to fit too much in, digestion – of words and of dangerous combinations of leftovers – isn’t easy. So some things had to be cut.

But, sweet reader, we live in the world of the Internet. It’s a magical place where we assume everyone is hanging on to our every word. We can gaily tap away at our keyboards until our finger callouses become infected and leak pus everywhere, which gets into the buttons and eventually destroys our computer. There are no word limits in the blogosphere and since my imaginary audience is obsessed with me and would read my shopping list if they got their beady little eyes on it, I freely breeze past my goal weight of 600 words.

So here’s my self-indulgent binge on the things that were trashed, because they’re no shame in eating hot chips from a garbage bin if they haven’t been there that long (I’m speaking literally AND metaphorically, from my own experiences, of course). Here are a few things that just didn’t make the final cut:

* Calling one of the actors “mystery meat”.

* The phrase “fangin’ for a nugg”.

* a suggestion the lead actor had a beard full of secrets.

* Critique of the high-five techniques.

* Questioning whether the playing of a Limp Bizkit song beforehand was intentional, what it meant and whether Halle Berry admits to featuring in the film clip for one of their absolute masterpieces. I then could have compared the demise of Limp Bizkit to Lincoln Park and Nickleback and penned a really poignant essay about which group left the biggest mark on our hearts and made the strongest contribution to music (spoiler: it’s none of them).

* A snarky remark about daydreaming about stabbing the person sitting next to me through the eardrum with a ballpoint pen for taking up my arm space.

* A definitive list of all the ways audience participation could backfire on a performer (if the person they picked to stand up gave the performers Ebola or vomited with stage fright or still had their umbilical cord attached and it fell out of their shirt etc).

* My soon-to-be patented six-pack of nuggets rating system. I gave the show five nuggs and one with a bite taken out of it but no one will ever know that.

The other day I took a call from our Deputy Prime Minster.

This is the guy who gets the sash and crown should the actual Prime Minister perish in a great firey mishap while riding on the head of giant gasoline-soaked swan (it could happen). If the big bopper has a cold or goes on a trip, this is the bloke they call in to take the metaphorical reigns (although in an election year, I wouldn’t put it past any politician to jump on a horse on front of the cameras) of our country.

He may wear crocs and Stubbies on a trip to the hardware store, but he’s still kind of a big deal. We once put a photo of him eating a piece of fruitcake on our front page.

Here I was, a few years out of uni with just a couple of years of experience under my belt having a yarn to the second-most powerful man in the country (behind whoever is handing out the roses on The Bachelor, obviously).

On the other hand, I’ve also written a story about a local woman planning on treating her grandchildren to a Red Rooster dinner. Now, being so far away from the Darling Downs, I appreciate the joint for attempting to fill the void that Super Rooster has left in my heart. It sells chips in family-sized-box-form. It offers garlic bread as a suitable snack option. It can hook you up with half a litre of gravy like it comes from a tap. It’s an excellent establishment by any stretch of the imagination, however, you wouldn’t think that someone thinking about frequenting a chicken vendor for dinner would make the news.

But that’s where you’re wrong.

The grandmother at the centre of the story was special. Our chicken-loving heroine was a winner, you see. Our sales staff were running a promotion with local businesses in which shoppers were given raffle tickets to win a $100 jackpot of vouchers for participating stores.

And my girl Pat was one lucky duck.

She was the winner one week, and to keep the momentum going, the editorial staff were asked to include a small piece about the competition. Nothing huge, just enough to put the promotion in the forefront of readers’ minds. And on the day of Pat’s momentous victory in the lottery of life, I was called upon to cover it.

She was given the fistful of vouchers, and presented with a list of participating businesses at which she could exchange the printouts of a templated ticket for actual goods and/or services. The list was reasonably extensive, but it didn’t take this savvy shopper to make up her mind: Red Rooster it was.

This woman could have made sensible choices to trade her winnings in for linen or plastic storage containers or even the medication needed to keep her alive. But she was courageous enough to listen to her instincts. Sometimes you just have to follow your heart, especially when it is pointing you in the direction of a hot chook.

And being the hard-core, dedicated journalist that I am, I couldn’t ignore the potential for a story in her bold choice, nor the opportunity to make a “winner, winner chicken dinner” reference in my copy.

We put that story on page 2, from memory.

This juxtaposition, my friends, is the real beauty of small-town journalism, and Australia by extension. It’s a world where the guy who controls the nation from time to time starts a telephone conversation with you with a casual greeting followed by only his first name (although, there aren’t too many other people with the same name as his, so fair enough). A world when a chinwag with the Deputy Prime Minister is nothing major, but a grandmother wanting to buy a hot chook and chips for dinner makes the paper.

Small-town journalism is beautiful world in which the delightful quirks of our society are highlighted and revelled in – except for that whole rampant inter-generational institutionalised racism thing, but we don’t need to talk about that because it doesn’t affect anyone you know, so who cares? Right?

For those of you playing along at home, I am dragging out a recount of the time I saw Daryl Braithwaite live. In the flesh. You can catch up on Part One here, but it’s really just some bulshit about glitter. Here’s were we get into the name dropping. I’m actually a bit of an insider you guys.

So I was in the same vicinity as the many who made a nation believe in love. And I was feeling good. I had avoided peeing on myself in a portaloo. I had dropped a few swears in front of respectable old people. I hadn’t had much breakfast. I was in the zone.

But it wasn’t just Big Daryl who was gracing the stage that day, but also Ross Wilson, the guy who wrote The Eagle Rock and Come Said the Boy, d-floor favourites I love to gyrate to while keeping eye contact with the most squeamish person at the party.

Now, as someone who went to uni in Brisbane and likes to prove how much of a fun person I am, I have this obnoxious insistence on dropping my pants along with Da Boiz when The Eagle Rock comes on. I also like to assert my tertiary institution was the birthplace of said nonsensical tradition. So I feel an affinity for that tune, an, by extension, the bloke who sang it. So I was excited for the warm up act.

By the time old mate took to the stage, I had well and true gotten into the sugariest bottle of wine one can purchase at these kinds of events. I was ready to dance, and I didn’t care how many old people’s views I obstructed with my moves.

As an aside – why do people go to concerts if they’re not going to cut a rug? Bastards were sitting in their assigned white plastic chairs throughout the whole set like they were enduring a child’s Easter dramatization. It just strikes me as very odd that people would sit in chairs of a lesser quality than those plastic outdoor sets that get brought out at barbecues (at least those chairs have armrests!) to listen to music they won’t dance to and drink overpriced, watered down wine. And they were packed in so close to other people so that they were touching. How is that fun?

After the set, there was an opportunity for a quick meet’n’greet and when the announcement boomed over the PA system, it occurred to me that I could make someone semi-famous sign my canvas sneakers. I also thought the guy deserved some kind of recognition after he played a ripsnorter set to a bunch of sitting elderly people, so I grabbed two wines from the bar lined up with the middle-aged reformed groupies. I was the last in the line.

People ahead of me bought t shirts and CDs and asked for selfies. But I had a better plan. I ignored the repeated offers to pay merchandise for signing purposes and heavily plonked my foot onto the table. My request for a shoe signing was met with an amused reaction, rather than disgust.

I assumed we “got each other” because I had previously interviewed him over the phone about the Eagle Rock drop and because I was one of the only people who wasn’t too lazy and jaded to get up out of my seat and dance. I felt like I would have stood out. Plus I was also wearing these attention-seeking bright, floral high waisted shorts I love that practically set fire to retinas. I also dance like someone stuck in a seriously strong rip trying to fight the current, tread water to stay alive and grab the attention of life savers back on the beach. So of course he could see me from his prime vantage point onstage. He made some remark about me enjoying the music and I thought this was the perfect time to sink piss with an Australian icon no one would recognise on the street. I offered him one of my glasses of urine-warm, sugary wine, imagining it to be more like a child leaving a glass of milk for Santa.

Instead it was more like one of those foot lotion salespeople you see in the middle of shopping centre walkways. Only I was loud, sweaty and had reached my intolerably chirpy tipsy stage. What I thought would be a welcome, top-bloke gesture was actually just straight up heckling. At least I wasn’t wearing an apron.

At this point I was feeling pretty buzzy, so this is paraphrasing, but I think I have most of it right:

Me: I thought you would like some moscato. Do you want some?

Daddy Cool: I don’t really.

Me: No it’s ok. Have some. It’s terrible. You should have some. Drink it quickly.

Daddy Cool: Um ok.

*drinks wine

Me: *wipes sugar wine drool off mouth with hand, makes caveman exhale grunt hybrid

Me: See ya.

Me: *runs off. Again, a little hazy so let’s just pretend I didn’t run off talking to myself. I probably said something really witty.

I later posted an Instragram photo referencing this encounter with at least one grammatical error. It gained 18 likes in total.

I while ago I wrote of the excitement and fear smoothie that pulsed inside me as I mentally prepared to interview a national treasure.

Daryl Braithwaite was coming to town, and I had clawed my way to the interview of a lifetime. I was going to exchange actual words with the man responsible for the hymn of our generation: The Horses. But I never ended up writing about how that conversation went or what it was like to see that hallowed sack of skin and song with my own eyeballs. And since the most exciting thing I’ve done in weeks was unwittingly create a vegan dessert, I thought now was the time to recount one of the holiest days of my life. Gather children, because here’s part one of the time I saw the face of God. It’s going to take a few posts, because if the stinking Hunger Games finale deserved to be broken up in two parts, this important and thrilling tale calls for trilogy.

After interviewing Daryl Bloody Braithwaite in secret to hide from the jeers of my colleagues, I was finally going to see the man in person. The day had dawned, and the sun would set on a new chapter of enlightenment. I was buzzing. I had brewed up a batch of apple vodka happy juice. I had laced up my sneakers. I was slathered in a sensible amount of sunscreen. I was ready.

As the time came to head to the festival, I grabbed my trusty shoulder bag that is hardly appropriate for anything other than a day drinking. But I had forgotten it hadn’t been emptied since its last outing. I had worn it to a Halloween party, which I went to dressed up as a sexy corn cobb (obviously). So of course this required a face full of golden glitter, because it what kind of sexy corn cobb would I have been without thousands of tiny gold specs making my features glisten in the moonlight? * The leftover glitter that didn’t stick to my face went into my bag, and the packet split, resulting in my transformation into a chunky, vulgar Tinkerbell with a supply of cheap fairy dust. I considered swapping my satchel. But thankfully common sense kicked in. The glitter was a mostly welcome surprise that I had to live with, like my younger sister.

I stepped out of the car at the concert ground, and I could feel the magic vibrating around me in the airwaves. Daryl was coming, but Daryl’s presence was already there. Something inside me told me to reach into my shimmer sack, pinch a bit of glitter and release it into the breeze. I imagined the wind carrying my spirit to him, coating his lungs with a film of my glittery essence as he inhaled; I could be his cosmic asbestos. Could he feel my soul seeping into his pores? Did my heartbeat echo in his ears? Probably.

The wind had a gentle ferocity that day, so when I tossed the contents of my bag into the air it formed a shimmering mist before the gusts carried it spectacularly off into the distance. So of course I started using this magnificent special effect to a punctuate moments of pure splendour. I began tossing fistfuls of glitter into the air when things got too quiet, or after I said something important like “I’m going to get more wine”.  Suddenly everything I said and did had this air of fabulous authority. Nothing cements your position as the flamboyant overlord of your group quite like a spontaneous glitter bomb. No one will question you.

It wasn’t just shiny shit getting airborne, there was something cosmically whimsical about it.** I may as well have been throwing tiny fragments of Santigold’s charred body into the air, it was that fabulous. It was like the powered bones of David Bowie formed a cloud and took flight. The essence of a perfectly ripened avocado solidified and exploded like fireworks. The semen of pre-Kardashian Kanye West dried up like salt from seawater and was shot out of an imaginary tshirt cannon. Particles of Dian Keaton’s laugh and Bette Midler’s powerful gaze were set free like doves.

It was glorious. And it was only the beginning.

Daryl was coming and you could feel it in the air.

*Answer: a shit one.

**But apparently it wasn’t the best thing to get in your eyes, My Blonde Sidekick would complain. Sure, people sitting behind us were being caught unawares with their mouths open and ending up with shimmer spit, but is that a bad thing? Who doesn’t want to hock up some glimmering phlegm? As I found out the next day when blowing my nose, glitter snot is the height of glamour and I had done that crowd a favour.

The other day I took the most important photograph of my career.

We got the call at about 10.30am on a Thursday. It interrupted my meaningless conversation with my editor. I backed out of her office, expecting it to be just another phone call. But it was the call that would change my life. The call was from her neighbour, who happened to be at the local council building witnessing breaking news unfold. Wild, unbelievable scenes were unravelling and needed to be recorded. The world had to see what was happening in our little town.

“There’s a crowd outside the council chambers! Someone get a camera and go!” my editor said.

My other co-workers looked a little taken aback. They had jobs to rush off to in 10 to 15 minutes time. Neither of them put their hands up. Which was a good thing, because I was hungry for the chase. I wanted the story. It was mine.

I had worked in this industry for more than four years. I had two university degrees. I watch both Nora Ephron movies in which Meg Ryan is a journalist on a regular basis. I was more than qualified for this. I was hungry for the story and I wasn’t going to wait to daintily cut a slice of the action and put it on a saucer – I was grabbing a fork straight of the fucking drawer and digging in like the ravenous, irrational overeater I am. The story was a family-sized custard tart and I was going to devour it.

“Me, me, me!” I shouted, abandoning the inside-voice I had been semi-successfully working on since probably my third day of school. I was jumping up and down like an overconfident, self-important child (i.e. me) wanting to do the reading on the church pulpit instead of the microphone like those plebs in my grade who couldn’t even manage the basic appropriate inflections. Suddenly I was the chunky schoolgirl I used to be, unafraid of hogging the spotlight with reckless abandon and elbowing bastards out of my way.

With the enthusiasm of a grandmother clutching a Frozen doll at the annual pre-Christmas Target Toy Sale, I grabbed the only camera available I sprinted out the door.

I didn’t have far to run, which meant I was able to get to the scene fast. But that also meant I had no time to think of a game plan. Within two minutes of getting the call, I was metres away from the action. There was no time for strategizing. I didn’t have the luxury of stepping back and taking the scene in. I couldn’t take a second to think about what to do first. In front of me was sheer chaos and all I could do was react. I had to trust my training, put faith in my experience and let my instincts guide me.

Slightly sweaty and panting with the power of one thousand Saint Bernards, I arrived outside the council building. Before I could think, my camera was clicking like a machine gun in a Vietnam War movie. I was in the middle of a busy street crouching down capturing the madness in front of me. I didn’t care about my safety; I cared about getting this story. As I snapped photo after photo, I wasn’t sure what would happen in the next frame, but I knew I needed to follow the action and capture every movement.

In a frantic haze, I put away my camera and began interviewing bystanders. With shaking hands I took down names. Sweaty fingers recorded testimonies on my mobile phone voice recorder. Arrived back in the newsroom in a flurry and began uploading my photos, praying that I had managed to capture the essence of the morning’s events.

The images flashed up on the screen, and I heaved a sigh of sheer relief: there on my monitor was a crystal clear photograph of a grown man laughing as held up traffic with his stop/go sign to allow a family of ducks to cross the busy street.

I’ve done it. I’ve reached the pinnacle of human achievement. I was there for what was arguably the most significant moment in history.

I think I need a cigar.

I’m outraged about the fact that no one is outraged over what I am outraged about.

Before I start, I want to make this unquestionably clear: I absolutely want to alarm you.

I don’t know if any of you tech-loving drones have realised it, but there’s something decidedly dreadful and undeniably underhanded going on right in front of our faces and no one is doing a damned thing about it. We have a national crisis on our hands and everybody is sitting around oblivious to the Armageddon-like reality that will soon send nucleonic winter storms rippling through the country. It’s a disgrace, an insult to the notion of liberty and, probably although I have no evidence back my claim, a bid to restrict our freedom of speech.

I’m talking about stamps, obviously.

I don’t know if you’re aware (I assume not, because otherwise you’d be out on the streets overturning cars and shouting at CCTV cameras if you were) but one stamp is now going to cost you a hefty $1 a pop. That’s an increase of 30 fucking cents from last year. Not only that, but the standard letter is now going to take longer to be delivered. We’re paying more for a service but getting less than what we used to. Now, I don’t know about you, but this really makes me mad. As a stingy bastard who still believes in the power of print, I am downright livid.

Now if I want to send a letter, it’s going to cost me a whole dollar and take the best part of a week to arrive. This means that it’s going to cost me an extra 30 cents if I want to send a postcard to my family members to give them a snapshot of my glamorous life. One hundred fucking cents to send a photo of a footpath with the words “I stepped over a used condom here”. That means I’m going to have to choose between sending 12 postcards and a box of goon. How many people would sacrifice a sack of wine for the purpose of sending depressing, tangible Snapchats to family members?! And with these new changes, the delays are going to be extreme. So if I want to send critically important correspondence, say for example a letter to Stephen Curry telling him how much I enjoyed his Geoffrey Rush camel skit on an awards show, it’s going to be a week late and will largely be deemed irrelevant by that date. It’s a rort and it’s rubbish.

I was alerted to this miscarriage of justice by my grandmother, a woman who still sends birthday cards laden down with enough stickers you’d think she was a six-year-old at a free craft activities table. She was absolutely disgusted. As a woman who exclusively drinks Coke, hates Steve Martin and couldn’t see why a landmark called the “Nigger Brown Grandstand” had to be renamed, Grandma and I don’t often agree. But this was something that transcended the generation gap and made our collective blood boil. What was worse was that Australia Post pushed the changes over the festive period, when people are too busy being happy to care about real problems in the world.

Being a noble member of the press, I returned to work ready for a backlash. I expected an avalanche of anger to come crashing down, with people chaining themselves to postie bikes and picketing post offices. I was ready for civil war and was perched at my desk just waiting for the letter bombs to explode. But there was nothing.

Knowing their tendency to use traditional means of conducting business and their outstanding capability to complain, I thought the older generation was the first place to start. I called my local senior citizens branch, and was met with confusion. The convenor told me she hadn’t heard of any outrage, and certainly was not in the midst of coordinating a large-scale display of civil disobedience to fight the changes. My local state member told me he didn’t know the price had risen and said he hadn’t sent a letter through the post for some time. I went a step higher and tapped on the shoulder of my federal elected representative and didn’t even get a response.

I was appalled. We were now being forced to pay through the nose to send a letter and nobody cared.

Now, before you keyboard warriors (hi Kettle, my name is Pot) start telling me about the wonders of email, I know that letter sending is down. The prevalence of sending messages via the postal service may have seen a decline in recent years, but it hasn’t plummeted as much as Bill Cosby’s popularity.

While it’s still a hot trend for me, I can see the practice of utilising a national public service to dispatch messages catching on to with the wider population once again. Writing a letter to someone is such a catalyst for affection and it requires such minimal effort. Once people realise that they can fulfil the same amount of obligation as attending a party or enduring a long phone call without having to actually hear the person’s whiney voice or be in the same room as middle-aged guests who wear singlets with sleeves down to their belts, the craze will be ignited once more. Sure, you still do have to eventually leave the house to post the thing, but you can use that as an excuse to show off your sick new roller skate sneakers.

Letter writing could come back once people remember how delightful it was and crave its return, like that time when Mark Latham didn’t have national platform with which to broadcast his idiotic ideas or Shannon Noll. However, like narrow-minded festival organisers may bar Nolsie from reaching the dizzying heights of commercial success, this price hike may stand in the way of the humble letter’s comeback. And I feel powerless to stop it.

I’d attempt to start a letter writing campaign against Australia Post but that will only line their pockets further.

These days are dark.