It’s Flashback Friday. Every Friday we bring back a golden oldie article from yesteryear. A chance for you to re-read it and see if it is still relevant today!
Today I will come out and share that I’m suffering from Steve Conway envy. Steve is a Dublin based broadcaster, journalist and writer (he has books, damn him, books). I met him originally back in the 1980s because of the offshore pirate station Radio Caroline, when we were both based in London.
When I first met Steve he seemed a bit odd or strange. I love odd and strange and so I felt very comfortable with him, despite his then physical appearance in some way reminding me of the awful Morrissey at the time. I hated Morrissey. His music made me want to kill myself. Nobody else saw this whenever I mentioned it behind Steve’s back, so it must have just been something odd going on in my head and maybe he didn’t look like Morrissey at all.
Anyway, for nearly a decade or so Steve and I kept in touch through good and bad times, and although drawn more by a kind of business relationship, I maintained a friendship during that period until as happened with everybody I knew from that era, I drifted away. Or maybe he drifted away. It doesn’t matter.
So, during this decade of which I speak we had a sort of tolerance of each other’s views on Radio Caroline and those who’d taken over running it, and so on, which was a very good thing. Try as I might I could never get him to see that the people I’d declared as evil were in fact evil. Damn him for having his own mind!
After losing touch, Steve disappeared off to Dublin and it is there that he holds down a regular radio show (on a real radio station), finally published his book about his time on Radio Caroline, and generally settled into getting old gracefully. Or so I thought.
Steve, like myself, is a bit of a dreamer. Different dreams (in different beds), all usually coming to nothing, and I appreciated that of him. One of his dreams was to publish ‘the book’. He wrote a first draft and I was extremely privileged to have been given a copy. It needed a lot of ‘subbing’ (as we world famous journos call it), but it was an exciting graphic read. One of the best reads I’d had in fact, probably because it was about a subject I loved, and it used Steve’s excellent powers of observation and easy to understand explanations and descriptions.
At this point I didn’t have Steve Conway envy. I hoped he’d get it published, tried to bully him into getting it published, and enthused about how he MUST publish it. However, he let it go and it took him over a decade before he finally got round to it.
The internet, especially the awful Facebook, lets you spy on people you lost touch with from before there was an internet, and so Steve (alongside so many others) was on my radar despite having lost touch. I read his publicity about his book deal and later read about his book launch. Nope, no Steve Conway envy at this point either. Either in my head or out loud somewhere (I can’t remember) I wished him well with it and didn’t think much more about it.
I carried on spying on Steve as time passed and he then blogged about doing something that I found incredibly curious. He’d basically prepared a kind of a ‘bucket list’ of ten things he wanted to do that he’d never done before, hopefully not because he was about to kick the bucket but because he is an imaginative genius with a bit of time on his hands. Ok, a bucket list, eh? I loved the film about ‘The Bucket List’ but had never really thought about preparing or implementing my own.
Yes, it was at this point that my Steve Conway envy started. It was tiny at first. Not enough to even make me realise I was suffering from Steve Conway envy. He’d hooked me and reeled me in, the swine.
First to be implemented from his list was to appear naked in public. He provided us with a brilliant blog entry describing how he had been part of a photo-shoot along with many other naked people for an album cover or something. He described his fears and experiences of getting his kit off for the very first time and nakedly sitting nakedly posing nakedly alongside other nakedly sitting nakedly posing naked people. It wasn’t porn, it was art. But, reading his vivid descriptions took me there and I was able to be with him and laugh out loud at the experience and his feelings of awkwardness and wry observations along the way. It was pure poetry with which I could identify.
Within a few days the Steve Conway envy started to rise. I slowly began to realise that I was actually jealous that he’d been able to do this naked photo-shoot, and I was talking about it to people around me. Their advice was that I should do one and why not?
Well, the point they missed was that all I’d be doing is copying Steve Conway. I couldn’t just go out and copy Steve Conway, I thought, because I’m a person who prides himself on being original. But, bloody Steve Conway had bloody beaten me to a bloody brilliant and original bloody idea.
A week or so passed and I had the hump. The Steve Conway envy had risen to an extreme. My brain was processing a thousand thoughts. Should I travel to Dublin to kill him? I mean, he’d stolen my idea after all!
Ok, he hadn’t stolen my idea in the slightest. I’d never had the idea. It was his idea and it was a good idea, and in the hands of the best person to implement the idea. I couldn’t do anything about it. If I copied him I wouldn’t be original. It was his idea, damn him, his idea.
The Steve Conway envy boiled over until I was seething with bile and making audible groans as I paced up and down. My head was looking for something – anything – to do that would rival what Steve was doing. But, the whole concept of having a list was already out there, so nothing, absolutely nothing I could do would be anything but copying. Even if I didn’t mention it, write about, or communicate it to anybody (least of all Steve), I would know that I was just copying him. There was no way I could ‘win’ in this game that was solely in my head of trying to be better than Steve.
Eventually I managed to wrestle control of my senses and the Steve Conway envy started to slowly subside. I’m in control of it, and no harm will come to Steve, honest. In fact, I felt a sense of contentment and ‘Pah!’ when Steve announced the completion of his second task which was to drink a Guinness.
Pah! Drink a Guinness? What a rubbish thing to have on a list. Pah!
Obviously, it was important to Steve, and although not as outrageous as his first thing, to him it was as important for many other reasons. Hence why if I was to have a list – I HAVEN’T, OK, I HAVEN’T – drinking a Guinness wouldn’t feature on it.
This made me feel superior to Steve for a while as I smugly nodded and went ‘Pah!’ in front of my computer screen. Pah! I felt I’d won some victory over him, crushed him into insignificance. The Steve Conway envy was at a low.
Until I then remembered he has another eight unannounced things on his list. With butterflies in my stomach, I felt the Steve Conway envy rise as I stared out of the window at the full moon and howled before returning to a scowl as I spied on him via Facebook and his blog watching and waiting…
(Steve Conway’s blog is http://steveconway.wordpress.com but be warned, you might get Steve Conway envy)
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