Recently I got to write news stories for The Undercurrent and it was a wonderful experience. I wrote them from mid-July until mid-November and there was rarely a dull moment.

Sometimes that was even a good thing.

News writing is a different type of writing than I normally do - I've traditionally done more the frivolous type of writing where the reader doesn't learn much of anything at all - but years ago at the University of Victoria I did actually study news writing.

To be honest I did not go into it professionally because it gives me just a wee bit of a headache. So basically I've had a headache for five months now. This occurs largely because there are facts involved in news writing and I've always found it so much easier to make things up.

The thing is that to find and report news accurately you have to organize your day, week, and, worse yet, your thoughts. I tried to avoid all that organizing only Outlook editor Justin Beddall was overseeing my work - I am indebted to him - and he tactfully convinced me to include actual news in the newspaper.

"Couldn't I just write arts and sports and a few profiles every week?" I asked.

"No," Justin replied.

I'd often have to call people back over and over again to get facts right. But I did it. For some reason the one story on sewage treatment was especially mentally discombobulating. It was hard getting sewage facts into my brain and I had to make countless calls to a beleaguered yet patient councillor Cro Lucas, who was on the... oh, the sewage steering committee or something.

"Hi, Cro. Hi, it's me again. Cro, you said sludge thickening was a good thing, right?"

"I did. And it certainly is."

"Great. Thanks. I just wasn't sure if sludge was better thick or thin."

During those five months I only know of making one misquote, but it was a big one. I quoted Ed Sanders as telling me how great this year's Bowfest was when in fact he and I had never ever spoken. My wife alerted me to the mix-up.

"Honey," she said. "I thought you said that you'd spoken to Ed Kane about Bowfest."

"I certainly did speak to Ed Kane about Bowfest; got a good quote, too."

"But it says 'said Ed Sanders.'"

"Huh."

I called a perplexed Ed Sanders and he graciously declined my offer of a retraction. For his part, Ed Kane took the giving away of his quote with equanimity; for the record, though, Ed Kane felt that this year's Bowfest was "awesome." Ed Sanders didn't go.

I don't think Hendrik Slegtenhorst will mind my saying that his name is my favourite of all those I encountered, though I enjoyed greatly the cadence of Emily Van Lithe De Jeude. I often invented nicknames in the Around Bowen photo cutlines but no one protested, not even the parents of Underwear Boy.

I knew I was on the right track when I got trashed on the Bowen forum; they don`t just trash anybody. Okay, they do, but still, it was nice to be included and some posters even came to my defence. There sure is a lots of passion for our community expressed on that forum.

And we`ll just leave it at that.

Now before signing off on my first Slow Lane Chronicles since Sept. 7, 2007, I'll tell you that in truth news is easy to find on Bowen because there's so many groups offering opinions on the issues. The hard thing however is keeping track of all their acronyms and I was forever tempted to write a story that would go something like this:

BIM will meet with B.I. citizens on the BICS AT field in Nov. about the OCP and issuing a DP for the CRC; CAO Hendrik Slegtenhorst says BAA, BIAC, BCHA, BIFC, BIFW, BIHORA, BIYC, BYC, Bowfest, Bowfeast, CHAC, the CRCTS, FOBILS, IPS, TGB, TOTI, TNN and CC (FYI that`s Chris Corrigan) have RSVP'd and will attend.

"However U.C. scribe Marcus Hondro has taken ASA and can't come, he's catching some ZZZ's," Emily Van Lithe de Jeude said. "He reports experiencing a rather bad headache."

Addendum: that headache seems finally to have gone away.