JUST cleaned out the messy shower which, despite my best cleaning efforts this morning, still had a coating of mud round the fringes of the tray.
This, after returning home just before breakfast, caked in mud along my arms and legs having gone arse over tit Bambi-like during a quagmire run along a river path. My footing was all over the place, sliding away with every impact along the mud-strewn path, where the river had burst its banks and was flowing into fields alongside.
Catastrophe struck as I tried to leap across a ditch and embarrassingly ended up on my back. Conditions were treacherous, the path never ending, and it was a relief when I managed to get onto firmer ground with the road back home.
Clearly the first lesson for a harmonious marriage, besides not peeing when the toilet seat is down, always remembering to replace the top on the toothpaste tube and never inflict your cold feet on your partner in bed, is don't leave muddy dregs in the shower tray!
The first week of married life has seen us return to our normal working lives - Alison working as a staff nurse at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital and me back in Eastbourne. During the week, I've had the opportunity to see close at hand how tomorrow's journalists are being taught with visits to Brighton and Portsmouth universities. It's light years away from Harlow College where I trained in journalism for a year.
Media then was so much simpler - we were trained as newspaper journalists, sufficiently skilled in 100 words a minute shorthand, law, local and central government, newspaper practice, and we even had typing classes! Now, students are being equipped as multi-media journalists, as journalism reaches across as a diverse discipline encompassing newspapers, websites, including social media journalism, video and audio.
The world of newspapers is going through its biggest cultural change ever. A storm rages inside this media snow-shaker with everyone wondering what the landscape is going to look like once the snow settles. At Johnston Press, my current employers, the thinking is definitely digital. By 2020, the plan is for revenue between digital and print to be split 50-50, yet despite the uncertainty this is an exciting era we live in.
Newspapers will always exist, but they will no longer be the prime source of information. Instead, newspapers will gravitate to become news organisations built around their historic brand providing news across a variety of media. To stand out amid the flotsam and jetsam of micro-blogging and hyper-local news sites of one man in his bedroom, the regional press has to retain its integrity and reliability as accurate sources of information.
Speaking to some of the journalism students struggling to get to grips with their shorthand, unsure of its relevance today when all you need is a voice recorder, is they remain tremendously excited to be in the foothills of the media challenge.
There are clearly issues of media trust from the fall-out of the Leveson Inquiry - it was a shame that the voice of the regional press was not heard so loudly at the inquiry since we live in a totally different orbit to our national cousins.
For those journalists who cut their teeth on typewriters, subbing by hand and dealing with tetchy compositors from the hot metal era of newspapers, we have to adapt and change. If we don't, then newspapers as a brand will die. However, news is news; recognising its value as a commodity and re-purposing it for the 24-hour news environment we now live in.
The way ahead is potentially treacherous, we just have to be sure of our footing along the news information highway to make steady progress.
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