Status Anxiety: Here endeth the lesson

One of the most depressing things about being a journalist is that 99 per cent of your work goes unnoticed. You pour your heart and soul into a piece, congratulate yourself on having produced something rather good for once, then wait for the plaudits to start rolling in. Six months later, you’re still waiting. It’s like dropping a stone into a well and not even having the satisfaction of hearing it go plop. Except it’s not a stone — it’s your whole career.

Occasionally, though, something you write attracts attention, and it’s often completely random. For instance, I wrote a column for this magazine last year that is still the subject of intense debate ten months later. Headlined ‘A lesson in satire’, it was a response to a blogpost on an anti-free schools website about LGBT week at Stoke Newington School. (For those of you who don’t know, LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered.)