A Feature Article – ‘Delicious yet affordable, please’

A feature article on the best places to eat in Bournemouth on a budget.

Last term we were required to write a feature article for our Professional Writing unit. The feature had to focus on an aspect of Bournemouth and be suitable for a local publication. We then had to design a spread in InDesign that was appropriate to the content of our feature. Here is the opening of my feature article, and below, the three pages created on InDesign. You can view the whole document and read the rest of my feature article here or if you simply want to read the text, click here.

“I found him waiting by the door of the restaurant looking fairly normal and untroubled, checking his watch casually to see how late I was. No one had really noticed him or given him a second glance, but then, why would they? This wasn’t an actor, a musician, a fashion designer. This was my Dad. My very own, unemployed, completely-and-utterly skint father.

“You’re late,” he said as he greeted me with a grin and gestured towards the door. “You get that from your mother, you know.” He laughed at my disgruntled face.

We weren’t, however, there to banter about my lateness or compare my traits to those of my relatives; we were in fact on a mission, a food mission. You see – my Dad has two qualities in which I really admire him. Firstly, he is the most intelligent man I know. Secondly, he has an insatiable desire for food, and although I said we weren’t going to be discussing our family traits, I can safely say that’s been passed on to me. We are a little obsessed with food.

Funny then, that neither of these qualities are apparent in my Dad at the moment. For one, he is not remotely overweight (and neither am I for that matter, lucky genes), and for two, he has been cruelly unemployed for nine and a half months. The economic climate has stripped his intelligence away from him, as it has with many, and left him jobless, foodless and teetering on the edge of homelessness.  He mostly eats beans, lentils and lots of green vegetables, and although he insists he enjoys them, I require a gas mask to enter his flat once they’ve been consumed (and digested) and frankly, I’ve had enough. I don’t intend to sit back and watch the cleverest man I know eat himself to horrendous flatulence when I can find him a good meal somewhere. So, when he told me he would be staying down in Bournemouth for a few days looking for work, I promised him some delicious yet affordable food. Now we just had to find it; our food mission.

Because my father is always right.

When I was little I used to hate getting the train anywhere, I found the journey so tiresome and was only ever interested in the destination, not the getting there. My dad used to say to me “Being on a train gives you time to think. You’re creative, use the time wisely.” Of course, being creative at seven years old involved child-like drawings (well I was a child, forgive me) on an A4 page, with a wonky title that read ‘Me and Daddy on the train’ and if I had had the nerve at seven, I would have written ‘BORING’ next to it.

However, like anything in life, you begin to get used to something the more you do it. I’m at University in Bournemouth but my home address is Wokingham in Berkshire, so for the majority of the year, I’m an hour and half at least away from home. (Not that long, I realise, but long enough). Then, for the summer months that I am at home, my boyfriend moves to HIS home address in Brighton, putting a three hour train journey between us. How inconvenient of him.  Anyway, the point is, the train starts to seem pretty damn important when all the people you love are scattered across the country.

So, last summer, on one of my many train journeys to Brighton I decided to thank my father by taking his words of wisdom on board. (This is his favourite way of me thanking him, because he knows it means he was right.) I whacked out my creative side and used my time wisely.

For my Dad, for being so annoyingly clever and right about everything.