This hasn’t really kept me from here as the whole process has been staggeringly slow, but I want to mention it here after reading this post from Christian. My own relationship with my mother was hopelessly broken and since she died a few months ago I’ve been forced back into a world I’ve been trying to escape from since I was a kid. So far the few meetings I’ve had with ‘family’ have been brief and not altogether unpleasant.

Bizarre but not unpleasant. No one’s punched me yet.

I’m still in the process of settling the estate. It’s a chore that is about to get a little more complicated thanks to the ‘eccentricities’ of some of my kin. Last Friday I spent the day traveling a couple of hundred miles to take a box of documents from one location to another location not a stone’s throw away. Loops, I jump through them. There’s a few home-truths to take on the chin along the way and that’s fine. I’m leaving as much of this as possible in the hands of my lawyer, but I think it’s fair to say that Friday was a bit of a head fuck. But I also came away with stuff like the photo heading the previous post.

That’s my old school pal, Martin Travis, with the blonde hair. That particular photo ended up in the local newspaper. No idea why.

And then there are the monkeys:

That’s me in miniature carrying a monkey. And my dad, many years previously, seems to have taken one out on a date. Again, no idea why.

The photo atop this post is my grandfather’s baptism certificate from 1910. I have one strong memory of the man and everyone who knew him is long gone, so it’s interesting to find these little artifacts from his life. I recently found his soldier’s service book from the Second World War which I’ll get up here at some point too. But if you jump ahead from 1910 to 1926 you find he was already entering the workforce:

It’s a beautiful document. I handed about twenty other intricately handwritten documents from the same period over to my lawyer so when I get those back I’ll get them up on Flickr too. The language is great. I don’t have time to transcribe it here now, but again I’ll add it to another blog post when I find the time.

And then there are my father’s GCE certificates from 1942:

Not surprised at the results, but I never knew that I shared the same middle name as my father until now.

There may be other bits and pieces squirreled away in the house I inherited, but unlike Christian I don’t really value this stuff beyond blog-fodder. My first instruction to the lawyer was to just empty the place and sell it.

With a little luck I can now handle the whole thing remotely without setting foot there again.

1972:

That’s my mum, Christine, holding on to the little bundle of joy that would turn into this large bundle of idiocy. The guy trying to work out where I came from would be Michael senior and next to him is my grandmother, Mary Jessie.

She died in 1999, my dad went in 1988 and I got the news about my mum this morning. She went into hospital last week, was diagnosed with pneumonia and died sometime over the weekend.

I spoke to her on Thursday.

That the news only reached me today says a lot about my relationship with her. With my family period. My grandmother offered the kind of unconditional love grandparents revel in right up until it became conditional on a few things. My decision to move away from my home town upset more than one apple cart. When I told my mother I’d accepted a place at university she threw a hammer at me.

Tough crowd.

But this is all stuff I came to terms with years ago. My dad had no idea who I was and if he’d lived longer I’d still be a fuck-up in his eyes. I came home from that first year at university to find my mum had destroyed all my belongings. The stuff was replaceable over time, but the writing she’d found and thrown away without a care in the world underlined that we really were from different worlds.

And all this stuff worked out. If I’d been a better son or at least the kind of son they were expecting then I’d have been miserable or at least a very different person today. That sounds horribly selfish, but in just about every other aspect of my life I try my very best to be generous. One of the good guys. That’s never stopped me from acknowledging that some things come at too high a cost.

My family never felt like one and it was the one thing I’ve never been able to fix.

My new family became the people who came with me. There are a few people who have stood by me through thick and thin and living my life online has assured that my friendships are global and the people I love know that I came to this place through conviction rather than duty. I’m fascinated by other people’s relationships with family and I guess I write about it a lot.

Sadly over the last couple of years I’ve seen too many of my friends lose family members. I know how devastating this has been for them and I feel guilty that a few tweets of mine this morning resulted in so many messages of condolence and emails/calls checking that I’m OK. Losing my family is in no way as brutal as it has been for others and while I’m not torn apart by this I am incredibly touched by how many of you have reached out in only a few hours.

Thank you.

The next week or so will be interesting. I come from a large unimmediate family and I’m the only one to escape. Black sheep doesn’t cover it and there will be a lot of recrimination heading my way over the next few weeks. Nothing I’m not prepared for.

But death makes you pause and take stock. I do tend to forget to let others know how important they are to me. So some of you have got that coming. It seems trite to drop a science fiction quote in here, so let’s be trite:

When you can’t run you crawl, and when you can’t crawl you find someone to carry you…

Finding someone to carry us is the adventure, but we often find out who those people are far too late.

I missed my mum when I was a kid. I was sorry when she got ill. First she was hit my mental illness and when we got that under control the physical stuff began to mount up. She spent the last few years confined to the downstairs of the home I grew up in. I believe I’d finally convinced her she needed to move somewhere smaller, but I visited nowhere near as often as I should. And even those infrequent visits seemed to go on too long for both of us. We didn’t have a relationship and I’m sorry about that, but going back over it I don’t think I could have done more.

I don’t believe in gods. Not the cool ones I learned about studying Classics as a kid and certainly not the vindictive old fuck whose ridiculous and damaging version of religion I was brought up in. I know she’s at peace because she’s gone and that’s enough.

I do have one vivid memory though. I was very small and we were walking hand in hand through a busy market on a Saturday morning. I got distracted by something and when I reached out to hold her hand again I was greeted with some surprise by a woman who was most definitely not my mother, but whose hand I had grabbed by mistake. Not being able to find her I immediately fell back on my basic training and wailed like a bastard until she was found. I remember the relief as if it were yesterday.

I guess that was the first time I lost her.

And we let go again somewhere along the way and it takes the cold hard fact that we’ll never see each other again remind me that that’s where the loss is this time.

Or as Bukowski, the miserable old fuck, left it:

These things, and others, in content
show life swinging on a rotten axis.

But the swing’s the thing… let’s enjoy it while we can.

Around a year ago an old friend of mine got in touch. We hadn’t spoken in over fifteen years and it was as we caught up over coffee that a baton story started by Michael Moorcock in The Guardian came up. I’d written part four and it turns out that Steve had written part six.

Small fucking world.

When we knew each other as teenagers I guess we were both working on our escape routes. For Steve it was music. And it was always obvious he was gonna break out. My own path seemed a little more muddled. We were in a band together for the briefest of moments – I think it was Steve who forced me to buy a bass guitar. What I really remember about that time is that I was more intent on writing about the music than learning how to play it. My bass fell to another friend with a natural ability and that was that.

We won’t mention my singing for Iron Hell.

Steve’s done a lot of cool stuff in the intervening years – including finding a wife smarter than either of us. One of the many things he’s up to right now includes radio drama. And wouldn’t you know it they’re also blowing the doors off the process:

After many queries about just how one goes about making a drama from start to finish, I shall, as producer and director, along with the writer, Michelle Lipton sound designer/editor Eloise Whitmore and composer Stephen Kilpatrick share this process with you

So now you have something else to keep an eye on.

Now I’ve paid Steve back for the bass and shouting at me for messing up ‘Motorbreath’ by getting him on Twitter. And we’re talking about writing something together again.

Probably not with Michael Moorcock this time, but you never know.

It came to my attention this morning that some of you may have not yet seen Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser. That’s ok – I have a back log of movies to catch up on myself and hey, we’re busy people. But it also came to my attention that some of you may be waiting for the inevitable American remake. This is unacceptable.

We don’t want a repeat of the incident  a few years ago where I was forced to drag some of you out of the theaters by the legs, hitting you over the head with the DVD of Infernal Affairs before the opening credits of The Departed had played.

Plus this time I have a claw hammer.

Skipped the normally mandatory Halloween post. My Bad. Spent most of yesterday trying to consolidate the external hard drives that pepper my office. Dug out a lot of old video I shot, a pile of movies I forgot all about and enough photos to put a little extra strain on Flickr’s ‘from Yahoo‘ hernia badge. They should really pop that back inside, out of sight, where it belongs.

Also found a pile of old bookmarks that I’m currently revisiting and feeding on. Figured the following pic managed to illustrate my previous two posts quite well so here it is:

Here’s the accompanying blurb from SADA104:

In the early 19th century, “Yamato Nadeshiko” (大和撫子) is referred to by Japanese as a ideal Japanese woman with loyalty, domestic ability, and wisdom in the male dominated society. Rin Nadeshico (*Nadeshico spelled with “c”, not “k”) is an up&coming Japanese female graphic artist who illustrates a new definition of “Yamato Nadeshiko” in the 20th century. Those girls she draws are independent, with strong personality, and sometimes aggressive.

Sadly, Rin’s site seems to be down, but there’s plenty of her work out there if you google her name.

In short: girls rock. Don’t fuck with them.

Right. November arrived on a wet windy Sunday. Luckily most of the Halloween vomit seems to have been washed away. November means novel writing for some of you, but I’ll be playing the video version again this year. 7pm and I’m in the middle of a Firefly marathon, but I’ll see if I can get something up by midnight.

Looks like last year I only managed a week’s worth of video. So that’s the target to beat. I’m also involved in a couple of side projects, but we’ll get to those when they pop up. I’m a big fan of Vimeo still, but I’m a bigger fan of the iPhone so that means I’ll be using YouTube more than normal.

Sorry about that.

There’s a word to conjure with.

The first thing that springs to mind is the ankh worn by Jessica in Logan’s Run. Perhaps the Iron Maiden song* playing in the background as Francis bears down on her and the reformed Sandman. I was always a sucker for sci fi and heavy metal.

I’m thinking about the word because my friend Alex posed a question:

Where do you find sanctuary?

It’s an interesting one. First I had to think about what it is that I’m trying to escape from when I look for the damn thing. The old chestnut it’s the journey that’s important and not the destination falls onto the page and I can’t argue with it. Partly because it looks so fragile it may break in two and I kinda like having it around. The scariest word I can think of, the one I keep in the closet next to the little dead Japanese kid who mews like a cat, is contentment.

I like the word sanctuary because it feels transient. It’s a rest stop along the way because the thing baring down on you is always only a few steps behind, but you can be smarter than the evil bastard as long as you don’t panic and give up. Throw a priest at it. Keep a nun to hand. The alternative is to be content. To give up. ‘This is it’, you’ll say. ‘I’m happy with my lot’, you’ll smile.

Fuck that.

Right now I’m very happy, but I’m far from content. Happy malcontents make for the best commentators. Its the truly miserable cunts you have to stamp on hard.

I’m in my office at home listening to Judas Priest. It’s not turned to 11, but part of what makes this space a sanctuary is the ability to turn everything up to 11. Try and drag me back to a regular office environment now and I’ll be Damien Thorn, aged 4, in The Omen contemplating a church service**.

Kids.

Within a week of moving here I did a not very grown up thing. I grabbed some left over black paint and scrawled a message on the office door:

It’s a reference from The Walking Dead, but it does its job for the most part***. It lets people know to keep the fuck out, but it also symbolises that I can do what I like.

And that’s the sanctuary that being a writer gives me. I never really enjoyed the conventional gigs I had. Even the first few years I was actually making a living from writing and doing well as a freelancer I found constraining. It’s the last year or so when I finally got to write exactly what I wanted to that felt like a real breakthrough.

This morning for example I got to fuck up a space shuttle.

But there’s always something just out of reach that looks perfect and indestructible and the challenge is to 1. get there 2. fuck it up and 3. move on.

So Alex, the short answer to is that I find sanctuary not in a specific place (as those places by their very nature crumble away) but in a specific mind set. The consciousness that probably began to establish itself when I was a kid and my bedroom really was a sanctuary. The drabness I saw every day out of that window is the thing I’m running from.

It’s Francis screaming “Run, runner!”

I always found that to be damn good advice.

…………..

*I love that Derek Riggs had to write to the Conservative Party for a photo of Thatcher to draw the Sanctuary single’s cover.

**That kid got the part because he kicked Richard Donner in the balls. Fucking heroic.

***It doesn’t go down too well when we have lots of people stay over and the office becomes a bedroom.

Aside from the ones in this post I think this is almost all the Slingers pics that have surfaced so far. Just rounding ‘em up to be tidy before I dig through to find a few more…

Sean Pertwee and Dalip Tahil as Colonel Thomas Hall and The Mark

Margo Stilley as Jeannie

Adrian Bower as DM with director Steve Barron

First day of shooting

Jeannie ready to pilot the ship

GUN in the safe hands of Tom Mison as Frank

DM and Frank

Haruka Abe as Marti

Short hop to Ireland to talk to one of the guys behind The Tudors.

Seems the little buzz we created at Cannes and LA has spread to Dublin. Slingers, although made for American TV initially, will be a Canadian/Irish co-production so this is really good news that we get to go out there early and learn a few things.

A lot of things probably.

Pretty pictures and more news when I get back. In the meantime, go watch Star Trek.

I am not a journalist.

I’m just someone who’s been blogging for a while, writing for a little longer and spots the important stuff when it comes along. In many ways I’m the same person I was when I started messing around on the Internet quite a few years ago and yet now I’m approached on a regular basis to do some weird and wonderful things. I haven’t changed the signal that I’m broadcasting all that much, but social media has certainly amplified it.

On Friday afternoon after a very successful social media cafe at its new home in the ICA I received a phone call from the Thomson Reuters news agency. I was asked if I wanted to come into their offices on Monday morning for a NewsMaker event with Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister.

Sure, I said.

And here I am now. In the same room as one of the most important people on the planet and simply because I tend to use a series of online tools and platforms that anyone reading this also has access to.

If you go to http://ourmaninside.com/ you’ll see that Christian Payne is with me. He’s one of the very best social media practitioners that I know. Yesterday as we spent the day here at Reuters working out exactly what this meant and what we could achieve, we were asked by a series of people what exactly it is that we do.

It’s a very good question.

Today we help to demonstrate how forward thinking and innovative a huge organisation like Thomson Reuters can be. I’m as out of place here as I was in Cannes when a similar set of people wanted to try something new and put me in the same room as Stephen Spielberg and Harrison Ford among others. That was a spectacular success not because of the names involved or the fact that I have a crazy job, but simply because we removed some barriers and allowed people sat at home to join in what would have otherwise been behind closed doors.

Today we’re taking a similarly high profile event that is already being broadcast worldwide (you can find a feed on the Thomson Reuters site as well as Christian’s blog) and seeing what we can add to the mix. With Gordon Brown due to start talking on the present economic crisis what can two beardy blokes with a few laptops and small cameras possible hope to add?

Well nothing directly on what is about to be said. I have as much interest in current politics as I did in marketing movies. I’m here with Christian to start conversations around the NewsMaker event that are currently not part of Reuter’s remit. I sincerely hope that following today the idea of getting these events discussed on social media platforms such as Twitter, Seesmic and Phreadz becomes a natural part of the news media’s roadmap.

Broadcasting on such a scale is brilliant. Listening to the conversations those broadcasts generate is even better.

And a happy side product is that we legitimise a little more the work we do (and by we I mean not just Christian and I, but all social media users) and the platforms we live and play on.

And hey look – I just used a free iPhone app to break a huge event. Don’t you just love living in the future?

Talk to Christian and I on Twitter right now and we’ll keep the conversation moving along.

Posted with LifeCast