Europe and Home Part 4 – Bexhill and Mom
A relatively short flight on RyanAir brings me to the good old UK. Feeling pretty tired again with minimal sleep (up at 4 for a 6am flight), but all goes well…..well-ish anyway. There is a wait ...
Europe and Home Part 3 – Pisa
Back on the train! It’s a short hop from Florence to Pisa. I asked two Italians before I left ‘what’s the best thing to do in Pisa’ and their answers were exactly the same̷...
Europe and Home Part 2 – Florence
Bundled on to a train with my stuff in the Italian summer heat, and I am on to my next destination, Florence. First, I am impressed by the trains and facilities in general, comfortable, regular, fast,...
Europe and Home – Part 1 – Venice
So. Saturday night. Flying to Europe from Montreal. On the Plane. I get 3…count ’em….3 seats to myself….thanks to these lovely old ladies moving to a different section. (I didn...
I should start here.
It is May. 2017. I am 46. I am 14 days from a return to the UK. I haven’t seen home in a number of years. On this whirlwind trip around the UK I will also see a few friends that I haven’t ...
Validation
I just dipped my toes in to the new season of Black Mirror, the first episode, called ‘Nosedive’ deals with being digitally ‘liked’ to the ‘n’th degree, in fact, y...
Pain is a person.
Let me begin by admitting something. I am a wimp. I don’t think I am being overly unkind to myself, I am just being realistic. I am not a manly man; the kind of arm-amputee-its-just-a-fle...
I am not Deadpool (and so am you)
Featured Image – Chibi Deadpool by Teimari “The forties are the time when you begin to take notice of certain aches and pains. Your body and brain behave in inexplicable ways: Less hair on...
Intimate Distance
This title is something I struggled with for much longer than the inspiration for the blog itself. First…I want to say that anything contained here is from my own skewed, flawed, imperfect persp...
Sky Scared – My first drone flight.
New experiences. Ooooh. So, my stabilizer friend, Sunny, was kind enough to pull a few strings on the other side of the world and get me a drone at cost price. It all happened in a rush. We were talki...
On Failure..
When I go and see a movie, I will always have an opinion about it, but good or bad, I will always stay to watch the film. My general outlook is that you can learn as much from a bad movie as you can f...
Where we go, where we’ve been.
There is a memory I replayed this morning, a clear moment in time. A humid city square next to an ancient wall, stormclouds gathering, between showers, the concrete slick and shiny. I was walking alon...
Haiti – Day Six – The Bittersweet
The sun rises on a final day in another world. The sound of church bells becomes a part of the morning routine now. Not to say that in six days everything becomes routine, because I just have to glanc...
Haiti – Day Five – Crossing Over
Today was an early start….wasn’t every morning? We were up before sunrise again with the over enthusiastic church bells (did I mention they are recorded, not live? I felt sightly cheated a...
Haiti – Day Four – Contrasts
After the more emotionally turbulent day previously, we were up again at the crack of dawn…quite literally…I was shuffling around before sunrise, at 5.30, only to find that there was no el...
Haiti – Day Three – Pride and Prejudice
A day of thoughts for me. The timetable was relatively simple, Church in the morning, then a free day, a trip to the beach. I am staying on a church compound, a gated community, containing a couple of...
Haiti – Day Two – Church and State
Saturday morning comes early. Really, really early. As is life, it seems around here. Awake with the heat of the sun means awake at around 6-6.30, maybe earlier, evening sleep comes around 9pm. I had ...
Day One – Welcome to Cap-Haïtien
2.27 am – Saturday, January 17th. Cap-Haïtien, Haiti. 93 percent humidity, around 21 degrees. I don’t think I have ever flown for so short a distance, and yet come to a place so far away. I set o...
Closer and Further Away
On the first day of a new year I find myself watching a movie from a dead director. It began as a play, in 1999, one of the stage performers being Maggie Gylenhaal, playing Alice. The same playwright...
Remembering
The picture shows a boy lying on a yellow foam matress in the back garden, basking in the sunlight. When people ask me what my first memory is, I detail this moment. The sun is blinding, I see the lig...
Words: Worth
Today’s’ episode is bought to you by the letter…well…all of them. “another thing, baldrick, belly, bird’s nest, blackness, box unseen, breach, case, charged chambr...
On ego (and the losing of)
What to do? You are a content creator. It’s your job. (You, meaning me, in case you’re confused.) You are paid to create. In the act of creation, you become attached to your creation. How ...
I am a mirror. I want to be a beacon.
Here’s how it goes. I work with clients to realize their own visions. I translate their thoughts and ideas to moving images. I strive to achieve the things they have in their head through the di...
Dating. Missing
I have a profound sense of loss and longing after a blind date. It’s not to do with the blind date partner. I’m not entirely sure what it is. Online dating is a modern cure for the age-old...
I am falling in love with my cellphone
Until a couple of years ago, I was never much of a smartphone guy. My fascination with cellphones, at least aesthetically, had begun sometime ago, back when I lived in China, I found them cheap and us...
Thought Thirty-Five: Walthamstow
My mom was punched in the face. Did that statement make you pause the coffee cup half way to your mouth? Make your eyes flick from the youtube video to this particular collection of pixels? Well, I gu...
The Sky and the Ground are One
A grey day. The kind of day where the concrete has more texture than the skies, but they meet in perfect tone and hue at the horizon. A run. I have yet to run for an extended period of time without br...
Fresh Start
Nothing (much) to see here. Testing out my blog after years of not using, and adding some random smartphone pics from my new phone. More meaningful stuff to come… ...
Two Three Four Seven
I dont consider myself a runner, I never have, a reluctant one at best. In September 2010 I took part in my first formal run, doing the 10k from the 20th Montreal Marathon. It was a fun experience, cr...
Thought Thirty-Four: Bizarre
Well. That was…odd. 40th birthday. Yeah, i’m THAT old. Deal with it. Anyway, I have been messaging back and forward for a week or more to organize a photoshoot with a model who for all intensive p...
Thought Thirty Three: John Lennon’s Bed
Launched a website at midnight on Sunday. Got two hours sleep.  Went to the scene of John Lennon’s famous ‘Bed-In‘ hotel room. Almost exactly 42 years ago that this event happened. Hard to beli...
Thought Twenty Seven: Man Love
I was a young man who once loved a young man. This is my confession. 1989. Portsmouth, UK. I was 18. It was the year of Tiananmen, the Hillsborough Football Tragedy, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. ...
Thought Twenty Six:Cat+High Place=Black Eye
Yes, my kitty cat, my adorable ball of fluffy fun managed to give me a black eye this morning. Let me explain (Mists of recollection descend, screen goes all wibbly wobbly, flashback commences) The we...
Thought Twenty-Five: Unrequited Love, Desire, and other mysteries
Without love our life is … a ship without a rudder … like a body without a soul. ~Sholem Aleichem Every day, we strive to achieve something. Whether the goals be small (catch the right bus, finish...
Thought Twenty-Four: Bad Dreams, Bad Movies
Funny, looking at the title I just wrote. Dreams are really what movies want to become. More Immersion than 3-D smell-o-vision, or any exotic technology yet to come for a long while. I remember the ...
Thought Twenty-Three: Lets Go Running
Strange things happen during a run. There have been books, documentaries, endless reams of documentation about running, the art of running, the loneliness of a long distance runner, etc, so I wont a...
Thought Twenty-Two: Bits and Pieces
My mind cant focus on one particular thing, so this is a random mash up of the mush sloshing around in my brain cells right now. First, I should really write more in this blog. I apologize if anyone a...
6 Months In…
Well, here we are. 6 months down, to the day. I was saying I didnt want this to be a fitness blog, so most likely this is my last direct post on the matter, or at least the last post only discussing t...
4 Months In…
Yup. 4 months in, 25 pounds later, same towel, same box sized room, same expressionless face, but thats me. Ok, Im not buff, not chiseled adonis-style body, stomach still painfully noticable, but im...
Documentary Blog – Day 6
The days tick onward….fatigue is setting in a little, not so much that we dont have enough sleep, as Musa says ‘the brain is good, the body is not’ For him the hardest thing is the driving, 4, 5...
Documentary Blog – Day 5
What started out, in theory, to be a relatively light day’s activities turned out actually to be particularly heavy. A large part of it, as is the norm now, was driving, getting lost, finding things...
Documentary Blog – Day 4
Better day, although technical problems that Musa doesnt know about yet, so that will probably bring him down again. Some snags on his camera. We went to a North American Indian reservation (now, I kn...
Documentary Blog – Day 3 – Regina
Difficult day. A little demoralizing. 6 millions things to do, and none of them quite working out. Back to Regina for another days shooting our First Nations Veteran, Howard Anderson. This time we wer...
Documentary Blog – Day 2 – Regina
Yesterday was the first day of filming. 3 hours drive from Saskatoon to Regina, the capital city of the province, to meet our first interviewee, Howard Anderson. He is 86 years old, joined the army, l...
Documentary Blog – Day 1 – Saskatoon
It’s Tuesday morning, and I wake up in Saskatoon, a city of 200,000 people. So, what am I doing here, 2000km west from Montreal, you might ask? Well, this is day one of filming a documentary for my ...
Thought Seventeen: First Love 3
The car slowed and stopped as she slipped past the vantage point I had from the front steps, but I already knew what was coming. I was kind of numb about it, in denial. I knew, but I didnt know, or wa...
Thought Sixteen: First Love 2
So, despite the level of stress, we continued. During that summer, I lived in London with my mom, and Rosalie in Portsmouth with her parents. We traveled to see each other when we could. In spite of...
Thought Fifteen: First Love 1
It is true what the majority of people say, that the first time you fall in love, you fall the hardest. Its the only time in my life I have ever trusted someone unquestioningly, and would gladly give ...
Thought Fourteen: Things I Hate
As Bill Hicks once said ‘dont mind me, Im just filling up my hump of hate’. I hate being misunderstood. Misinterpreted. Misrepresented. Undervalued. Ignored. Mistaken. They may sound like a mini-l...
Thought Thirteen: More Dreams
Shrugged off 6 hrs or so of sleep. Still hanging over me like a constricting shroud. Downing an energy drink to break the funk of tiredness. Im not going to let this blog turn into a dream diary or an...
Intermission
Up until 8am, worked through the night on my own thing. Recorded an accapella version of a new track off Imogen Heap’s new CD. Debating whether to share it with anyone or not. Tried adding a videoâ€...
Thought Twelve: Love
10 Things I love: I love the way my cat sleeps under my arm, next to me when I go to sleep. I Love the ‘a-HA’ moment when Im creating. That flash of inspiration, the breakthrough on something. The...
Thought Eleven: I Remember
You see, its what you forget. What you lose. What slips through your brain full of holes. The little things, the stuff of life, the stuff that makes you smile, makes you cry. The lead character from t...
Thought Ten: Begging
My policy on begging, beggars, etc. Dont give them money. Thats it really. Dont do it. This is a difficult and problematic decision to make, and theres bound to be people out there that disagree with ...
Thought Nine: Dreams
No, I’m not talking about career aspirations, or goals, or wishful thinking, Im talking about the stuff you do when you snore and drool. Yes, I drool in my sleep, I admit it. Nasty habit, but Im not...
Though Eight: Hitchiking Five
The longest trip I attempted, in my younger more optimistic days (not that im THAT old now, it just feels like it) was a trip from London, UK to the South of France to see a friend who was working in ...
Though Seven: Hitchiking Four
Ok then, we’ve pretty much covered this topic, but heres my two most unusual lifts: The first, forgive me, is a story I tell from time to time, so if youve heard it before, well, just skip over it, ...
Thought Six: Hitchiking Three
There are days when it takes forever to go a few miles down the motorway, and there are days when everything just comes together, days when I was actually faster than public transport. I lost count of...
Thought Five: Hitchiking Two
So! If youve followed the steps in the last blog, then youre ready to go, and you stand a good chance getting a lift. Thumb out, smile, clear sign, dont let them get to you… Its a weird kind of feel...
Thought Four: The Magic!
I did my time in higher education (in fact, more than my allotted time, considering I tried, quit, and tried again) at, primarily, Newport College of Art and Design, in Newport, surprisingly enough, i...
Thought Three: Tears
The first film I ever cried to. When I was a teenager, I would suppress the urge to display emotion in soppy films. Actually, its more accurate to say that I wasnt really moved by any of them to any e...
Thought Two: Scorned
I was at school. I want to say, something like 14. Not entirely sure, but somewhere around that. Teenage crushes, finding your feet, defining your personality. Generally school was an unhappy time for...
Thought One: Hitchhiking One
When I was a teenager, fresh out of University, or rather, fresh out of uncompleted University, I wanted to live the student lifestyle, hanging on to what mystique remained of the student life. Eating...