There are a dozen reasons why it’s taken me nearly 20 years to do this, and another dozen to explain why I’m doing it now – but they’re both long stories and this is kind of a long story already.

Its working title is – has always been – Khamsin.

It’s a novel about culture shock – about a strange person, in a strange place, asking for an agenda that no-one has to give.

It’s a novel about the implacable strength of blind faith – about believing you’re right when the rest of the world knows you’re wrong.

It’s a novel about microcosm and memory – about how who you are is made up from everything you’ve been.

More than anything, it’s a novel about passion – about how it can drive you screaming round the edges of insanity… and about what happens when you lose it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s genre fiction and while I harbour boundary-pushing ambitions, I have a long way to go. Again.

The link is here.

If you’d like the explanation, you’ll find it in the footnote.

This has been an advertising post on behalf of Danacea’s Daydreaming. Normal geek service will resume after Salute on Saturday.

 

 

 

 

My blog will now be found...

here.

Over Christmas and New Year, I exchanged my internet access for quality time with family and friends, for eight days of rest and relaxation and a chance to ease down from ‘working mum’.
I was expecting it and prepared for it – and the break was both difficult and welcome.
The change of environment made it vital – meant space to walk and smell the sea, time take my son to the edge of the wild winter water. Danacea was a world away, a Planet away – left in the endless anticipation of the scrolling Twitter screen.
Upon my return to Sutton, my laptop was waiting for me with eager puppy lights, begging me to log on. I succumbed to the Firefox double-click, braved the onslaught of emails, notifications, postings, twitter replies that I hadn’t seen… after the quiet of wind and water, it felt like white noise, but it felt like welcome.
More recently, I’ve been a victim of a Virgin Media power outage – and left spinning for two webless days.
I was neither expecting it nor prepared for it – at home, with my partner away and my list of evening-filling-online-projects abandoned, I was left hopelessly seeking something to do.
‘Something to do’, I say.
I have a job to do, a family to care for, a home to run, friends to see, a fitness schedule to keep… yet how many times do I glance at the clock in the corner of my pc screen and think ‘I need to go to bed’, ‘I need to get moving’, ‘I really need to get off my arse and spend this afternoon turfing three years’ worth of crap out of my son’s bedroom...’?
My partner doesn’t understand my shiny new fascination. He pushes himself away, swearing he’ll be the last person on earth to sell his soul to FaceBook. He throws Bill Hicks quotes at me – I’m sure fellow Marketeers know the ones I mean – and curses all things virtual.
All he sees is how Twitter consumes my time.
Over my two webless days, I finally did those tasks I’ve been putting off. I had energy to burn, idle hands with twitching fingers. I was bereft, but I was busy – my windows have never been so clean.
During that time, I was thinking about the two tines of Twitter – about they affect the lives of its users, their families, friends and businesses.
On the positive side, the sheer and overwhelming strength of the community to pull together in a time of crisis, or to support a friend – the huge force of fellowship that responded to Susan Reynolds and Ashley Spencer has brought forth tears all around the world.
On the positive side, an open arena for the exchange of information, both professional and personal: any member of the community can absorb as much or as little as they choose – from whomever they choose.
On the positive side, an environment where social groups are created. In the middle of my Christmas break, I dropped in to loudmouthman’s ‘social media living room’ to drink whisky and talk tech. I’d met warzabidul briefly, but had a chance to meet jasonjarrett, markharrisonuk and fred2baro – Twitter creates smaller communities within the larger one.
On the positive side, when you’re doing a wee bit too much of the Stay At Home Mum thing, your Twitter friends keep you from climbing the wall.
Fellow twitterers reading this, I know none of this is new.
But, like all things, it need to be consumed in moderation.
Twitter is enormously powerful. The flow of conversation never ends; the ripples of activity as your worldwide friends awaken is perpetual motion in action, endless potential as new days begin. Like all tools, it’s as good or bad as you make it.
There are just times I need to pull my head out of the screen and focus on what’s in front of me – my family, my home.
And there are just times when I dearly wish that the chasm between those two worlds were not so deep.
Over Christmas, my partner strained his knee and was sitting on the couch with a bag of frozen peas pressed to the joint to ease the swelling.
And there was no-one to understand why I chuckled.

Thanks to Steve Brettle, manager of the new Southampton Megastore, for footage of the store banner actually unfurling!



It's a fairly short piece of film, but if you can imagine the whoops and cheering of the store staff as they celebrate the moment of their move from East Street to the enormous new location (it's like the TARDIS, okay, way bigger on the inside!) at Hanover Buildings... well, then it takes on a new magic!

Hark the Herald Angel sings
Advertising wondrous things!
Tom Lehrer.

Every year, the same story. Every year, I’m not going to do it. Every year, I wonder where the time’s gone and the tale unfolds again.
What do I mean?
Christmas shopping.
Call me the last great starry-eyed idealist, but I like actually choosing presents. I enjoy wrapping them, I get excited seeing them piled-bright under my tree, I love the anticipation as they’re opened; I get an enormous amount of joy from surprising people with special, personal gifts.
Okay, so I’m a big kid. I’m guessing you’ve realised that.
Last year, our Christmas shopping consisted of one postie-staggering box. It was quick, it was easy, it kept us well clear of Mall Mania – as an etail marketeer, this is the exactly kind of thing I should celebrate.
Yet, I didn’t enjoy buying the family’s gifts. I didn’t enjoy wrapping them, or the electric expectation of watching people open them. One of the things I love most about Yule was lost in the emptiness of it all.
‘Oh, the DVD I wanted, thanks.’
But what’s the alternative? To find dedicated and personal presents for my family, I have to storm the gates of High Street Hell. The seeking out of gifts has twisted and swelled into something monstrous; wrestling the demonaic frenzy of the West End is even worse than having Father Amazon drop down my chimney with a boxful of expediency.
Seems I’m trying to follow some sweetly glistening star and steer a course between characterless convenience and consumer chaos…
Big kid I may be; something in me still misses the magic.
In a world where you can buy advent calendars in supermarkets in August, it’s hard to keep enchantment in the festive holiday. It’s stressful, it’s expensive, it’s marketed to death – only our Christmas cards give tiny glimpses of that snow-sparkling, childhood ideal…

Then, just as my naïveté is overwhelmed by a great wash of Bah Humbug, I see the twinkling lights of my tree reflected in the shining eyes of my son.
And I remember why I do this.

Okay, excuse the dramatic title: charming though the lovely Mister Gerard Way was, the romance was all about his legions of sobbing followers. But I get ahead of myself…

At Forbidden Planet, I’ve played host to some high profile guests; to Andy Serkis, to Simon Pegg, to Terry Gilliam, to name but a few. I’ve seen queues that stretched from the back door of the store to the far end of the road and beyond; I’ve seen fans come through that door and catch their breath at the sight of their icon.

I’ve never seen anything like the reception that awaited Gerard Way.

My colleague Leesa, who ultimately ran the event, has a great deal of experience with ‘A’-list heart-throb pop stars – we can be thankful for her knowledge and her insistence that the business took the signing seriously. In spite of the huge crowds and high-running emotions, everything ran like clockwork.

She told us what to expect; I understood it academically (I once had the misfortune to be on security detail when Jason Donovan played a small Norwich nightclub in the late 1980s) but it wasn’t ‘til I faced the full frontal that I began to believe.

There were thousands of them.

We had private security, we had police, we had every member of staff that could be spared… what we needed was a truant officer. Five thousand love-struck and starry-eyed teenage girls had bunked off school (some of them had stayed overnight on the street) for the chance to give Gerard their declaration of love.

And they did.

Notes, letters, paintings; in their chilled hands were clutched pieces of their souls. Outside, the crowd was tripping on its own anticipation – they were six deep, seven deep, eight – both sides of the street and pushing forwards to get as close the hallowed halls as they could. As Gerard’s car arrived, they surged and cried and sobbed and their excitement fed upon itself and redoubled, exploded.

Gerard himself, accompanied by his band members and personal security, was quiet, softly spoken, very likeable, remarkably unpretentious. He’d made only two requests – no bags or coats (for security reasons) and a ban on all photography. I found myself shifted sideways from press liaison (a certain large rock publication turned up anyway and I chased them off twice) to security guard – gathering the shaking, crying girls as they left the signing desk, making sure they’d retrieved their belongings and chasing them out into the main body of the store.

How strange, to have queued for all that time for just that brief moment of contact.

They came in utterly wired, shivering with thrill; some of them couldn’t look him in the face until he asked them to smile. Then – whoosh! – it’s all over and they’re breaking down in shuddering sobs as I herd them away.

The strangest thing of all? They weren’t all girls. My Utter covers this, but there were a scattering of thirty- and forty-something women, as completely besotted and overcome as the teenagers around them. That, I have to say, baffled me – it was the most surreal thing about the whole event.

Even after Gerard had gone, after his car had been mobbed on the way out, his fans were still there – pale, black-eyed faces pressed against the glass like something out of a zombie movie. They were chanting, pleading – denial rising and breaking against the front of the store. When the surge calmed and we tentatively reopened, they flooded in to grab every piece of My Chemical Romance merchandise they could find.

In the aftermath, Leesa, Jon and I walked back to the South Bank and Titan House swapping amazements at what we’d seen. Jon, my boss, has teenage daughters and was aghast at the idea of fourteen-year-olds skipping school and camping overnight on the street; I was still reeling over the behaviour of the thirty-something ladies. Leesa was most amused by the Mum who’d turned up with her daughters at lunchtime and been politely turned away – and who had then been found rallying an annoyance of fellow Mums on the ground floor. ‘We’ve come all the way from Croydon!’ she was stating indignantly. ‘Just to be treated like this!” Seems she had even less experience of these things than I did.

Anyway, a conclusion to this is almost impossible – we all know this stuff goes on, but it’s not until you’re right up with your nose in it that you see the love and lust and anguish these girls go through. It’s startling, horrifying – and yet, as I was herding them away from Gerard’s presence, I found myself remembering what it’s like to be fourteen.

Maybe experiences like that one are just a part of contemporary growing up.