Monthly Archives: December 2009

On Sunday night I went to bed with my phone on and next to my pillow. I was fully expecting a midnight text to tell me that our wonderful fighter Jess had finally lost her battle after dragging herself through one last Christmas.

In the middle of the night – just after midnight, in fact – the phone did indeed buzz. I fumbled around, picked it up and read the message.

“Jess is having her transplant NOW”

I came on here this morning to leave a message about everything that’s happened with Jess in the last few days, but in fact my friend Sarah has beaten me to it and written such a concise and accurate blog detailing the events, emotions and thanks that we have all felt over the last few days that instead of trying to rehash it badly, I’m just going to send you over there to read about it. It’s also worth taking a look at the previous post as well, detailing as it does a family’s first Christmas together thanks to the wonder of organ donation.

Spare a thought as you read this for the family who have suffered the worst of Christmases and keep Jess in your thoughts and prayers. Although she’s finally been given her gift, she’s got a long road ahead of her and there are no guarantees. But one thing we all know is that she wouldn’t be with us now were it not for her call finally coming after more than four years of waiting.

I’ve been struck again by one of my intermittent bouts of insomnia and have – as usual on nights like this – found myself sitting and contemplating all around me.

In particular, I’ve been reading back over this blog entry from the summer and going back through the last few months on my Facebook. I wanted to break into the “real world” and do something that felt like a tribute to my donor. I know now that the decision to go to Liverpool was made in haste and a fog of ambition and clouded judgement.

I can’t regret that decision, though, as it’s left me in a place now that’s so much happier than I was before I left. Being away has made me realise what it is I want to do, but more than that it’s shown me that I have the knowledge, drive and courage to pursue it.

I’m immensely lucky to be surrounded my my wonderful family, my always-supportive friends and, of course, my wonderful K. Since getting back from Liverpool I’ve been happier in my life, my house and my skin that I can remember for a long time.

At the same time, thinking about the future has made me think about all those around the world less lucky than me. I lost my friend Jo just a few short weeks ago and said my final goodbyes last week and knowing that her family face Christmas without her is heart-wrenching. Added to which I’ve got one friend in hospital over Christmas, another friend’s baby brother in intensive care and two more friends facing the very real possibility that this will be their last Christmas if their transplant doesn’t come in time.

This time last year, my brother was fighting in Afghanistan in one of the longest and most protracted operations of our combat there. On Christmas Eve, in an experience I’ve never had before, I was overcome by emotion during the midnight service thinking about him and the dangers he was facing. Without realising, and something I can only attribute to the kind of sibling bond I’ve always derided, I woke on Christmas morning to a phone call from my parents to say that he’d lost one of his closest friends right by his side that night.

In truth, despite our hardships, my family is undoubtedly one of the luckiest and most blessed in the world. I’ve fought and won battles within my own body and been lucky enough to be given a second chance at life. My mum has battled her own illnesses and come through with flying colours and my bro has fought and survived one of what is turning out to be the bloodiest wars in decades for the British Armed Forces.

I’ve been blessed by so much happiness in my life and as Christmas approaches with people living in fear, in hope and in grief, I realise more than ever that now I know where I’m going, it’s time to put the pedal to the metal and get my arse there.

I can’t wait to get started. Here’s hoping that the New Year brings all of us the things we want most in life and, should it fail to and instead present us with more, deeper challenges, may we all have the strength to fight, battle and rail against them and emerge victorious this time next year.

As a wise man once prayed: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Merry Christmas to you all, and a Happy, Healthy, New Year.

This may well be ultimately premature as I defy anyone to go and see this film and come away with their head clear and their mind made up. I currently have two major thoughts banging around my head. Before I explain myself, though, a word of advice. If you are remotely interested in film at all – not this film, just film in general – you HAVE to see this film on a big screen. It simply will not have the same impact on your telly or – God forbid – downloaded to your computer. This is justification for shelling out your hard-earned on a trip to the flicks.

ONE
Amazing. Stunning. Awesome. Incomprehensibly beautiful. Art on an IMAX scale. THe most utterly visually amazing film you will have ever seen, guaranteed, bar none and no exceptions. When they say this film is a game-changer for the 3D world, a concept I didn’t really understand beforehand, “they” are absolutely right.

I’ve never seen photo-realism to this extent. I’ve never so greatly empathised with, nor felt an emotional connection with, any animated characters like this. I’ve never seen near-lifelike creations communicate with such raw emotion and depth.

There has never been a film with digital environments this flawless, with a fantastic world created in such a way that makes you wonder where on Earth it could be. But unlike Middle Earth, you can’t just pop to New Zealand and find the back drops – this is pure artistry from the best in the business. ILM and Weta, two of the CGI and physical effects supremos in the business, have created undoubtedly their best work from first frame to last in this film.

TWO
Style over substance. It pains me to say it, but this is the genuine article. A world so rich and nuanced, a planet so beautifully rendered, a people so carefully crafted and a script so atrociously hackneyed it makes you groan.

However, there is an argument to say that the last thing you want with a movie on this kind of grand scale is a complicated plot which bogs the whole thing down. I would, however, have liked some characters who weren’t straight out of “How To Write A Blockbuster Movie 101”. Giovanni Ribisi is a great, and hugely underrated, actor. But in this he’s given nothing but “conflicted corporate fat cat” to play with and it appears is boredom is only assuaged by marvelling at the brilliance of the effects which weren’t even there when he shot. As if he knew what’s out the window behind him was going to be more interesting than the stuff happening in front of it.

More than this, though, what disappointed me was James Cameron’s shoe-horning of a ridiculous, over-used and way-too-heavy Afghan metaphor into the whole thing. If he was any more overt about the message he was trying to get across, he’d have needed a banner with vast, IMAX-screen, 3D words all over it proclaiming “THIS IS ABOUT NOW, AFGHANISTAN AND WHAT WE’RE DOING TO OUR PLANET AND THEIR LIVES”. And disappoints me is that I know he’s a better filmmaker – and a better writer – than that. Hell, the rest of the film proves that, if nothing else.

I can’t let it lie on a down-note, though. This is undoubtedly the most remarkable film that has ever been made. It contains images, creatures, people and effects that you will never, ever have seen anywhere else. It has a level of beauty in both craftsmanship and sheer visual brilliance that has never been seen and I’d venture to so won’t be again for a good long while.

This is a truly ground-breaking movie of epic proportions and will be a firm favourite of many people for many, many decades to come. It will, no doubt, be a favourite of mine, to. Because despite my misgivings, it’s one of the greatest filmic experiences anyone can ever have.

Once again, I reiterate from the start: do not wait for this movie to come to you: GO AND SEE IT IN THE CINEMA because you simply will not appreciate what this film is until you see it 20 feet high with your sexy 3D specs on. Enjoy. And let me know what you think.

I’ve been reading a friend’s blog this morning after another friend pointed it out to me. It’s a very interesting take on a couple of articles from the Sunday papers. Read it all here.

The pertinent part of the article for me was this paragraph:

“I use this medium to keep writing and putting my ideas out there, but could it also be a sort of safe haven of vanity, mainly accessed by friends and family, hardly ever questioned or criticized? There’s certainly at least a grain of truth in that.”

It made me reflect on what this blog is all about and why I’m still writing it. I don’t think it’s too strong to say that blogs are almost universally vanity exercises to some extent. While some bloggers are clearly onlt writing to massage their own egos and lead people to compliment them in various nice ways, all bloggers to a greater or lesser extent write because they want people to read it and read about them and their opinions.

When I first started writing SmileThroughIt back in 2006, the blog was intended for me to keep an online diary of the ups and downs [hopefuly] leading up to transplant. I wasn’t writing out of vanity – indeed some of the things I wrote about I didn’t particularly want to tell people – but rather out of the hope that someday someone reading the blog could gain some strength from knowing that someone else had been there before, much in the same way as Emily and I helped each other through experiences we shared on our road and the way Emily guided me through the frightening first weeks post-transplant when the world had changed instantly.

Even that, though, has an element of ego in it. I wanted people to read it and feel affected by it. Ostensibly I wanted to make a difference to someone else’s life, but how vast an ego did I have to think that words on a (virtual) page could really impact and comfort someone to that extent?

More recently, I’ve been blogging less and less as the minutiae of my day-to-day life is now not all that different from other people’s. I contemplated stopping the blog, but some of my readers protested and I kept going, but even then I’ve not blogged in the same open and honest way as I had previously.

Take Liverpool for example. If you read the posts on this blog from September, October and November you would have no inclination at all of the struggle I was having at the time trying to keep myself happy and weighing up the option of whether to return home or not. The ego in me didn’t want people to know I was struggling – I didn’t want people to think I was living an unhappy life as I felt it to be some kind of betrayal of my donor.

Now, this blog is here to serve almost nothing but my vanity, or so it seems. I can keep my writing honed, I can keep my family and friends abreast of what I’m up to and I can occasionally comment on something I want to comment on. But I’m not entirely sure what else it’s for, or whether it’s something I should still be doing.

Any which way you look at it, blogs are vanity. Not always consciously and not always in a negative sense (vanity’s not always a vice), but they are very insular and – as Miss Write points out – they largely go uncriticised.

The next month will be blogging as usual on this site, but in the new year you’ll see a radical overhaul to morph the blog into part of a new project that should be hitting the ‘net in January or February 2010. Keep watching, the ego has landed.