Archives: Day-to-day

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.

Happiness is an often elusive thing. It is at once indefinable and definite – you just know when you’re happy. It’s also vital to life. Or at least to mine.

A long time ago, pre-transplant before I was seriously ill, I promised myself that I would never have “just a job” – that I would always do something that made me happy. It didn’t matter to me if that was street sweeping, rubbish collecting or running the biggest company in the country; if I was happy that’s where I’d want to be.

This has come back to me over the last few weeks and months up in Liverpool. The ultimate truth is that I’m just not happy up here.

The decision to come to university was made in a rush of confused feelings about my past, my present and my future. At the time it seemed like a great option for me to explore what life is like outside the confines I’d previously lived in and that life as a student – something I’d missed out on when I was still in my teens being too ill to go – would suit me and re-energise me.

The theory behind the decision to come to LIPA was sound: I’d always wanted to come and when I saw the place in clearing I leaped at the chance to be a part of an institute I’d always wanted to go to. I didn’t, however, consider well enough the value of the course to the way I see my life panning out.

LIPA is a remarkable place – the people, the building, the students, the tutors, the shows: all outstanding. But it’s not the right place for me to be.

I’ve been unhappy here for nearly as long as I’ve been up here and it’s taken me a long time to reach the decision that I’ve come to. In the end, though, the opportunity to come back and start the rest of my life with my wonderful, devoted and utterly beloved K combined with the chance to pursue a project I’ve wanted to push through for well over 3 years was too good to turn down.

K and I have been through rough times in the last six months or so. We’ve been through rough times in our own, individual lives; we’ve been through tough times in our relationship and we’ve been through hard times in our lives together. But we’ve come out of it stronger and more supportive than we’ve ever been.

When I came back South a few weeks ago, I had a long chat over lunch to two of our closest friends who, when I aired my views about Liverpool, came up with one singular piece of advice: follow your heart and not your head.

I have spent too much time in the last few months thinking through everything. Wondering about what my family would think, what K’s family would think, what my friends would think and – most important of all – what my donor and their family would think. What it comes down to is this:

I want to do something that makes my donor proud to have bestowed this gift on me. And sitting up in Liverpool, miles from the woman and the people that I love and living 3 years of an already-shortened life being unhappy just isn’t right.

So it is with a heavy heart, but high hopes that I take my leave of Liverpool and LIPA later on today. It’s been a great ride: Wind in the Willows was an amazing show to work on and I’ve made some firm friends. But it’s time for me to do what’s right for me, regardless of what anyone may think or feel about it.

Am I sad to be leaving? Yes. Am I disappointed in myself? I am a little. Am I excited about what comes next? You betcha.

After everything that’s happen this week, there has never been a more important time for me to dedicate myself to the life I want. The life that makes me happy.

Nearly five years ago I had a night out in Milton Keynes that broke all the rules of CF – three of us who had become friends on the CF Trust’s messages boards (and another bunch of mates) met up for a party in town.

Toria, a long-held email acquaintance, and Jo, a young, effervescent and far-cooler-than-us teenager, hit the town harder than we probably had for a while and I’m inclined to think harder than we should have, too. Toria came back and crashed at mine, while we all promised this would be the start of many similar nights.

Now, in the space of just over a year, I’ve lost them both after having my life utterly change through my transplant. Neither of them were as lucky as me – both listed, neither got “that call”. I detailed in this post my emotions on Toria’s death, as we’d fallen – stupidly – out of touch over something that was on reflection utterly trivial and should never have come between us.

I was in touch with Jo right up to the end. Her transplant journey, although occurring a couple of years later, mirrored mine almost exactly with treatments, problems, worries and everything else. She was cared for my the same CF team in Oxford and was to be called to the same hospital for transplant.

This morning, however, she lost her fight. Buried deep in the technical rehearsal process of Wind in the Willows at the moment, I didn’t know about this until almost 10pm tonight and it has utterly shattered me.

Over the last few weeks and months, I’ve talked to Jo through all the ups and downs that come with the wait for transplant, but never for once imagined she’d be near the end. I left LIPA this evening and walked home with the night’s light rainfall mixing heavily with my tears as I thought back to that day in the mighty Oceana (pre-smoking ban and all).

Toria’s death impacted on me hard as I felt so removed from it. Jo’s has pole-axed me as I just wasn’t ready for it. Are we ever ready for the death of a beloved friend, or is it just that at some point we’re prepared?

I don’t understand how I can be presented with this chance to live my life how I want to and do all that I can when two of my friends have their chances ripped from them. It doesn’t make sense to me and I guess it never will.

I love you, Jo, you were so much more than just a friend at the end of the phone. I’ll miss you and I’ll think of you every day. The rest of my life is for you, honey – you and all the others who haven’t had the chance that I’ve been given.

Rest easy now, take a deep breath.

Today marks the point 2 years ago when I received the ultimate gift from a wonderful person. It is, therefore, a day to celebrate.

Being currently ensconced up in Liverpool and far away from many of my friends, I’ve developed a slightly novel way of celebrating using the magic of Facebook and Twitter.

I’m asking anyone who wants to join me in celebration to find their own way to mark the occasion, whether it be a party, a trip to the pub or just raising a glass in their living room and to take a picture of themselves doing it and upload it to either the Facebook event page or onto Twitter.

If you’re on Facebook, search for “Oli’s 2nd Second Birthday. Party Where You Are Party” or find my profile and get to it from there. If you’re a Tweeter, simply use the hashtag #oli2nd.

Have a great day today and, if you get chance, raise a glass to me and my donor.

As I wrote this time last year, I hold the 19th of November as a particularly special and reflective day for me.

I received my transplant at 00.15 on the 20th November 2007, from which I can deduce that Monday 19th November 2007 was the day one family lost a very important member.

One family, somewhere in the UK, is today mourning the loss of a beloved child. Although I don’t know anything else about my donor, they may also be mourning a life-partner, a sibling, a parent and, most likely of all, a close and trusted friend.

Today I will be remembering a person whose faith and courage saw them sign the Organ Donor Register and offer me the chance to live again, even after they had died. I will also be saluting the incredible and immense clarity of thinking on behalf of a family going through their worst of experiences in allowing the surgical teams to go ahead and follow their loved one’s wishes.

Without this generosity on the part of people I will never meet, nor likely ever know, I would not be here.

I wouldn’t be here to think of all those friends I’ve lost when their chance didn’t come in time. I wouldn’t be here to support and pray for all those friends who are waiting right now, their lives hanging in the balance waiting for a family to be as courageous as my donor’s family. I wouldn’t be here to realise the things most important to me in life and I wouldn’t be here to effect the changes I know I need to make to live my life to its fullest extent – the only real way I can ever show my appreciation for what has been given to me.

So if you’re watching down on me from above, I want to thank you. I want you to know how much your gift has already given me and I want you to know that I am doing and will continue to do all that I can to make sure that every second you look down on me, you are proud.

I can think of no greater goal in life than the pursuit of the knowledge that, this day and every day, my donor is proud. Proud of me, proud of what I’ve done and proud of what I’m doing.

Thank you will never be enough.

As the years of my wait for a transplant slipped by and my health got progressively worse, I was more and more confined to my flat in MK unable to venture out without massive exertions. Inevitable, I suppose, this led to periods of struggle with my mood and fight to stay positive (of which long-time readers will recall this being a large part).

Another large part of that battle to keep my head above the depressive waters that threatened to flood over me was the DVDs of Eddie Izzard’s previous UK tours, most notably Glorious and Dress To Kill.

Both of these would never fail to make me laugh and would frequently result in intense bouts of coughing which, if nothing else, made my physios happy as it cleared a lot of gunk off my chest.

Last week, when scouting around the ‘net for things to do with K when she came up for her visit this weekend, I discovered that Eddie was playing at Liverpool’s ECHO Arena. Expecting it to be fully sold out, I nonetheless logged on to the ECHO website and to my amazement and joy I bought us two tickets.

After nearly five years since first coming across him and 2 years of a fight for life, following a two-year recovery period with as many lows as there have been highs, I finally got to see the man who helped me through it live and in the flesh.

There’s really no way to describe a comedy gig comfortable in writing, so I won’t try to. All I’ll say is that if you know him, if you like him, you are duty-bound to seek out his nearest date to you and go see him.

The man’s a legend and my ribs still hurt.

Everything I’ve seen about Heath Ledger’s final film has told me two things: 1) It’s Heath Ledger’s final film (he died half-way through production, to be variously replaced throughout the film by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrel and Jude Law) and 2) It’s utterly rubbish.

From watching the film myself today, I’ve discovered three things:

1) It’s almost the ultimate Terry Gilliam movie, combining the tangible, off-kilter world of a only-slightly-stylised reality with the final-given-enough-money beauty of the CGI creating the heavily surrealist world beyond the mirror that take people inside their own minds. Where his previous films have failed for me has been the difficulty in realising this clash of the real and the fantastical, but Parnassus does it almost perfectly.

2) The three actors who came in to finish the film, playing 3 versions of Ledger’s Tony who appear through the mirror did a great job. Admittedly, knowing the story behind the film made me almost predisposed to look on them favourably: all three stepped in as friends of Ledger’s to offer their services, all three fitted the film in around their other filming commitments and all three donated their fees to Ledger’s young daughter. But all three of them also hit just the right balance of the surrealist elements of a shape-shifting lead character by keeping just the right amount of Ledger’s original performance while infusing it with a spirit and attitude of their own. It never feels like 3 people pretending to be Heath Ledger, which would have been dreadful.

3) I really, really, really liked it.

So I may well be the odd one out in all of this, but frankly, who cares? I unashamedly love this movie. I love all that it stands for, I love all that it means, I love all that it’s been through and I love the end product more than any other Gilliam film I’ve seen before.

As a side note, K’s come back up to Liverpool with me today and we saw Parnassus at FACT, an amazing Liverpool cinema and gallery space which impresses me more and more every time I go. Today’s screening was in a small-ish box room with the audience all seated on 2-person sofas; a brand new experience for me, but a great one. There should be a flickhouse like this in every city.

The one upside of Willows going into rehearsals this week of all weeks (LIPA reading week, that is) is that I was still around to witness this year’s first Masterclass with the legendary Jonathan Pryce of Evita, Pirates of the Caribbean and Miss Saigon fame.

Once again revealing quite how aged I am in relation to the rest of the students at LIPA (or at least the majority), I first saw Jonathan Pryce when he played Fagin in Sam Mendes’ revival of Oliver! in the West End way back in 1994 when most of my classmates were learning to walk.

Thanks to the Pirates series, he’s now famous throughout the student body at LIPA and, since he’s literally just up the road (about 500 yards from LIPA) doing The Caretaker at the Everyman at the moment, he stopped in to talk to us all today.

He may have been nervous or just unsure at the start, as he was somewhat bland and struggling to relate to the audience to begin with, but as time went on he warmed up and became more and more ebullient and amusing with all of his anecdotes. Among my favourites:

• He turned down the opportunity of taking over from Michael Crawford in the title role of the original production of Phantom of the Opera
• He gave first jobs to both Julie Walters and Bill Nighy, recalling of Nighy’s audition that he thought we was either an absolute genius or absolute rubbish. He maintains (jokingly) it’s the latter.
• When he and Nighy were reunited on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Nighy performed in a lycra body suit with motion-capture markers all over his body and face. The sight made it impossible to get through an emotional scene without laughing, prompting the writer to approach Pryce and ask if everything was OK with the scene.
• He never actually read the entire script for Pirates and frequently only knew what was going on by asking Jack Davenport while the shots were being set up.
• When performing in the ill-fated National Theatre production of My Fair Lady, he remarked to one audience “This is you first Eliza, but it’s my second today and third in two days. If anyone would like to apply to play Eliza in this production, please contact Stage Door after the show.”

It’s amazing to be studying what I love in a place I can’t get enough of and to have the added bonus of people like this coming in to talk to us. After almost 2 hours at it, I think the entire audience of actors, dancers, technicians and managers left the room utterly inspired and energised.

Who’s next?

I say it begins, but for most of the backstage staff, it already has – weeks and weeks ago. But all too often in theatre the start of a production is marked by the start of the rehearsal process.

Like the dutiful techies we all are, foregoing our reading week to be here for the show, we trudged our way to the 4th floor of the main LIPA building and into the room which will house rehearsals for Wind in the Willows for the next 4 weeks before we hit the Paul McCartney Auditorium for a week of technical and dress rehearsals to realise the show everyone’s had in their heads since the first week of term.

Today was also the first time I’d had to see the model box, the small, scale model of what will eventually be realised on stage. I know this is a big show, but seeing the model box today really rammed home just how HUGE the whole thing is. The monstrous set takes up the entire PMA stage and a little bit more besides and there is an incredible amount of work for us lowly ASMs to do in keeping the show running with all the appropriate scene changes as the show goes on.

It’s both extraordinarily exciting and not a little bit daunting. I’ve never been an ASM before – I’ve stage managed, I’ve production managed, but so much of the success of the performance itself rests on the ASMs getting their cues right. Because an ASM missing a cue in the middle of a show is likely to cause one of the most obvious slip ups in the theatre. It’s possible to miss lighting and sound cues without people really being aware, but if the setting and props aren’t in the right place when they’re needed, the actors can look like a right bunch of muppets.

Am looking forward to it, though. I think it’s going to be a great show and a fun show to work on. So here’s to four weeks of running around Liverpool like a loony getting everything sorted and a final week of running around LIPA like a loony getting everything sorteder.

Deep breath!

Sorry for the delay in posting about the awesome Save Jess-tival on Friday night, but it’s been a hectic and exhausting last few days.

Friday was amazing. A stellar line up including headline turns from Natalie Imbruglia and Ed Byrne as well as the fabulous Yeah Yous and Laughter for Life favourite Glenn Wool who unfortunately suffered from some sound issues meaning his set didn’t go down as well as it might have.

The revelation of the day for me, though, was the two singer/songwriters I’d not heard perform before. Susanna Cork is undoubtedly on the verge of great things – she has an amazing voice that’s beyond anything I expected and is a supreme talent. I can’t wait to pick up her album when it comes out and believe me, I’ll be plugging it like mad on here as soon as it streets.

The other half of the amazement came at first-timer Mr Robin K. Already on his Twitter feed he’s been hailed as the next Tim Minchin and on this performance you can clearly see why. Witty, emotional and often hilarious songs coupled with a little stand up in between made for a truly surprise package. Considering this is his first gig and he’s only been writing since the summer, this guy is undoubtedly going just as far as Susanna, albeit in a slightly different direction. You can check him out here.

The day itself was utterly exhausting. I was up at 8.30am to be at the venue for 10am and I worked through with various members of my team to 1am without a break. The crew who came in with their lighting rig and sound systems were brilliant, working far beyond their working time regs should have allowed them and never complaining or kicking up a fuss, just quietly getting things together to make it all happen.

Most importantly of all, our Jess was there throughout and thoroughly enjoyed it by all accounts, even allowing for the minor hiccup in the cab on the way home.

It was great to be working on something like this again, though, as something along the lines of a production/stage manager. It’s been a lot of work over the last 2 weeks, but really worth it for the buzz of pulling off such a massive gig with such big names.

Now it’s onwards and upwards, although downwards on the stage management ladder to ASM Wind in the Willows, which goes into rehearsals next Monday and promises to be challenging on lots of different levels. Can’t wait.