Archives: Support

All this rushing around doesn’t seem to suit me. No sooner had I blogged about all the necessaries for holiday and uni prep than I started feeling a little pesky with a bit of a sore throat. Monday night I woke at 4am with a roaring fever and raging headache splitting my very delicate and uni-bound cranium in two.

After fighting for more sleep, I eventually hauled my butt out of bed at 8am to spend an hour tossing my cookies in the bathroom. When I managed to stop hurling for five minutes I dragged myself to the phone to call the ‘rents and tell them I suspected ‘flu.

Funnily enough, at the time I was more concerned with not passing it on to K as having it 8 days before we’re dye at the airport for Hawaii is bad enough but if it were to gestate a little longer and hit her 5 days before we flew, our holiday could be in very real danger.

Mum and Dad thus rode to my rescue and I’ve been holed up in quarantine at Chez Parental for the last 3 days, with regular GP visits and Harefield consultations. Tuesday was the most concerning day as I kept being sick, a very bad thing when my new lungs are dependent on oral immunosuppressants to keep working properly.

One very sore injection in my left butt cheek later (still hurts, by the way) and the vomiting, though not the nausea, stopped and from there on in I’ve been improving all week.

Now all but mended, I’ll be heading home tomorrow to finish off my uni and holiday packing which I’ve so far abandoned K to. My lung function is looking good, so despite the slight cough I’ve got I’m confident there’s nothing serious going on.

It’s been a pretty rubbish week, bur with so much coming up in the next few weeks I’m kind of glad it happened now and hasn’t – touch wood – spoiled either the holiday or my first weeks at uni.

Lots to do and little time, but still enough to reflect on the marvel that it post-transplant recovery. Had I fallen I’ll a week before flying abroad pre-transplant there’s no way I’d have been fit to leave the country. Thank heavens for the gift of life – a phrase that gains more meaning and resonance each and every day.

Just North of London today I met with our military adviser about the impending shoot. They’re 100% behind us and are providing all manner of costume, equipment and research material, not to mention (fingers crossed) our main location, which is both awesomely unbelievable and totally unprecedented for a short film.

We’re waiting on one final go/no go from their ranges to see if we can shoot on the dates we want to, which should come through to us on Monday. All being well it’ll then be all systems GO! for an amazing, life-changing movie for everyone involved.

And don’t forget, YOU can be involved, too! All you have to do is click the link and you can become a Producer on Remembrance by helping us hit our budget target in time for the shoot. Every penny counts, so even if you can’t meet the pre-set amounts, hit the “donate” button and chip in what you can. And if you happen to be flush right now, there’s nothing to stop larger donations, either. And you get to see your name in the credits, too – and you get a free copy of the film when it’s all done.

This is all ramping up to be quite exciting just now and the pedal is about to hit the metal – come along for the ride!

I know you’re not supposed to hibernate in the summer, but my excuse is that it’s been rainy and horrible once we had a short spell of loveliness. Still, apologies for the silence last week – I had a few issues I needed to sort out before I could devote myself to getting on with Remembrance and pushing forward.

I’m going to be continuing the break-down of the screenplay and the budgeting this week, and will shortly be on the lookout for the initial members of my crew, more on which later in the week.

For now, I’ve just sent off a couple of proposals to people who may be interested in getting involved in one way or another, so we’ll wait to see what comes of those.

No more hibernation, I promise.

As I said on Wednesday, we’re going to need your help to make this film and achieve what we want to achieve. That means cold, hard cash – £25,000 of it in fact.

It’s a huge amount, but it’s worth it. To be considered for Oscars and the like, shooting on film is really the best way to go – it’s not dead and it never will be. More than that, though, as a calling card movie for both myself and the people who end up coming on board to help, it’s important to show the world that we can handle the big boys’ toys.

More than money, as I said before, is support – and as I know now, support comes in many fashions. I will be asking everyone who works on this film to give their time for free. That includes the military adviser who helped me write the screenplay and their commitment to assisting us throughout production.

So far they have been absolutely brilliant. Not only were they instrumental in the creation of the script, but they have also offered us the use of a fantastic location to shoot the military battle scenes in as well as full technical support and advice throughout preproduction and production.

That should hopefully tell anyone umm-ing and ahh-ing over this project something significant – these guys like it. A lot.

With military backing and the financial support of not only you guys but also some bigger sponsors I’m hoping to pull in, we can truly make this a film to knock people’s socks off.

There’ll be more on how you can help in non-financial ways here next week, but until then have a root around the sofa and see what you come up with. You can find out all about your options and rewards for chipping in here.

After all the to-ing and fro-ing, the waiting, the build-up, the Big Secret Project is finally here.

Oscar

BAFTA

As many of you will know, a good friend of mine set out to make a short film when I was waiting for my transplant. Gone Fishing eventually reached the final 7 in the shortlist for the Oscars, some going for a little film made with the help of friends, colleagues and people he didn’t even know at the start of the project. Shot on 35mm film and finished to the highest of professional standards, Chris’ film has won far too many international festivals for me to count. If you visit his blog, you’ll be able to find out all about it and the festivals.

By far the biggest thing to come out of Gone Fishing for Chris, though, is the launch-pad it has given him into the film industry. From taking meetings in LA to signing with an agency and manager, Chris is living the life he (and I) has always dreamed of.

When I sat at home an mulled over my options for how to get where I want to go when I don’t know how long I have to achieve my goals, Gone Fishing and Chris’ experience thrust themselves into my consciousness. I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker, I’ve always wanted to make films. It’s that simple. So why sit around thinking about it when you can actually go out and do it?

And given the blessing I’ve been given – the most wonderful gift any person or family can give to anyone else – it seems even more important to push myself to achieve the very best that I can. No middle ground, no soft-peddalling. If I’m going to do this, I’m reaching as high as I can. As a wise man once said, “Reach for the stars and you may just reach the ceiling, reach for the ceiling and you will barely get off the ground.”

Every journey, as they say, starts with a single step. And this is it, “Remembrance”.

Remembrance is a 15 minute short film about war, family and memory through the eyes of three generations of a single British family. It’s chock full of action, carefully-crafted dialogue and packs a real emotional punch. It’s designed to showcase all of the things I can do as a director and writer, working with big names (if things go to plan), working with children and young actors, directing action scenes and working with stuntmen and stunt arrangers as well as working on a smaller scale with intimate dialogue scenes.

As I said when I first sat down to write about it: this one’s good. It’s really good. And I believe it can go all the way. I intend to fully document the process on here for everyone to read and for filmmakers to learn from and I will shortly be enlisting you all for your help in creating this piece of historic cinema. It may not rock the entire world of film, but it will turn my world upside down and become a launching point not just for my career, but hopefully for everyone involved.

Keep checking back for progress reports and on Friday I’ll tell you all how you can help.

I spent the weekend with Live Life Then Give Life Advocate Holly Shaw (also star of Channel 4’s Battlefront programme
last Thursday) and Vice-Chair Emily Thackray in Warrington. We were there to shoot an interview with Holly and also to cover the Team Ethan participation in the BUPA Great Manchester 10k on Sunday morning.

The family of Baby Ethan, who sadly lost his fight just a few weeks post-transplant earlier this month, are truly amazing people. Despite burying his son just last week, dad Stu lead the team around the centre of Manchester, registering a time of 65 minutes for the 6-mile-plus run.

Even more inspirational was the enormous turn out of family and friends at their LLTGL fundraiser in the evening to bring the events of the day and the recent weeks to an emotional but uplifting close.

In the end they raised a phenomenal £5,900 for LLTGL between the online fundraising on their justgiving page and including over £3000 raised on the night in the room. We were all humbled and privileged to be there and experience such an amazing display of mutual support.

The video from the weekend will be up on the LLTGL website this week and if you want to donate to Team Ethan, you can do so here.

As we move through our lives things naturally evolve. Whether it be learning how to walk, talk, communicate and mis-communicate or the effects the passage of time has on friendships, relationships and our outlook on life.

You will all know only too well how important my outlook on life has been to me, hence the naming of this blog originally as “Smile Through It” – a reminder to myself during my wait for a transplant that life had more to offer than the misery I was experiencing day-in, day-out back in the bad old days.

Today I’m no less in need of such a reminder as I was then, although my problems are less weighty than they once were.

However, the time has come when Smile Through It has served it’s purpose – chronicling my daily life in the build-up to and recovery from my transplant, letting people know how I was doing and feeling and along the way helping to inspire a few people to keep on pushing.

If you read this regularly – and let’s face it, you wouldn’t be here reading this now if you didn’t – then you’ll be only too aware of the recent lack of updates. More than anything, I just don’t feel that my life is that interesting to anyone any more. Don’t get me wrong, I love my life, but right now I have so little time to update and when I do it’s always with the kind of mundanity that I spend too much of my life berating other blogs and bloggers for. Actually, that’s a lie – I don’t even bother with many other people’s blogs any more as I don’t have time to wade through them all. I have my select band of people I follow, but I prefer my news in person.

So, the evolution of this blog commences. Over the next few days you will notice some changes on here as I adapt the site to fit with my current plans. This afternoon I have taken what will doubtless turn out to be a life-changing decision on a new project and I’m about to leap into it full-force. Part of this process will be to introduce new readers here, but that means things will change. The blog will be renamed, rebranded and re-engineered and you’ll arrive at this address a little confused the first couple of times I suspect.

Rest assured, however, that I’m going to need all you loyal readers more than ever in the coming weeks and months as this will be the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken. I remember how you all kept me going in the weeks after the op, so I’m hoping you’ve still got that motivational spirit within you to help push me forward when the going gets tough.

Smile Through It will be preserved, with all my previous entries staying up, but for now, in the words of a wise man and friend of mine, it’s “Onwards and Upwards!”

So this week (well, since Wednesday) has been spent in Plymouth, home of 42 Commando Royal Marines, for their homecoming celebrations after their 7-month tour of Afghanistan.

Festivities started with a parade through the centre of Plymouth on Thursday morning. The Marines had hoped that the crowds would be big enough to ensure a solid single-file line of supporters along the route. They were wrong. Very, very wrong. There was a solid line of crowd around the whole route, but it was 3-4 people deep everywhere and at points that rose to 7 or 8 people deep. The reception was fantastic and the Marines were clearly all stuggling with a mixture of emotions ranging from proud to humbled, relieved to saddened.

Nothing like a parade of all the men in the Commando serves to highlight the loss of the 3 men who never returned. As the Commando filed passed the families of the fallen men – Marine Georgie Sparks, Marine Tony Evans and Lance Corporal Ben Whatley – on the dais, they saluted their memory. Everyone in the crowd, as jublilant as we all were, spared a though and shed a tear for the families who didn’t get to see their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers marching past with their mates.

After the parade the family all took a wander with Bro up on the Hoe, before grabbing a cracking lunch on Princess Street, after which he left us to return to Bickleigh for the tree planting ceremony for Georgie, Tony and Ben. Doubtless an emotional occasion, it does help to provide all sides with closure on the events of the last 7 months.

That evening we headed out to the Tanner Brother’s Barbican Kitchen for a meal which blew us all away. After dinner we headed out for a nightcap before calling it quits pathetically early for a party-week in Marine-ville.

Friday began with the worst hotel breakfast in the world – disappointing as the hotel at been pretty good up to that point – followed by a parade and medal ceremony back at the Bickleigh barracks, which we managed to see but sadly not hear since either the sound-system went wrong on our side of the field or else the wind simply carried the noise off.

Then we grabbed a couple of cheeky drinks before heading into the middle or Dartmoor to the Warren Pub/Inn/Freehouse where I had my first rabbit pie for absolutely ages. Apparently renowned for their pies I was soon jealously coveting Bro’s steak and ale pie after having a sneeky dunk of a chip in the gravy. Heaven. If you can find it out on the Moors – nestled at the side of the road just beyond Princetown – you’ll have a gem of an experience and a cracking meal.

After heading back to Bickers and then into the country for a bit of a walk – more sheltered than the Moors but with no less phenomenal a back-drop – we shot back to the hotel for a little R&R before another night out. This time starting at Artillery Tower restaurant, a quaint and friendly little eatery crammed full of character and quirks, we then headed back to meet Dazz at the hotel after his trek down from Leeds to spend some time with his cousin – also a 42 man – for a drink.

The hotel bar was populated by a number of…inebriated people who were all, let’s say, of a certain age. A large contingent of them were present to commemorate the HMS Gloucester’s – The Fighting “G” – stirling work during the German invasion of Crete before it’s eventual sinking in 1941. As soon as they realised/heard/overheard that Bro was a Marine, the place exploded into a riot of congratulations, handshakes, backslaps and war-stories. From a bunch of people who’d never actually been to war. Go figure.

Once we’d extracted ourselves from the bar, we headed into town and hit the nightlife hard. I eventually stopped drinking around midnight, knowing that making myself ill is a big no-no post-tx, but stayed out with Bro and Dazz watching the latter trying to keep pace with a man he should never be able to keep pace with. Ouch.

This morning, once we’d risen from our stupor, we headed out to the Dartmoor Diner outside Bickleigh for a bit of brekkie before hitting the shops on the Barbican from some bits and pieces, then heading off on a leisurely drive home.

It was a great “weekend”, spending time with my Bro and the family all together, eating and drinking far too much, but enjoying every minute of it. As you get older you realise how rare these occasions become when you can all spend time together without someone having to dash off somewhere and it was made all the more special by the true purpose of the occasion to congratulate 42 Commando Royal Marines on everything they’ve done for our country doing a sometimes thankless job. And, of course, paying our respects and tipping our hat to the three men for whose families there was no such celebration this weekend.

God bless you all, Georgie, Tony and Ben – let your deaths not be in vain.

I will update the rest of the blog at some point in the near future, but today has been too good to pass up the chance of blogging about it immediately.

As I’ve rather cryptically mentioned over the last couple of weeks I started writing a project that I’m really keen on. Many of you will now know the name of Chris Jones, a friend of mine who set out in 2007 to make an Oscar-winning short film. Many scoffed, but all were eating humble pie when he was short-listed down to the final 7. Now, that short (Gone Fishing, buy it here, it’s awesome) has landed Chris with all sorts of meetings and potential jobs as well as a top-flight manager Stateside.

Never one to re-invent the wheel when others have ploughed the furrow previously (nor, clearly, afraid to mix a metaphor), I thought I’d see if I could write something that might hit the same kind of notes and be the same kind of showcase as Gone Fishing has been for Chris.

So I started writing one night and came up with a story I liked. I sent it to my brother to look at and he liked it. More than that, he sent me 2 pages of notes to bring it up to scratch and then today we’ve spent the afternoon working through the script and really ironing out the detail of some very heavy military sequences.

What I have now is the first official draft of what I believe could become my calling card to the industry. *EGO ALERT, please look away now* I’ve known for a long time that I have the talent to succeed in this business, but I’ve never quite worked out how to convince other people of what I know I can do myself.*EGO OVER* This is it. This is the script that can change everything for me – I 100% believe that.

More than that, my brother likes it so much he’s putting the wheels into motion to get me the kind of support I could only dream of to help get this made. I can’t go into detail here as it’s in way to early a stage, but mark my words – keep your eyes out for Remembrance. It’s going to rock your socks.

I am now officially in recovery following my first full week’s work for, well, ages.

Although I’m frequently busying myself with many different things, most of the are done from home in the study and involve writing, planning or other such creative-type endeavours. This week has been all about graft. If you count workshopping as graft – it’s not building a house or anything, but it’s chuffing tiring.

Over the course of four days I’ve been working alongside my usual Youth Theatre co-conspirator with a group of 6-11 year-olds to teach them a little about the theatre, some performances skills and putting together a short performance with which to entertain their parents this afternoon at the en of thei week’s work.

I have to confess to having been mildly trepitdatious of the project before it began, having had such a hard 10-week term with this age group in my Tuesday sessions, but the week’s been a dream. The group are all fantastic, all keen and eager and willing to learn and absorb things.

We’ve got through so much stuff in the last four days – more, in fact than we got through in an entire term with their contemporaries up to now. They’ve been brilliant fun and really entertained us while we’ve worked with them. Being able to have a laugh with your groups is so important to creating a good working atmosphere in any theatrical workshop setting, whether it be Youth Theatre, short projects or professional rehearsals.

It’s been pretty tiring and a real test of my stamina, but I’ve impressed myself with my ability to stick with it all day. Most of the week, it’s really hit me on the way home and I’ve been a bit of a vegetable when I’ve got in, but I’ve absolutely loved being able to stay the course all day.

This was driven home to me more than ever at Holly’s Donor Drinks on Tuesday (read more about them here) I was chatting to Emily’s mum and pointing out the fact that I’d just done a full day’s work then steamed home to jump on a crappy train to bring myself down to London to spend all evening at a drinks reception, followed by a late train home that got me in just before 11pm for bed and up for work the next morning. That’s something I’d never have dreamed of being able to do.

It’s strange working with a group of young people and looking at them with their whole lives ahead of them thinking that I’m so amazingly blessed just to be in the same room as them. And all thanks to the generosity of my donor and their family for taking the time to talk about their wishes and sign the Organ Donor Register.