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.

So here we are – the brand new TinyButMighty blog. Don’t worry, all you SmileThroughIt acolytes, the whole of the old blog of my wait for transplant and beyond is still here, you just have to peel back through the pages and you’ll find it all saved for posterity.

But as I said in my previous post, things are changing around here.

The first thing, then, is TinyButMighty, my new production company that you can read all about here. Although it’s been set up to produce all of the work I do, the website and the changes to the blog and my Twitter account are all down to one singular project, currently dubbed The Big Secret Project. All will be revealed after the weekend when the final few shuffles have been put into place and I can finally announce the Grand Plan for the next few months and – possibly – years.

For now, I’ll leave you to explore the website and learn about TinyButMighty and what it can do for you and your companies before, during and after the Big Secret Project.

From here on out, dream realisation will be my goal and I intend to achieve it!

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.

Things keep getting better and better at the moment – I love my life!

Today I was back in the director’s chair for the first time in…well…a long time. And I’ve got to tell you – it’s a fantastic feeling.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently wondering if I really am following the path I want to follow – I’ve been out of the loop so long and become so distant from the dreams I used to have that I find myself wondering if I’ve changed since my transplant and if I’m chasing the dreams of the old me.

I can say with absolute certainty today that I am 100% on the road I want to be on. As I stood in the rehearsal room running through the Snippets scene for the MKT writers’ group showcase on Monday night, working, re-working, talking to the actors, polishing and finessing the piece I was in my element. All of the feelings that rumbled away within me about what I like doing, where my strengths lie, how I approach things came flooding back to me in the briefest of two-hour rehearsals.

I want more than ever to follow my dreams and to chase them down until I catch them at a run. I promised myself before my transplant when I was sitting at home on my sofa day-in, day-out that I would never let myself have just “a job” and that I’d always do something I love and am passionate about. I feel more strongly about that now than ever. Watch out world – here I come!

I was up middlingly-early this morning to drop K at the station to go in for an exam – she’s all done with lectures for the year now, just exams and assignments left – then home to go through the minor email backlog that I’ve built up over the last two days.

That cleared, I jump in the car and head to Toddington to the house of one of the writers whose pieces I’m directing for the MKT Snippets showcase. We’d planned a read-through so we can all meet – KH (the writer), myself and the cast – and go through the script to polish it up. I was a little concerned about some of the dialogue but actually most of it read fine and the bits that didn’t KH was really open to changing and adapting into the right language for the characters as the actors felt it.

Lots of valuable work on one script done, I came home to try to collar the cast for the second piece, to discover that one of them had pulled out and the other we STILL hadn’t heard from. The last remaining cast member has been absolutely awesome in trying to find us replacements, but it’s not easy at such short notice. Here’s hoping.

The rest of the afternoon and evening was spending tidying up the application and cracking on with the rewrites. I finished the major load of script work by the early evening, had a break for dinner and chill time, then went back in to redrafting one of my shorts and polishing another pair of scripts.

It was another late night/early morning finish, but I’m really happy with where I’ve got the scripts to. The short – the ambitious project I was talking about having written a couple of weeks ago – will need a further tweak for dialogue and authenticity, but I’m really excited by the whole thing now. I’ve got lost of projects which are really getting my creative juices flowing at the moment and it feels fantastic – I suddenly feel like I know what I’m doing and precisely where I want to go rather than sitting feeling open to all possibilities. I still want to work in multiple mediums, but I know what I want to do within them now, rather than having aspirations all over the place.

Now I just need to apply myself and push forward to get myself where I want to go. To borrow from a friend, “Onwards and upwards!”

It’s interesting how you end up perceiving time when your wake up calls move all over the place. I was up at 7am again today, which feels like an early start. When K is in the middle of a uni semester, though, it’s actually an hour-and-a-quarter’s lie in if we get to wake up at 7am. Strange.

Anyway, it was another early start this morning to get to the Grove for a short follow up to the first aid course in January to learn the specifics of paediatric first aid. We all expected the course to be a full day, but it turned out to be only a half-day, which was a nice surprise, although equally frustrating as I’d just paid £4 to park when I could have spent £1.50.

Still, post-course I headed straight home and settled down to my Arts Bursary application. MK Community Foundation offers an annual grant of £10,000 to an artist to help them develop their practice and create opportunities to earn their income from their art forms. The application calls for examples of your work, so while I had finished DVDs of my film work and some really nice photography to give them, I realised hastily that I needed to do a re-draft of one of my screenplays for my writing submission, as well as a polish on two others.

This afternoon, then, was dedicated to pushing on with the redrafting of the script. It has to be said there weren’t a huge number of wholesale changes to the script, but there was a lot of re-jigging and dialogue revision to be done. I worked on it solidly from 2pm to around 7pm with a couple of breaks, then settled on the sofa with K to chill and watch some TV.

When K called it a night I was back at the computer, getting to around halfway through the screenplay by the time I called it a night around 2am. Late night writing suits me, but it’s a pain in the proverbial if you’ve got things to do the next day. Luckily, I don’t have a heap of stuff on tomorrow, other than forging on through the redraft and application.

Crazy-busy day today. After the late finish last night, I was up at 7am this morning with just about enough wakefulness to throw myself in the shower, down some breakfast and jump in the car to get to the Royal for 8.30.

Once there I ran through the video cues with the DSM and made sure they all worked, inserting a few extra elements as we came across things that didn’t quite follow. Then the cast arrived and we set to work on a full technical run through, where I found myself doing my usual tech work of running around like a madman sorting all the extra little bits and bobs to make things work nicely and seamlessly.

Come 1pm we broke for lunch and I left the Theatre, heading back home with enough time to grab a sarnie before jumping back in the car and heading to the Grove for the first Youth Theatre session of the new term.

With the two Grove workshops dispatched and a couple of minor incidents dealt with, I was back at the wheel and headed North as quickly as legally possible (and possibly a little quicker) to get back to the Royal for the 8pm curtain-up on the first performance of Vikings and Darwin.

It went fantastically well, especially considering I’d not been there for the dress and the immediate audience reaction was brilliant, as was the feedback from the party of suits from the National. They came to see the show a few weeks ago in a scratch performance to judge whether it could go to play the festival at the National (sadly deciding “no” the following week), but commented on just how far the show had come.

I escaped the Royal around 9.30pm and was back home within the hour, with about enough time to chill out with K for a while in front of Hell’s Kitchen, to which she’s become addicted and I’ve found myself being drawn into as well. After that, it was an early(ish) bed for another early start in the morning.

Spent the vast majority of the day/evening today back in the auditorium of the Royal Theatre in Northampton where we were running the technical rehearsal of Vikings and Darwin, the Youth Theatre show for the RNT’s New Connections festival.

I can’t describe how great it felt to be back in the Theatre and working on something.

I had the morning off, which I spent catching up on piles of work which were still demanding my attention, then had a huge drama with the file I was delivering to the Royal. Somehow the PowerPoint presentation that was being used to facilitate the projection had stopped recognising and playing the video. Cue two hours of mad scrambling to-and-fro between computers, re-encoding video to try to get it to be accepted by stupid, stupid, stupid PPT. I profoundly hate PPT. but what can you do? It’s by far the easiest way to control projection when it’s not running as a full movie, but need prodding for each new element.

Crisis averted, I arrived at the Theatre about 4pm and settled in to a seat to watch the lighting plotting session that was in full-flow whilst we waited for the projection screen to arrive and be hung.

As soon as it was up, we got to work making everything fit, then the cast arrived in the early evening and we began running through it, making the necessary adjustments and changes as we were going.

The cast departed around 9.30pm and we carried on plotting and working through the cues until 10.45, at which point I escaped back home, getting back at about 11.30 and taking myself almost directly to bed for a 7am start the next day.