I got going on Twitter yesterday. I've finally become a bone fide Twitterer. I've had an account for agest but never known what I was supposed to do with it. I mean, do I really want more inane interruptions? Am I not already sufficiently distracted in a typical working day?
It all started to make sense a couple of weeks ago. 4 of my nephews and 6 of their friends cycled from London to the Alps to raise money for two charities; The Shooting Star Hospice for children, and a men’s cancer charity. The boys had been training throughout the year and although only 2 of them had ever cycled more than 100 miles in a day they rose magnificently to the challenge of pedalling 700 miles in a week and raised over £20,000. Quite a brilliant result!
I got involved with the trip as a support vehicle driver. Meeting them in lay-bys every hour or so, topping up water bottles, and handing out tracker bars as the boys paced around and pissed at the roadside. When you’re drinking a litre of water an hour for 10 hours a day there’s a whole lot of pissing to be done!
When I got home I phoned my friend Tim who’s a keen cyclist himself, and told him about the trip. He coolly replied that he’d been following it all on Twitter. The penny dropped. I finally got it.
I now have Twitterfon on my iphone and am following all manner of amusing TV personalities. I almost feel as if I know Wossy (Jonathan Ross), Stephen Fry, they’re so damn prolific!
Every day, pretty much, for the last 18 years I’ve sat myself down and written for 20-40 minutes. Just stuff. Thoughts. Random. Observations. I’ve never known what to do with it all. I’ve got a shed full of boxes full of full notebooks, gradually taking on the musty odour of dampness. Will they ever be useful? Are the seeds of genius contained therein? I doubt it… I’ll probably never read them again, and yet I keep on writing.
Why? I just love writing. That’s it. It’s great to put my thoughts down on paper. I get a buzz out of it. I never read it again. And yet if I don’t write I feel there’s something missing. Weird yet true. So, dear reader, I’m going to experiment with blogging. I’m going to put these thoughts out into the ether, at least they won’t get damp there. Is ether damp?
As a producer/director I’m really in the business of creativity and ideas, and yet I’ve always been shy to share mine. Well, this is it, this is the moment that I’m manning-up. I’m going public. I’m coming out of the closet. Who the hell’s going to read it? I don’t know. What the hell are they going to think of it? I don’t know. But everyone else is doing it so why shouldn’t I?
I do interesting stuff, I meet inspiring people, so why shouldn’t I share that with the world?
Last night I met one of my heroes – Nick Hornby. His new book “Juliet, Naked” came out on Monday and last night he was reading excerpts, answering questions from the audience and signing books.
About 12-15 years ago, when Fever Pitch came out as a film I went to see it randomly one day in Leicester Square. I knew nothing about the film, it just happened to be starting at the time I decided I wanted to see a film, so in I went. I was really taken by it, and in fact it turned out that as I was living in Arsenal at the time I’d seen the lights out of my bedroom window when they lit for the closing crane shot of Colin Firth and his girlfriend walking down Gillespie Road to the tube.
I was so impressed by the film that I wrote to Nick Hornby. Just a standard sort of fan letter. Blow me down with a feather if a couple of weeks later he didn’t send me a postcard thanking me for my letter and telling me what he was up to next with books and films etc. I’ve treasured that postcard and I’ve read everything he’s ever written since, except 31 Songs which I couldn’t really get on with. I think songs are for listening to, not for writing about. But the rest, well I’ve lapped it all up, every word.
Earlier this summer I made a short film called The Gift. It was my application to the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. I co-wrote, produced and directed it. I had to pull in many favours, it cost me money, and it consumed me for a good 3 months. I didn’t even get an interview at the NFTS but I’m very proud of the film anyway.As I designed the cover for it I began to think how great it would be to have a review like “Brilliant writing from an up and coming star” by Nick Hornby, or something similar nestling subtly below the film’s title. If he thought it was good so would other people and then my career would be off like a shot.
I scoured the internet but couldn’t get contact details for him. So anyway, back to last night. After the Q&A the interviewer announced that Nick would be signing books, and he piped up that he was going out for a cigarette first. Instantly a queue formed towards a table where the great man was to sit and sign, every queuer clutching their brand new hardback novel.
As I sat there contemplating joining the queue my intuition told me to go outside and if I was destined to meet him I would. I imagined he might be in a private courtyard puffing on his cigarette, surrounded by bouncers and Penguin literati.
I had a drinks evening to attend with the Directors Guild of Great Britain, so I upped and left. Imagine my surprise when I saw him right there in the hotel foyer. No bouncers and a mere two or three literati chatting gently. I walked purposely towards him. He looked over and I smiled as if I knew him. The truth is that I felt I did! As he left following a cameraman to do a quick TV interview I shook his hand, thanked him for the postcard and asked if I could send him my film. All over in 30 seconds, but the beauty of it is that I got what I wanted. I met my literary hero and he agreed that I could send him my film. Wow!
I spoke to a nice Penguin lady and got her card so I could email the film to Nick via her, then I left the hotel floating on air. I didn’t know how to contain my happiness, what to do, who to tell. I just paced up and down the road feeling great. Then it hit me. This was an ideal Twitter moment!
I reached for my phone and announced to the world, well, to my 15 followers that I’d just met the great man. Who knows if my followers are even following me? But I had to tell someone, and it seemed like the right sort of thing to put on Twitter.
140 characters only gets you so far, so now I’m blogging. Will anyone read it? Will anyone care?
Well, I enjoyed writing it, so once I’ve worked out how to actually post a blog then off it’ll go, into the ether, and will forever be my first blog.
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