How Christmas adverts became awful

Have we had enough of sentiment in the name of commerce? The battle over supermarket adverts has got to the point where it actively bothers me.

This year, the two worst offenders have been the John Lewis advert (following the previous John Lewis adverts in corny sentimentality, this time telling the heartwarming story of a small boy helping a penguin get his fuck on) and the Sainsbury's advert (where we find that the many ten million soldiers who died in World War I didn't die in vain after all, but actually died to give Sainsbury's a quick boost in their December profits).

When did supermarkets go from advertising the things that they sell for Christmas to trying to make sure that they define Christmas? It's clear why they'd want to do it - this ties into big, big bucks. Get people to identify their Christmas shopping with your brand, and you've got a final financial quarter that makes a major difference. It's worth millions and millions.

Looking at the John Lewis adverts with this in mind, you can see how they've taken the elements that have worked best in previous ads, and used them to manipulate you with the accuracy of a surgeon prodding your brain with a scalpel to make your face twitch.

Let's take a quick, year-by-year look at them and see how we've ended up at the point of what I like to call 'this fucking advert'.

Firstly, it shows the range of what they're selling, with a Christmas image being projected using as shadows of the pile of presents - it's all very stark, and Apple-like. The following year, they bring in the first of their cover tunes "With love, from me to you". We also  get the first plushie that they sell - a small mouse. Not to mention the first child. It finishes with a baby, looking at the camera, and showing a present that the child is looking at.

Obviously, the child aspect worked, because the next year, we got a sickening cover of 'Sweet Child of Mine' with children all over it, and the next year, it was 'Your Song'. Throughout all of them were a range of items being shown, so it was still somewhat about the catalogue.

2011 brought us the child waiting for Christmas. This was the first really big one for them, because it focused on a specific child and told a story. We were all expecting the kid to be waiting for his presents, but he was actually waiting to give presents to his family (although I maintain that the mystery box had his sister's head in it, much like Seven. John Lewis adverts share a surprising amount in common with horror trailers, something that has finally been pointed out with the wonderful Babadook mash-up trailer).

The story aspect downplayed the range and went instead with a simple story. It was their first proper mini-movie. And the first point where it really became a tradition.

The following year, we got a terrifying snowman on a trek to buy some fashionable winter items for his snow-girlfriend while a child watched. Although he may have actually been trying to kill her by making her warmer (I told you, they're all secretly horror stories). There was less range shown, but it was still somewhat about the products.

Just buy Private Eye already

The less said about their idiotic Hare and Bear advert, the better, except to point out that it showed a complete lack of understanding of hibernation and the bear probably killed everyone (as shown by Private Eye's fantastic cover). It also showed a alarm clock that somehow could be set to a specific day as well as time, but then, it had moved well into the realm of fantasy by this point.

But there's a more important point here. Which has been shown with this year's advert.

This year, we get the complete package. A story that focuses on a young boy and an imaginary penguin (which is actually a stuffed toy). But the penguin is lonely, and wants another penguin to love. The kid buys another penguin for the penguin and presumably spent most of Christmas night banging them together, what with his limited understanding of how penguins procreate. I have to admit, I'm not entirely sure how penguins bang either, and have no desire to have that on my Google search history. Incidentally, since the kid's dad isn't in the advert, I'm entirely fine with the suggestion that the penguin toy is possessed by the ghost of the kid's dead dad.

But why is this important?

Because, similarly to the bear and hare, the penguin (Monty) has his own product range. You can buy plushies of Monty, t-shirts with Monty on, ties with Monty on, cushion covers with Monty on, duvet covers with Monty on. None of them are particularly cheap either.

As of last year, John Lewis moved from the advert being about their catalogue to being about a specific range of products. This is how successful they are. The main Monty items are already sold out, six weeks before Christmas. And in the reviews, someone is talking about how happy they are that they managed to get one, because they weren't able to buy their child the bear and the hare the previous year.

It's nakedly self-serving. It's pushing your emotional buttons in order to sell you a single, along with some plushie toys and duvet covers. They even went so far, this year, as to have the kid being given the plushie this year. It isn't even subtle.

It's part of a new trend, which I think Starbucks kicked off with their red cups. Corporate Christmas traditions. At least the red cups thing has finally backfired as just about every other coffee chain have realised that Starbucks don't own the colour red and have started doing the same thing at Christmas. Which means it's backfired a bit, which I'm delighted about.

But this is what adverts do. Cheaply and manipulatively try to take parts of Christmas and brand them.

And it works. We lap it up. The John Lewis advert has been an enormous hit, and what they're out to sell has sold out in the thousands.

But it's been beaten by the Sainsbury's advert, which retells the Christmas truce. This, for me, has crossed the line, and I think we need to talk about what's acceptable to use when you're manipulating people's emotions in the name of profit.

How did this come up in the first place? How did this idea first get floated and approved? I imagine the conversation in their PR team went a little like this:

"John, we need to come up with something to get more customers in the store, ever since we accidentally told everyone that we were trying to squeeze an extra fifty pence out of them."

"It's a tough one. Coming up with sentimental Christmas stuff isn't easy."

"Too true. I've heard that John Lewis are going with a lonely, blue-balled imaginary penguin."

"They must be completely out of ideas."

"I totally agree."

"If only we could use something truly touching."

"You mean like the Christmas truce in the first world war?"

"Yeah, something like that. A moment of humanity in the middle of a senseless war that caused so many millions of deaths. A moment that shows how we're all the same, even at our worst moments."

"So how do we take something like that and use it to make people spend money in our shop?"

"Steve, you don't think that could be a bit unpleasant, do you?"

"You're right. We'll leave out the death bit. Chuck in a robin. And give the Royal Legion a call so we can make out we're doing it out of Christmas spirit."

"Happy December Profits, John!"

I may be abridging it slightly, but I honestly think the conversation must have been at least a bit like that. Somewhere, some people around a table decided that the WWI Christmas truce was an appropriate point in history to exploit for an advert and they made sure there was a charity angle in there in case they were criticised. This will have been proposed, approved, written, tweaked, designed, tweaked, retweaked and finally given the green light to be filmed.

Fine, the profits from the chocolate bar go to the Royal Legion. That's a good thing. But let's not pretend it's being done purely out of charitable impulse. It's about increasing footfall. It's about getting people into the shop and getting them to buy more things than that single item.

That's why the advert exists. That's the point of it. That's the point of the chocolate bar.

This hasn't been done out of any cosy Christmas feelings. This has been done to exploit cosy Christmas feelings. Personally, I love Christmas, even as an atheist. I tend to go to Ireland and spend time with my family. I'm even into corny sentimentality - you're looking at one of the few people who liked the remake of Christmas on 34th Street. But I'm not into serious attempts to get me into your fucking shop.

What John Lewis have started with their mini Christmas movies is an attempt to corporatise a season. And it's become competitive. Everyone will, next year, be looking to see what Sainsbury's do, and if you think that all the other brands haven't noticed the press that John Lewis and Sainsbury's have had over these two mini-movies, then you'll be surprised just how many go for the emotion button next year, and what they're willing to do in order to achieve it.

If we're okay with an incident in the middle of the deaths of millions being used to get us into shops, then what are we not okay with?

The time I saw a UFO

Starry night (source)

It's taken me fifteen years to feel comfortable telling this story. But here we go.

I saw a UFO once.

It still feels like a strange sentence to write down, and I daresay some of you reading it will have had a reaction to me saying it. Please allow me to tell my story before you make any judgements.

It was a long time ago, and I was a different person then. I was at university and me and my then-girlfriend had a long and awkward commute between the university itself (in West Yorkshire) and where we  were living at the time (in North Yorkshire). She'd drive, as I hadn't learned to yet, and I'd sit in the passenger seat during the early hours of the morning as we made our way through dark B-roads (which we sometimes took to avoid traffic jams on the motorway). We'd talk, listen to music and generally try to keep each other entertained and awake. I found the journeys hard going and I was just in the passenger seat - I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for her.

You'd occasionally see odd and interesting things as you drove through the countryside. One time, we pulled over during the daytime, because there were enormous flocks of birds flying and creating an enormous billowing flurrying sheet of movement, and you could see the ripples of the shape they created as they moved together. Walking out into the field to watch, it felt mystical, primal and powerful to see them intersecting in complicated patterns.

This time, though, it was the early hours of the morning at some point in 1999 or early 2000 (I remember the details far more vividly than the generalities). We were driving home on a clear night. While there are fifteen years or thereabouts of memories in the way, I'm fairly confident I can say that I was either as sober as her or at least only marginally less so, and that we weren't particularly more tired than we normally would be on that route.

We saw a light in the sky. It was larger than a star, but very bright. It looked brighter than an aircraft light (which was our first assumption) and very focused. I remember thinking of it as looking like a searchlight from a helicopter, but from much further away and without the beam of light coming down from it.

It moved in very straight lines across our field of vision, and then would turn at acute angles and travel in another straight line, before turning again. Considering how far away the light seemed, it was covering an amazing amount of distance in a short amount of time. I'd say at least twice as fast as watching a passenger plane going across the same distance. We were confused and intrigued, so we pulled over and got out of the car to watch.

Then it was joined by another light, and a third after a while. All three of them would move in straight lines and turn sharp corners. They weren't quite in formation, but they all seemed to have their own vague patterns. They weren't quite drawing triangles in the sky, but if you think of them all doing that, you won't be far off what we were looking at. The three of them moved independently.

After a while of watching (probably about five minutes or so), we got back into the car and continued on our journey.

What happened next was frightening.

After a short while on these quiet roads, we started being followed by a light. It was rectangular, and looked a bit like a motorcycle headlight, if a bit larger. It was at roughly the right height for it as well, so we didn't think too much of it at first. It was just very bright.

As it got closer, it was actually lighting the road ahead of us to the point where we could have turned off the car headlights and safely continued to drive. And this wasn't even with it immediately behind us - it was still a few car's distance behind. But it was following us for a while.

I was looking behind us and watching the light as my girlfriend drove. We'd just seen something strange in the sky, so we were both aware that we were likely just a bit paranoid and weirded out. It was probably just a motorbike with its headlights on full beam.

We were driving a bit below the speed limit, so we weren't going overly quickly, but we certainly weren't crawling either. So I was watching to confirm that it was a motorbike. As we took a fairly sharp corner, I watched the light carefully - at the speed we were going, it would have had to lean into the corner, so the rectangular shape I could see would have to lean in as well.

It didn't. While we lost the light for a moment, as the corner was between us and it, when it came around the corner, that light was steady and at exactly the same angle.

We took another corner, and it stopped following us. The light was gone.

That was the last unusual thing we saw that night. We talked about it for a while and agreed we couldn't explain it. My memory is that we were both a bit frightened by it all.

But it wasn't a defining moment for us. We went back to university and work and got on with our lives. We split up a while later - I was 20 years old and, through a combination of emotional immaturity, selfishness and a lack of understanding, wasn't very good at being a boyfriend, so she quite sensibly ended things.

All of the above has been told as consistently and as fairly as I can. Fifteen years of memories cloud things. It's entirely my memory of it as well - while I've said 'we' throughout, it's purely to avoid complicating the story. I don't remember any specifics of the conversations that we had about it at the time, and who said or did what, and we're not in touch any more (and while I hope that she's doing well, I rather doubt either of us is racing to fix that - we've both moved on with our lives), so you'll have to take my word for it all. But it's as clear a memory as I have of it, and the details I've described remain vivid.

So, it was completely unexplained. The bright lights in the sky, moving in a completely unnatural way, and then the floating light following us.

But.

But, but, but.

Unexplained does not mean the same thing as inexplicable.

The reason I haven't spoken publicly about this for fifteen years isn't because I'm embarrassed about it - it's because I didn't understand it. However, now, I think it makes more sense, and can be explained. Which is why I'm more comfortable talking about it.

And it's a fairly simple, mundane explanation, all things considered. But it's still plenty intriguing.

The first thing to point out is that the area we were travelling in wasn't just countryside. We weren't particularly far away from Menwith Hill, an RAF base that also happens to be the area where project ECHELON is located. Here's the wikipedia page, and also, because I'm a fan of coincidences, here's a link to an article written for Esquire back in 2000 by an investigative journalist called Eamonn O'Neill about ECHELON. The coincidence here is that Eamonn, now a professor of investigative journalism, is my uncle.

A good few years later, I told this story to a friend of mine who pointed out that there was a very simple explanation for the floating light behind us (and some of you reading this may have already worked it out).

It was most likely a jeep with a searchlight. That's why it was so bright and, when we took the corner, why it remained steady - because it was travelling on four wheels, and staying steady the same way we were. And why did it vanish suddenly? It just got switched off. It actually sounded obvious once it was pointed out. But because I'd thought of it as 'like a motorcycle headlight' and the most confusing feature was that 'it didn't move like a motorcycle', I had difficulty rethinking it.

So, the story goes from being 'we saw something mysterious and alien and something mysterious and alien followed us' and becomes rather more 'we saw something'.

So, taking the large light near the ground out of the equation, the mystery remains around the three lights moving in straight lines and sharp angles.

I reckon, looking back, what we saw were drones. Early ones, in development ones, or even just a demonstration of how they worked. It's a base that specialises in surveillance, after all.

This, to me, explains everything. The lights weren't quite as high up as we thought they were - they were just very small, so we thought we were looking at something larger, further away. Why were they flying in strange straight lines and sharp angles? Because they're multi-directional and remote controlled. That's how they work.

At which point, I reckon the whole thing becomes a rather more harmless story. Assuming that they were drones, it's not unreasonable to guess that they were either broadcasting night vision or heat signatures or something similar, and we were seen nearby watching them. At which point, they send someone with a jeep to check us out, either to check we're not spies or (more likely) to confirm that 'yep, that was a person and we're interpreting what we're seeing correctly'.

While I love stories about close encounters and aliens, and while I love conspiracy stories, I love actual explanations more.

The dark late night, the strange lights and being followed. It has all the hallmarks of the kind of unexplained story that appeals, but there's plenty of room for explanations.

When we tell a story, we have our own natural bias in it. It's easy to assume that, because we don't know what the motivations are for the other people involved, that they can only be one thing. It's easy to assume that, because we don't understand something, that it must be something sinister or enormous.

Conspiracy theories, whether they're the kind that suggest that the government knows that aliens exist, or the kind that suggest that the illuminati planned 9/11 in order to instigate worldwide war, are attractive because they not only explain that there's a reason for certain events, but they also describe a world where there's a reason that we don't know things. Why aren't we successful? Because there are secrets to being successful that we aren't told. Why aren't we told how the world works? Because the evil forces that manipulate it want to keep it the way that it is. Explanations like this can be a lot more comforting than the idea that we're not successful because we're not good enough or don't work hard enough, or that we don't know how the world works because we're not smart enough or haven't looked carefully enough (or even that there are societal issues involved, which are a whole other area, but still...).

While I believe that there's probably life out there somewhere, I don't particularly believe in government conspiracies regarding them - to put it simply, I don't actually believe they're competent enough to have kept something like that under wraps.

Actual explanations for things that are simpler and more mundane may be less exciting, but I love them. They say so much more about how we interpret things and about how we try to solve things. I love the idea that we were followed because they wanted to check their new toy was working properly so much. It feels human and real to me, and it satisfies me so much more than anything else.

So, that's my UFO story. Does my explanation make sense? Let me know in the comments.


While I may not believe in conspiracy stories, I do enjoy writing about them. Please check out my new book, Deadlines. It's a crime/conspiracy thriller that's being published in 10 parts by The Pigeonhole at 50p per instalment. It's a little bit Lois Lane, a little bit The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and a little bit Watergate.

Here's what some people are saying about it on the Pigeonhole message board:

"Loved stave 1, the idea and characters are great. I think your analogy of thinking of this like a weekly TV murder mystery is spot on (State of Play springs to mind)." (Graeme Langlands)

"I like this a lot a lot. Nearly knocked a cyclist off his bike wombling about reading it on my way into work, so engrossed was I. Can't wait till next week!" (Sarah Larkin)

"Good start and I'm looking forward to more. I get a Stieg Larsson-esque in London feel from it" (William Paul Boyce)

Deadlines - Sometimes, getting the story can be murder.

DEADLINES - all about my new book

DEADLINES - out on Wednesday!

What is DEADLINES?

DEADLINES is a crime thriller and is my first full-length novel. It will be published in 10 parts over at www.thepigeonhole.com starting on Wednesday 15 October.

What's the story about?

Two reporters at The Sentinel newspaper, Gemma Masterton and David Levy, investigate the suspicious death of a colleague and begin to uncover something large, complicated and dangerous. As events spiral out of control, their lives are put in danger.

How often do the parts come out?

They come out every Wednesday for ten weeks, starting on 14 October. You also get some free bonus material with each stave.

What's a 'stave'?

The sections of the novel are called 'Staves', which is what they were called back when novels were published serially in Victorian times.

What kind of bonus material?

A mixture of things. The Pigeonhole have taken a fun, innovative approach. There are photos, social media tie-ins, essays, music playlists, video interviews and podcasts.

What do other people think about The Pigeonhole?

Well, here's just some of the coverage:

“The app's minimalist design is superb – I haven't enjoyed reading on my phone until now”

“Hurrah for The Pigeonhole”

“Now, after a century of neglect, the art of the cliffhanger is experiencing a revival”

So, how will it work?

If you have an iPhone, there's an app which makes it insanely easy to read both the novel and the bonus material. If you don't, you can read both on their website which is also optimised for mobiles and tablets. You can also download the novel for the Kindle as well. So, basically, if you can read this, you can read DEADLINES.

How much is it?

50p per stave. You pay at the end, and if you decide it's not for you, you can cancel during it and only pay for the parts you've subscribed to.

Why is it being published serially?

Because serial stories are a huge amount of fun. Look at TV - Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Killing, Broadchurch... shows like this are partially fun because they keep you waiting to see what will happen, in a sort of sweet torture, especially after particularly evil cliffhangers. And as the book goes on, there are some very evil cliffhangers.

What if I join in while it's in progress?

Yes. You can buy all the previous staves at any point.

Will it be coming out in print?

It might do eventually. The best way to ensure that it'll come out in print is to support the serialisation. So, if you're interested, please do sign up.

What else does The Pigeonhole offer?

Well, you can get involved in discussions about the book, as there's a discussion area. There are also four other books available, including WISDOM HACKERS (a non-fiction series), SEX STAVES (erotic short stories), GREAT EXPECTATIONS (the Dickens story, which was originally published serially) and REDPOINT (which has already been completed).

How do I subscribe?

Go to www.thepigeonhole.com and sign up to the site for free. Once you've joined (and possibly downloaded the app, if you're so inclined), you can subscribe to DEADLINES. Please note, you will need to subscribe once you've joined.

How do you feel about it?

Nervous and excited. Getting reactions as it goes through is both something I'm looking forward to and something I'm terrified of. But I think the Pigeonhole is doing something that's so much fun, I'm incredibly excited and honoured to be part of their launch lineup. So, please, do get involved.

SUBSCRIBE TO DEADLINES NOW

Stories are important

Stories are important.

When we're learning to process thoughts and words in the first place, we learn through stories. When we're learning right and wrong, we learn through stories.

They form us and they inform us.

And when we're children, as any parent knows, we cling to our stories and we want to hear them again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and...

When we grow up, we start to create our own stories. We cast ourselves as the main characters and we craft our own story as we live our life. We sometimes spend a long time trying to work out who that character is. But we keep on with the stories anyway.

Sometimes, we tell stories about other people. Sometimes, we realise we're part of someone else's story. Sometimes we realise there are more stories than we can count.

And in the meantime, we tell each other stories. We speak them. We write them.

Funny stories. Sad stories. Personal stories. Scary stories. Bad stories. Good stories. Exciting stories. Beautiful stories.

We go and watch stories. We buy books so we can read stories. And we use technology to find new stories. We read stories in new ways. We listen to stories and we want our stories to be listened to.

We learn about each other through stories. We learn about the world with stories.

We start off making sense of life with stories and we end up making sense of our lives with stories.

Why I love horror

It's strange being a horror fan. Well, at least, a lot of other people seem to think so. It's one of the genres that some will just flat-out avoid.

"I'm a horror fan."
"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realise. Is it serious?"

Personally, I find horror to be a comforting genre, which is admittedly somewhat counter to the intention of most horror films and movies. A good, scary movie (or even a crap, scary movie) can be what a mug of hot chocolate and a blanket can be for a lot of other people.

I think my introduction to horror was probably the Usborne 'World of the Unknown' series, with the 'All About Ghosts" book. It was beautifully illustrated with images that still stick in my mind (a quick google image search for it brings multiple memories flooding to the surface).

If you read this as a kid, let the memories start flooding back...

I was also a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes from a young age, and my favourite was obviously The Hound of the Baskervilles. There was a richness to Conan Doyle's stories that was always comforting. They were scary, with their tales of poisoners, snakes, dancing men and murder, but there was also the basic notion that there was someone interested in justice at the end of it.

I read a story once where Peter Cushing described meeting a priest who was a huge fan of his work. He queried the appropriateness of horror as a priest's hobby, but the priest pointed out that 'good always wins'. And whether it's a dishevelled lieutenant, a borderline-sociopathic victorian or a SOMETHING ELSE, there's almost always something good to counteract the evil in horror stories (although they don't win as often as the priest made out). For me, horror stands as a natural housemate for crime - they tread on each other's toes, but they support each other well.

My parents took a fairly liberal and sensible approach to my evident interest in horror. They started me off on the classics. While I was far too young to watch modern horror movies, I could work my way up as I got older. So, along with Sherlock Holmes, I fell in love with Dracula, Frankenstein and Jekyll & Hyde. And I began to watch Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff films whenever I could, to go along with my Basil Rathbone adoration (an adoration that stays, by the way. It made my day when I visited the rather beautiful Odeon in Muswell Hill and found their small exhibition celebrating their opening night, which Basil Rathbone attended).

When I got a little older, I was allowed to start watching Hammer and Amicus films - again, the Sherlock Holmes connection made the link easier, with Peter Cushing's version of Hound of the Baskervilles. These were generally slightly gorier and slightly sexier, with lurid technicolour and lashings of bright red blood.

By the time I was deemed to be old enough to watch Nightmare on Elm Street, that was pretty much it - I could judge for myself what I was willing to watch or not. My tastes never particularly went to the gory, anyway. It's not something I Have an issue with, but it's not much of a selling point for me either - give me suspense any day.

So, what do I like about horror? What is it about it that makes me more likely to watch it?

I think it's partially that there's something safe about them. They allow you the thrills of being scared, but in a controlled environment. That can be really quite comforting - the sensation of allowing yourself to be in that position. It's a small endorphin boost that can be quite reassuring.

Also, as I've grown older, I've found something fascinating in the way that horror features women. I think there's a general perception that women in horror tend to only be victims, there only to show their breasts and get torn up. And in bad films, yes, that's often the case. But it tends to be quite the opposite in the better films. Because they're based around what scares the central character, and based around their vulnerabilities, there tends to be at least one fully-formed, fairly three-dimensional woman front-and-centre, who has the majority of the screen-time, in roles that aren't exploitative. And as time has gone on, that trend has usually increased if anything.

But mainly, I think I love horror because it's an immensely human thing. A primal thing. It's all about an entirely basic reaction, and it's exploring what scares us in interesting ways. It's also about what scares us on a cultural level - the horror of the '20s and '30s is totally different to that of the '40s and '50s. Even horror of the last few years has been very different to what came before. And then there's the opportunity to look at the history of other cultures and seeing what scared them.

I find horror, and our reactions to being scared, generally fascinating. I also find our reactions to horror itself interesting, especially taking into account the way it seems to make us so edgy, especially in the western world. Look at the attempts to ban horror comics in the 1950s or the video nasties controversy in the '80s. It's interesting how heavy-handed the reactions can get (especially considering how small-time and poor some of the films were - or how good some of the genuine classics were).

And that's another point in there - there's a point in regards to freedom that I like with horror. When we can react in that kind of way. They're stories that people want to tell - whether they're good, bad, terrible or great. They're easy to try to do, but difficult to do well.

When they're done well, there's an artistry to it that takes your breath away with more than just gasps. They confound your expectations and their own tropes. They take the things that you're comfortable with and scare you with them, or they take the things we all feel uncomfortable about and use them to scare us in ways we weren't expecting. They push boundaries and tell us things about ourselves that we didn't know.

I'm not saying that these are things that other genres can't do, but I find that horror explores these things in a way that I find works for me. It's something that, at best, challenges me, making me look at important concepts in a different way.

No, horror isn't for everyone. Some people are going to look at the parts that I love and see only a naked emperor. Some aren't going to be able to get past some of the worse aspects of the genre, and I can understand that. And some are going to find it impossible not to sympathise with the characters that can be cruelly killed off.

But for those that love it, there's a lot more to it than the gory bits.

Writing and Earning

Earlier today, a news story did the rounds, talking about how authors are earning less and less. It makes the point that the average author income per year is now around £11,000 with a picture of Will Self looking sad. Or, rather, a picture of Will Self.

It's a depressing article, but I feel there is more to the story. And, for new authors (or aspiring authors), I think there are positive points to take away from it. In fact, I think that for new authors, there's never been a more exciting time to get into writing.

The publishing game is changing. This isn't news - everyone knows this. But it's worth considering just some of the ways in which it's changing. It's at a crossroads at the moment, as customers have more content at their fingertips than ever before and, as a result, seem to value content less than ever before. Younger people, especially, appear to expect that all content (whether it be writing, music or TV and films) should be free, or at least come as part of a minimal monthly fee.

But where did this come from? Think about how customers now buy books. Time was, your main places to buy books were bookshops, either new or second-hand, the latter of which didn't really make the publishing company or the author any money.

This meant, for the most part, customers were restricted to buying what was available in the bookshop at the time. As a result, just getting on the shelves gave you a chance of selling copies at a far higher rate than your competitors who were not on the shelves.

Now, however, with so many books ordered online, the amount of choice has increased enormously. You're now competing with everything that's in print, as they're all as easy to buy as each other. This is better news for readers than it is for writers. In fact, at this point, the game is set in the favour of non-new books. Theyre cheaper, after all, and they're not as untested. There are more reviews and the writers are likely to be more well-known.

When you add the kindle sales, the choice becomes even more extensive. Books can be bought instantly, without many of the overheads involved in printing books. This adds a major extra factor, which is the number of free books that you can easily pick up, whether they're intentionally free, on offer or simply out of copyright. Everything written before the last hundred years is eligible to be downloaded for free, ranging from the works of Shakespeare to the stories of Sherlock Holmes.

So your book now has to compete with all the books ever written. Many of the greatest and most famous of which are free. You're in the biggest bookshop ever created. Along with everyone else. Ever.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that the places where customers buy books are now easier to get into than they ever have been. Whether it's working with one of the many new publishers out there or whether it's putting your own work out there via direct publishing, it's easier to actually sell copies of your books to more people than at any point in history.

This doesn't mean that it comes without work. You can be in the shop, but you're still going to have to convince people to look at your book instead of other people's.

Up until now, this has generally been the role of the publishers or the booksellers. And, obviously, most of this still is - Amazon is, after all, a selling machine and the major publishers didn't get where they are now just purely through being there for a long time. Publishers offer a level of awareness-raising that makes many book deals worth striving for. They're the experts after all. And there are plenty of good publishers who are experimenting with new ideas.

However, what has changed is that there are more opportunities to market yourself. Social media, paid online advertising, blog tours, submitting articles... whatever you can think of, really. If you're good and prepared to work for it, this may be a better time than there has ever been to get a foothold.

Meanwhile, publishers are having to do more to justify the budgets that they spend on books, which means authors have to keep justifying investment in them, right from the start. This is why Val McDermid has talked about how she would be a failure if she started out today (although I think that she's so likable, I doubt it, personally... it just may have taken her longer).

Money is still being spent on books. It's just being spent in more places than ever before, so it's being spread out over more authors. And everyone's trying to work out what this means for the industry as a whole.

Writers are going to have to be more diverse from here on out. Part writer, part publicist and very possibly part publisher. There's room for more diversification and room for more experimentation. The chances of making a career solely as a writer may be more difficult, but the chances of making writing fiction part of your career?

Write. Have confidence in yourself. Adapt and change and be part of the future of where writing is going. Write lots and do what you can to get out there and network and publicise yourself and develop fan bases and learn everything you can about how publishing works and who does it well and how they do it well.

The writing game isn't over. The rules have just changed, that's all. And they're still being written. Because they're always being written and rewritten.

So what's stopping you rewriting them?

Iain Duncan Smith and the Scrounger Narrative

Iain Duncan Smith responding to Salma Yaqoob

I do, fairly regularly, get annoyed at things that happen on Question Time. That's kind of what it's for. It's an hour of cathartic irritation at politicians who do everything they can to avoid questions. And that's fine. I tend to see mine and many people's roles on twitter as being those standing at the sides throwing rotten fruit and mocking ties.

But the anger I felt at Iain Duncan Smith on Thursday was something different.

During the show, he'd been having a shockingly easy time of it. Despite the relative rarity of having a secretary of state on Question Time, either no questions were asked that were about his direct work or none were selected.

However, Salma Yaqeeb, the head of the Birmingham Stop the War Coalition, made things a little bit more difficult - albeit after being repeatedly shouted over and interrupted by the male panelists in an uncomfortable display that made me disappointed in both Chris Bryant and Ian Hislop.

She immediately became a twitter darling when she said to Iain Duncan Smith:

"I’m sitting next to Iain Duncan Smith who labels poor people as scroungers when you claim £39 for a breakfast, like you can’t afford your own breakfast, and you live on your wife’s estate and have taken a million pounds of taxpayers’ money, that’s what I call scrounging."

To which Duncan Smith replied, with an air of offended sensibilities and personal outrage:

"What a load of old nonsense. I have never, ever labelled them as scroungers at all."

I actually believe that he doesn't use the term. He's taken George Osborne to task about it and has also talked about how his party have got the language wrong. So, yes. I totally believe he has never called them scroungers.

But that's not the point. The point is that he has labelled them scroungers, repeatedly and intentionally. The point is that he has created, established and maintained the narrative of people on benefits being scroungers.

Here are just some of the headlines you'll find when you google search 'Iain Duncan Smith Scroungers'. If he was so upset about labelling people 'scroungers', don't you think he'd have had something to say about these headlines?

Benefits system is broken! UK's top scroungers on £300-a-week more than the average family

February 24, 2014

Mr Duncan Smith said: “Benefits were out of control and people were rightly outraged at some households receiving far more in benefits than the ordinary hard-working family.

“We have fixed this broken system by introducing a fair limit to make sure the system works for taxpayers who fund it. Our reforms ensure claiming benefits is no longer a more attractive option than being in work.” 

Workshy told scrounging no longer an option in new benefits crackdown

December 28 2013

Duncan Smith said: “The decision to claim benefits should no longer be considered a lifestyle choice.

“This will make it clear that looking for work requires as much effort and commitment as a full-time job.”

Disabled people once again branded as scroungers

15 May 2012

Dicussing a Telegraph interview, in which Iain Duncan Smith says that the number of claimants has risen by 30 percent in recent years “rising well ahead of any other gauge you might make about illness, sickness, disability”. Losing a limb should not automatically entitle people to a pay-out, he suggests.

2015 starts now: Tories get tough on scroungers and immigrants

18 February 2013

Speaking on the Marr Show, Duncan Smith said: "My view of life is simple – we make sure our door is shut to those who want to come and claim benefits and is open to those who want to come and contribute and work and make this economy good and strong."

Government declares war on Benefits Street's scroungers

January 23 2014

He added: "Our real success has been to reframe the argument (emphasis mine) – challenging a narrative beloved of the left … which focuses so exclusively on how much is being spent on welfare that it risks overlooking the real question: it is not about how much goes into the benefit system, but what difference it makes to people at the other end."

4,000 jobless singletons raking in benefits worth more than £23,000 to be hit by lower benefits cap for people living alone

12 August 2013

‘For those eyeballing benefits as a one-way ticket to easy street, I have a wake-up call for you: those days are over,’ he writes.

2015 starts now: Tories get tough on scroungers and immigrants

Monday 18 February 2013

Speaking on the Marr Show, Duncan Smith said: "My view of life is simple – we make sure our door is shut to those who want to come and claim benefits and is open to those who want to come and contribute and work and make this economy good and strong."


There are plenty more.

Iain Duncan Smith doesn't want to be called out for labelling people scroungers. But he has pushed the narrative time and time and time and time and time and time again.

The idea that our government would intentionally create this narrative and then try to distance itself from it makes me angry.

The idea that Iain Duncan Smith has pushed a narrative about scroungers when so many of them are people that need our help makes me angry.

The idea that he categorises human beings as job seekers who aren't pulling their weight enough or people with mental or physical issues preventing them from working as fraudsters in a country where these benefits can make the difference between life and death makes me angry.

The idea that Iain Duncan Smith can do all of this again and again and again and again over years, but get upset and offended because he avoids using a specific word, the idea that he would try to abdicate responsibility for his own clear and repeated actions, the idea that he would try to turn it into a narrative about words instead... that just disgusts me.

Remembering Rik Mayall

I'm expecting this to get lost. It's the one thing that's making me feel like I'm not jumping on a bandwagon or trying to make this all about me. I'm expecting the outpouring of emotion and memories about Rik Mayall to be so enormous that this is just going to be one of the flow.

I'm 34 and I'm not quite sure how that's happened. It seems to have happened incredibly quickly, because somehow, Rik Mayall was a big part of my life a long time ago. It seems and feels like it was still fairly recent, because his death brings so many vivid memories flooding forward that it feels like I've only just experienced them. But I mention my age because it puts me squarely in a generation that grew up with Rik Mayall.

The first thing that I remember him from was The Young Ones - specifically, The Young Ones singing 'Living Doll' with Cliff Richard. It was anarchic and it was silly and it was a little bit rude (at least, the bits that I understood) and I was absolutely blown away by it. I immediately became a huge fan of The Young Ones, whenever I was able to see it.

Looking back, I've no idea what my parents were playing at, letting me watch The Young Ones at that age. But I'm exceptionally glad that they did. Well, I'm not actually that surprised that they did. I was of the age where so many of the jokes went over my head that all I really had was the sheer silliness and the characters.
We forget, I think, that we were accepting of so much stuff going over our heads as children. It's like growing up and realising just how much of Grease was actually about sex, because you were young enough to just not know what 'flogging your log' was. There was so much stuff flying over our heads that you mainly asked about the things that you needed to understand for plot reasons. Danny's going home to flog his log... I think I associated that a bit with log rolling or something else boring that he'd rather do than hang around with the others.

 But with Rik Mayall, there wasn't that need. He was just funny - naturally and consistently. He had an incredible energy, a dangerous and manic quality that meant you couldn't help but watch him. The next thing I saw him in was Blackadder as Lord Flashheart. A character that's onscreen in total over two episodes for about 15 minutes and yet is one of the most immediately recognisable and quotable characters ever written in comedy. When I realised that Flash and Rick were played by the same actor, I just fell in love.

It helped that Mayall had a beautifully childlike quality about him, which made him a natural for story-telling, which he seemed to enjoy just as much as anyone listening when he gleefully played around with inevitably disgusting details. It felt a little bit like he was recognising and encouraging something in the children that adored him, which made it all feel a bit naughty and yet freeing.

It was this quality that likely saw the creation of Drop Dead Fred - a movie that doesn't quite work, but through no fault of the full-on performance by Mayall that's made it a favourite of lots of people in their early-to-mid-thirties. He just threw himself about the screen like a cross between Miranda Richardson's Queenie and a Looney Tunes character. A film that was a little grown up for a kid's audience but a bit too childish for an adult audience, I can't help but wonder how it could have worked with someone like Sarah Silverman opposite Rik, able to tap into the little girl that would have been just as manic as Mayall.

As much as I loved the work that he did in the UK (especially Bottom and the New Statesman), I always felt a little like he was underestimated as a talent. The at-times-stunning Rik Mayall Presents - a short series of one-off stories, usually showing a more serious side to his phenomenal acting ability - displayed him at his peak. Dark, sympathetic or just pathetic... he was an amazingly versatile actor. Kevin Turvey, Rick, Richard Richard, Drop Dead Fred and Alan B'Stard. While you never forgot that you were watching Rik Mayall, all you'd need is a second of any of them to recognise them instantly. Most comedians never get to create one iconic character. Mayall created numerous. There may have been some DNA in common between them, but you'd never mistake one for the other.

Bottom was, of course, magnificent - the live shows were riotously funny at times, and showed off how much fun he seemed to be having sometimes. Sadly, that fun wasn't always there. Mayall could, by some accounts, be awkward and arsey at times, especially following the quad bike accident that almost (and technically did) kill him. Suffering from long-term effects of the accident, it appears that his frustration occasionally made him difficult to work with.

He worked less after he recovered from the accident, but there were still flashes of the brilliance that had been there before. I'd always hoped that he'd have a late autumn in his career, ideally moving towards more straight acting. He was incredibly charismatic and the intensity that he carried as a performer always put me in mind of Jack Nicholson. I'm not intending to exaggerate when I say that I absolutely believe he could have been that good.

If I feel sad now, it's because for all his talent and for all his achievements, it still never feels like Rik Mayall got the opportunities on a worldwide basis that seemed due. I always thought it would happen one day. I always wanted his talent to get more recognition. I wish I'd kept up with more of his work in recent years, because he's a performer I always enjoyed watching.

As it is, though, I don't feel that sad. I feel lucky and many of us should. I got to grow up watching Rik Mayall, that dangerous jester that appeared to terrify adults while sharing a wink with the children. He let us in on the joke and the jokes were fantastic. Rik Mayall is one of the greatest performers ever to have been on television. It is obviously sad that he has died, but it was a privilege to be alive when he was.

Question Time and the UKIP problem

I'm a big fan of the BBC, and I don't think that they show much in the way of bias. In fact, I think that they generally do a good job of representing issues fairly, but I do think that they have to take a certain amount of responsibility for the surge in popularity of UKIP.

In the last six months, UKIP have been on BBC Question Time on more than one every four episodes (excluding a more Welsh specific one and a South African one), with six showings. And in the last five episodes alone, UKIP has been represented three times.

As we all know, Nigel Farage himself has been on a lot. In fact, in the last six months, he has equalled appearances  with Grant Shapps and Danny Alexander, who appear to have as empty a social diary as him*. In recent decades, the only guest that has ever had more appearances than him is Charles Kennedy. And Nigel's only one appearance behind Charles.

This is quite the record for a party that doesn't have any MPs. Parties that actually do have MPs like the Green Party have had a single appearance by Caroline Lucas (on a show that Nigel Farage was on). And the notoriously publicity-shy George Galloway has also had a single appearance in the last six months as well.

But the appearances aren't enough for UKIP. In an article earlier this year, Farage asked whether Question Time audiences are too hostile, suggesting that there's an unfair balance in the audience leaning to the left and suggesting that those that criticise may be plants. As anyone who saw last week's question time, when Charlie Bloom criticised Farage, using the context of far right parties and history to explain why he didn't 'have any time for you, sir', UKIP certainly do come in for some stick. And, if you check out his timeline on twitter, you'll see that there are plenty of UKIP supporters claiming that he's a plant as well.

But why am I concerned about how often UKIP are on Question Time? After all, when the BNP went on Question Time, overestimating the cuddle-ability of Nick Griffin, they pretty much died out soon afterwards.

The difficulty is that UKIP do a great job of appearing as if they're the underdogs, while doing their level best to appeal to the fear and hatred that permeate parts of our society.

They're basically very good at having their cake and eating it. Having members of the party that openly criticise gay marriage or refer to David Cameron as a 'gay loving nutcase', and saying that these don't reflect the views of the party, while also saying that the over-70s are uncomfortable with gays and gay marriage. Saying that it's not the kind of thing that they do, while making clear that they understand those who are worried about it.

It's the same thing with racism. Whether it's their members that refer to 'Bongo Bongo Land', or Farage supporting Jeremy Clarkson's use of the word 'nigger'** as being 'perhaps not quite going over" the line of being offensive. It's treated as simply being controversial or old-fashioned rather than being racist.

But then, racism is something that Nigel Farage doesn't appear to see a huge problem with. Whether it's his school teachers describing him as a racist or whether it's the multiple news reports from earlier in his career about the regularity with which he allegedly used words like 'nigger' and 'nig-nog', including when having meetings with BNP members. Or maybe his version of 'racism' is different to a lot of other people's. UKIP deny pretty much all of that, incidentally, or Farage disavows responsibility, playing it off essentially as schoolyard japes to get attention.

Of course, it's the over-65s that are the greatest supporters of UKIP and the most likely to move that way, which is part of why UKIP are doing their best to appeal to the more scared and resentful members of that generation. It also may be why they're going out of their way to appeal to the elements of that generation that may have more sexist, racist and homophobic attitudes, or at least don't get why things have changed so much, because in their day, it just wasn't offensive, don't you see? The fact that this age-group is also far more likely to vote at all just makes them all the more appealing.

The more that the party turns up on television, the more legitimised they become and the more popular they become. The more they get to portray the myth that they're a friendly, inclusive party.

But also, and I fall as foul of this as anyone, the more they rile people up. The more they get people watching and discussing and the more that shows like Question Time rank on twitter and the more column inches they get. But it's a vicious circle - the more they appear, the more they're discussed and the more relevant they seem to be, so the more they appear and the more they're discussed, and...

Some of this is presented as Farage being charismatic. I don't see it, personally. He's loud and laughs a lot, but he's actually very boring. He strikes me as the kind of guy you'd avoid in the office or the pubs that he's so very fond of being photographed in. But I do understand that he makes for good - or at least popular - television.

I just wish that Question Time, This Week, and the like weren't making their job so easy right now. Personally, I wish that The Green Party and the NHA party were getting more of that free publicity, in order to highlight areas I think are more important issues like the environment and the future of the NHS.

It's important to remember that discussion on the internet is only going to accomplish so much, whether it's blog posts like this one, twitter or facebook, as that's not the main audience that UKIP are aiming at. The best way to limit the damage that UKIP can do is to get out and vote. Every vote that isn't for them reduces the overall amount of share that they get.



* This is based on going through the last six months of guests on Question Time as recorded on the BBC website (which has incomplete information in the sum-ups) and Wikipedia.

** I went back and forward over whether to censor this on the blog or not. In the end, I decided that these are ugly words, and it's the ugliness that I want to highlight. If you feel I've misjudged this, I apologise.

Short Story - Base Station Q

This was my entry to the SciFiLondon Flash Fiction challenge. I was given the following and the challenge was to write a story that used all three:

Title: BASE STATION Q

Line: "If, for any reason, I do not respond I'll leave a note."

Theme: "Everything we touch gets our DNA, Litter is now traceable to the owner"



And here was my story.



BASE STATION Q

I saw him break.

He tried his best to withold the information, but our heightened interrogation techniques are essentially impossible to stand for long. They're physically harmless, as they only involve a series of injections to the base of the skull to allow us to reroute their pain receptors and control them. The agony that they feel is strictly illusion.

We do not torture. We create the illusion of torture. We are humane.

But when we find out that one of the higher-ups in the movement has left some physical evidence somewhere, we have to find out where that is. Our security depends on it.

We had been monitoring his communications for some time. We believe him to be mid-level, but based on the tone of the conversations, we believed that he had affection for her. Maybe was even in love with her.

She is very clever. She communicates with her network almost entirely virtually, and then using every level of encryption and re-routing that is possible, and a few that some of our technicians claim are impossible. She's like smoke, twisting through every attempt to find her.

If we have DNA evidence, no matter how small, we can track someone. The entire city is monitored.

It started in the days of closed circuit television, but as scanners became more sensitive, we ended up being able to track and trace information far more carefully. Crime dropped quickly when this happened, because all it took was the slightest touch of something, in a way that allowed us to identify the DNA, and then...

Then we scan the entire city for skin particles. You leave them everywhere, whether by touching something or the way they just slough off your skin. Sometimes the breeze scatters them, but it doesn’t matter. We just find the highest occurrence locations, and we have a nice, simple, easy-to- follow trail.

But we need something that we know they’ve touched.

So when she asked him to go to 'the usual place' to pick up contraband, and then respond with confirmation, she signed off with something she'd never said before.

"If, for any reason, I do not respond, I'll leave a note."

When she then didn’t respond, that changed everything.

A note. An old fashioned, honest-to-goodness note. Ink on paper. Actual physical paper. That she would have had to have touched at some point. And because of the way that it was said, he must have known where that note would be left.

And so we interrogated him, and when that didn’t work, we moved to enhanced interrogation. The
needles in the base of his skull pierced through the bone, almost imperceptibly. He would have barely felt them.

But once we started dialling up the pain receptors, once we started sending his brain the message that every single one of his nerve endings was individually being ripped, torn out and shredded, but we denied him the ability to pass out through pain... then, he talked.

It reminded me of watching my brother go through the same techniques. He had fallen in with the enemy, fallen in with the movement. They had seduced him, and he had begun to speak out against the government. He began to speak out about security being a sham. He was arrested. He fought. I had to watch in Base Station Q while he was injected. I had to watch while he screamed. Even though I knew it was not torture, it was still difficult to watch. And then, because of his confessions, he was executed.

The same method. The same chair. The same machine to engineer the injections into the back of the skull. Except this time, cutting off the brain. Painlessly. Simply. He was scared, but it lasted seconds.

He told me he was sorry. He told me that he had to fight. That I was wrong. I remembered us as children, and these are the memories I have tried to cling to the most.

But this was not my brother. This was another traitor, another person who hated us. He had arranged numerous crimes in cooperation with her, and if we could get her, that would lead us to the rest.

It was the biggest break we’d ever had.

He became confused as a result of the injections, and couldn’t give us the exact location, but we knew that it would be in one of a number of safety deposit boxes in a major bank. There were thousands of them.

This would take time, but the evidence would be there. That note would be the key.

There was no need for contamination control. The scanners would simply remove my DNA from the equation, focus on her DNA and then send the message out to the rest of the scanners across the city. Once we had it, it would take seconds, and then we would have our trail to find her.

When I found the note, my hands shook. I read it before I scanned it.

It wasn’t for him. It was for me.

“Hello.

When was the last time you read a letter? I suspect it has been a long time. Savour it. Enjoy it. Feel the paper in your hands and be aware that this is how we have communicated as a species for centuries.

Are you a detective? Or a soldier? Whoever you are, you now hold my life in your hands. Once you scan this, I will be easy to find. And once I am found, I will be easy to interrogate. And once I have been interrogated, I will be easy to kill.

So please, before you do, take a moment to question.

Have you lost someone close to you? We all have now. Due to the way we govern ourselves now, we all have lost someone because they disagreed. Because they wanted to be free rather than be safe.

We have not killed anyone. We have not hurt anyone. We have only tried to be free.

We spread messages. We ask questions. This is all we can do.

We are made complicit in the murders of those we love. We are made to watch. Made to testify against them, so that even while we hate ourselves and mourn them, we are controlled. Disagreement is not a crime. Freedom is not a crime. But we have made them so.

But anything we can make, we can change. Anything we can create, we can destroy.

You hold this note in your hands. You can use it to kill me.

Or you can use it to make your own choice.

You could burn this note.

You could be free as well.

X.”

I looked around me. My heart was racing, and I could feel sweat trickling down the back of my neck.

I had a lighter in my pocket. A privilege I am afforded. A sign of status. The ability to create fire.

Something we deny many people.

It felt heavy in my hand.

Being wrong and trying to learn.

Social media has had a number of effects on my life, but the biggest one has been how its challenged me. Not always vocally and not always personally, but one thing that I've found important to do is to look out for voices that provide different viewpoints to my own.

This is because I've been wrong a lot of times in the past. And I'll probably be wrong a lot in the future.

I've been generally lucky to have supportive, liberal, left-wing parents, who are fairly open-minded, and even luckier to have watched them become, if anything, more liberal, left-wing and open-minded as time has gone on.

At the same time, I grew up in areas that were nice, but not necessarily very diverse. A suburb of Manchester for most of my childhood and a village in rural Ireland during my teens. My secondary school was an all-boys Irish Catholic one, run by the Christian Brothers.

Being, as I was, into drama rather than sport, and, to be fair, probably being an insufferable fellow student, my school days weren't huge amounts of fun, and I looked forward to moving away from University. But I was also nervous - after all, moving to England and going to a Drama course meant that I was really quite likely to meet (whisper it...) some gay people.

It's important to realise that I didn't know any out gay people when I was growing up. Or if I did, I had absolutely no idea - hell, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that Right Said Fred were gay. I thought they were meant to be skinheads. But where I grew up, my knowledge of gay people were primarily rumour or insults on which I was often on the receiving end. I didn't feel that I was being told that gay people were bad, or that I should be scared of them, but I was nervous. The main thing I knew about them was that they were perceived to be different.

By the age of 17, probably the two most rounded gay characters I was aware of were Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Uncle Monty in Withnail and I. I was also somewhat sexually confused as well - after all, I'd been called it enough that it was possible that other people saw something in me that I didnt. I didn't think I was into guys, but what if I actually was? And what would happen if I was hanging around with gay men? Along with all my other fears, I was also worried that I would be judgemental.

Flash forward a short while to me at seventeen, and my first day in university, and I was going around, meeting people. One of the first doors I knocked on was opened by someone I wasn't expecting to see. He was over six foot tall and slim, with bright pink hair. He was also dressed from neck to ankle in PVC, along with a pair of bright pink fluffy slippers.

I had never met anyone like this before. I put my hand out, probably with my jaw dropped, and he didn't shake it - he took it carefully, and introduced himself: "Hello, I'm Thom. That's Thom with a 'h'. The 'h' stands for homosexual".

While it probably didn't actually take more than a second, I remember my thought process clearly, as I was faced with someone who was far, far more out than anyone I had ever met before.

"Right, okay, this is new. What do I do? I've got, as far as I can see it, two choices. I can either freak out and walk away, and decide that's who I'm going to be, or I can decide that it doesn't matter and just be fine with it."

And what I said was "Hi, I'm Chris. Pleased to meet you." And from there, it was fine. Thom was absolutely lovely, and while we didn't become lifelong friends or anything, I think it's fair to say that we got on and were generally pleased to see each other around.

That was almost seventeen years ago, and I remember it vividly. I remember the flash of fear and the flash of feeling that I had no idea how to handle this situation, and then how quickly and how easily I realised that even slight fear of someone because they were gay was bullshit. Once I came to that first step, it stopped being something to worry about.

But I also realised how easy it would have been to have gone the other way. How easy it would have been to have seen what I saw as confirmation that here was somebody that was different to me, and that difference was negative. Personally, I think that would have been the point where I would have slipped from ignorance to hatred, and that's something I'm very glad that I didn't do.

Later, someone I shared a house with had an abortion, and while I think I successfully kept my judgement from her, I did judge her for it. I judged her for not having been sensible enough to avoid getting pregnant in the first place, and I absolutely judged her for not telling the father. I felt that she overrode his rights and put herself first, and took him out of the decision making process. I felt she treated the abortion casually and I found that idea difficult. I wasn't completely against the idea of abortion itself, but I did feel that it should be agonised over and debated and thought about, and was a big, serious step.

I look back on that and I realise how completely in the wrong my point of view was. But that realisation took me time, and took me far longer than I wish it had done.

I was raised Catholic, and anti-abortion imagery was around my upbringing. More so in the culture I was brought up in than absolutely directly in my family, but still very much there. I'd grown up with the idea that it was simply a wrong thing to do, although I ended up taking the personal viewpoint more that it was a practical choice in places, but should always be treated as a last resort.

The mistake that I made there (as if it isn't obvious) was putting my own discomfort with the idea ahead of a woman's right to make choices with regards to her own body. I was doing the same thing with the discomfort over whether or not the man involved with the pregnancy had been told.

Sometimes, a realisation is about putting things in a way that you just cannot argue with, and the line that I eventually came up with was this: My right to feel uncomfortable with a situation comes a distant second to a woman's right to make her own choices.

And lo and behold, when I came to that understanding, suddenly I was a lot less uncomfortable with the situation. Go figure.

I don't feel, looking back, that I was a horrible person, but I do feel that I was ignorant and naive. I had fairly firmly established ideas about what constituted right and wrong, and while I think that I got a reasonable amount of stuff right, it also led me to hold some beliefs that now make me very uncomfortable to have ever held at all. If you asked me if I believed in equality, I'd have said yes, and I would have meant it

So why do I now share them? Why do I share things that make me absolutely cringe to talk about? And of course, there's more, because I was young and stupid, and now I'm older and hopefully a little les stupid - at the very least, I'm more willing to listen and try to get to that understanding.

Am I saying 'Oh, you don't understand, poor me, I'm actually the victim here, with my upbringing and naivety - just leave me alone and remember how difficult it can be to be wrong'? Hell, no. If anything, I'm saying 'Get on me harder, because I know I get stuff wrong, and I want to get better at getting it right.'

Obviously, that comes with caveats - one of them being that it isn't your job or responsibility to help me out if you don't want to, and another being that it's important to remember that you may not always be right about the situation as well (and if there are two things that social media seem to increase, it's the apparent certainty of being right and the increased ability to be misunderstood - I've seen far too many arguments where I think both people were misunderstanding each other more than disagreeing).

My intention with this rather rambling blog post has been to use my own experiences to come to a more general point.  Because the important point is the ignorance. I think that ignorance and hatred are different things, although I also think that ignorance can easily lead to hatred. And hatred doesn't have many solutions. But ignorance? That can have some solutions. The light of normality can help out with a lot of them. And when you don't understand something, when you don't know how you're going to react to it, fear can come from a number of directions.

Nowadays, I tend to hold my tongue a lot more. Not because I'm scared of what I'm going to say (and anybody that knows me away from a computer screen knows that it doesn't take much for me to give my opinions about things), but because I'm more aware that there are situations where, whichever side I'm on, my voice doesn't need to be part of the conversation. Just my ears, at least for now, until I've listened more to the voices that speak with experience.

Social media is amazing for this. You can seek out people who know more about things than you do, and listen to them. Hear viewpoints different to your own and be prepared to examine your own beliefs. It's important for all of us, and I honestly think it's the best thing about the internet.

Because I'd rather have been wrong through ignorance and have the ability to change, then think I'm always right and lose that ability. Being wrong isn't the end of the world. But refusing to believe that you can be wrong? That's unlikely to be good.

Being wrong and trying to learn.

Social media has had a number of effects on my life, but the biggest one has been how its challenged me. Not always vocally and not always personally, but one thing that I've found important to do is to look out for voices that provide different viewpoints to my own.

This is because I've been wrong a lot of times in the past. And I'll probably be wrong a lot in the future.

I've been generally lucky to have supportive, liberal, left-wing parents, who are fairly open-minded, and even luckier to have watched them become, if anything, more liberal, left-wing and open-minded as time has gone on.

At the same time, I grew up in areas that were nice, but not necessarily very diverse. A suburb of Manchester for most of my childhood and a village in rural Ireland during my teens. My secondary school was an all-boys Irish Catholic one, run by the Christian Brothers.

Being, as I was, into drama rather than sport, and, to be fair, probably being an insufferable fellow student, my school days weren't huge amounts of fun, and I looked forward to moving away from University. But I was also nervous - after all, moving to England and going to a Drama course meant that I was really quite likely to meet (whisper it...) some gay people.

It's important to realise that I didn't know any out gay people when I was growing up. Or if I did, I had absolutely no idea - hell, it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that Right Said Fred were gay. I thought they were meant to be skinheads. But where I grew up, my knowledge of gay people were primarily rumour or insults on which I was often on the receiving end. I didn't feel that I was being told that gay people were bad, or that I should be scared of them, but I was nervous. The main thing I knew about them was that they were perceived to be different.

By the age of 17, probably the two most rounded gay characters I was aware of were Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Uncle Monty in Withnail and I. I was also somewhat sexually confused as well - after all, I'd been called it enough that it was possible that other people saw something in me that I didnt. I didn't think I was into guys, but what if I actually was? And what would happen if I was hanging around with gay men? Along with all my other fears, I was also worried that I would be judgemental.

Flash forward a short while to me at seventeen, and my first day in university, and I was going around, meeting people. One of the first doors I knocked on was opened by someone I wasn't expecting to see. He was over six foot tall and slim, with bright pink hair. He was also dressed from neck to ankle in PVC, along with a pair of bright pink fluffy slippers.

I had never met anyone like this before. I put my hand out, probably with my jaw dropped, and he didn't shake it - he took it carefully, and introduced himself: "Hello, I'm Thom. That's Thom with a 'h'. The 'h' stands for homosexual".

While it probably didn't actually take more than a second, I remember my thought process clearly, as I was faced with someone who was far, far more out than anyone I had ever met before.

"Right, okay, this is new. What do I do? I've got, as far as I can see it, two choices. I can either freak out and walk away, and decide that's who I'm going to be, or I can decide that it doesn't matter and just be fine with it."

And what I said was "Hi, I'm Chris. Pleased to meet you." And from there, it was fine. Thom was absolutely lovely, and while we didn't become lifelong friends or anything, I think it's fair to say that we got on and were generally pleased to see each other around.

That was almost seventeen years ago, and I remember it vividly. I remember the flash of fear and the flash of feeling that I had no idea how to handle this situation, and then how quickly and how easily I realised that even slight fear of someone because they were gay was bullshit. Once I came to that first step, it stopped being something to worry about.

But I also realised how easy it would have been to have gone the other way. How easy it would have been to have seen what I saw as confirmation that here was somebody that was different to me, and that difference was negative. Personally, I think that would have been the point where I would have slipped from ignorance to hatred, and that's something I'm very glad that I didn't do.

Later, someone I shared a house with had an abortion, and while I think I successfully kept my judgement from her, I did judge her for it. I judged her for not having been sensible enough to avoid getting pregnant in the first place, and I absolutely judged her for not telling the father. I felt that she overrode his rights and put herself first, and took him out of the decision making process. I felt she treated the abortion casually and I found that idea difficult. I wasn't completely against the idea of abortion itself, but I did feel that it should be agonised over and debated and thought about, and was a big, serious step.

I look back on that and I realise how completely in the wrong my point of view was. But that realisation took me time, and took me far longer than I wish it had done.

I was raised Catholic, and anti-abortion imagery was around my upbringing. More so in the culture I was brought up in than absolutely directly in my family, but still very much there. I'd grown up with the idea that it was simply a wrong thing to do, although I ended up taking the personal viewpoint more that it was a practical choice in places, but should always be treated as a last resort.

The mistake that I made there (as if it isn't obvious) was putting my own discomfort with the idea ahead of a woman's right to make choices with regards to her own body. I was doing the same thing with the discomfort over whether or not the man involved with the pregnancy had been told.

Sometimes, a realisation is about putting things in a way that you just cannot argue with, and the line that I eventually came up with was this: My right to feel uncomfortable with a situation comes a distant second to a woman's right to make her own choices.

And lo and behold, when I came to that understanding, suddenly I was a lot less uncomfortable with the situation. Go figure.

I don't feel, looking back, that I was a horrible person, but I do feel that I was ignorant and naive. I had fairly firmly established ideas about what constituted right and wrong, and while I think that I got a reasonable amount of stuff right, it also led me to hold some beliefs that now make me very uncomfortable to have ever held at all. If you asked me if I believed in equality, I'd have said yes, and I would have meant it

So why do I now share them? Why do I share things that make me absolutely cringe to talk about? And of course, there's more, because I was young and stupid, and now I'm older and hopefully a little les stupid - at the very least, I'm more willing to listen and try to get to that understanding.

Am I saying 'Oh, you don't understand, poor me, I'm actually the victim here, with my upbringing and naivety - just leave me alone and remember how difficult it can be to be wrong'? Hell, no. If anything, I'm saying 'Get on me harder, because I know I get stuff wrong, and I want to get better at getting it right.'

Obviously, that comes with caveats - one of them being that it isn't your job or responsibility to help me out if you don't want to, and another being that it's important to remember that you may not always be right about the situation as well (and if there are two things that social media seem to increase, it's the apparent certainty of being right and the increased ability to be misunderstood - I've seen far too many arguments where I think both people were misunderstanding each other more than disagreeing).

My intention with this rather rambling blog post has been to use my own experiences to come to a more general point.  Because the important point is the ignorance. I think that ignorance and hatred are different things, although I also think that ignorance can easily lead to hatred. And hatred doesn't have many solutions. But ignorance? That can have some solutions. The light of normality can help out with a lot of them. And when you don't understand something, when you don't know how you're going to react to it, fear can come from a number of directions.

Nowadays, I tend to hold my tongue a lot more. Not because I'm scared of what I'm going to say (and anybody that knows me away from a computer screen knows that it doesn't take much for me to give my opinions about things), but because I'm more aware that there are situations where, whichever side I'm on, my voice doesn't need to be part of the conversation. Just my ears, at least for now, until I've listened more to the voices that speak with experience.

Social media is amazing for this. You can seek out people who know more about things than you do, and listen to them. Hear viewpoints different to your own and be prepared to examine your own beliefs. It's important for all of us, and I honestly think it's the best thing about the internet.

Because I'd rather have been wrong through ignorance and have the ability to change, then think I'm always right and lose that ability. Being wrong isn't the end of the world. But refusing to believe that you can be wrong? That's unlikely to be good.

The Scottish Daily Express, February 20th 1954.

I bought an original edition of the Scottish Daily Express from the 20th of February, 1954 for my Grandparents' 60th Wedding anniversary. It was a souvenir of the day that they got married (in Scotland, which is why it's that specific newspaper - they were actually more likely to read the Daily Record, but I couldn't find a copy of that).

I found it interesting reading through it, so I scanned the entire thing and thought I'd put it on here for you to read if you so desire. I couldn't quite believe that it was only 8 pages long. Newspapers now have so much more, but so much less on each page. I find myself wishing there were more papers like this now.

Some points that I found interesting - celebrity culture is nothing new. Check out Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe both prominently placed in stories. Also, an advert for cars that cost in the hundreds of pounds. My favourite story is about a girl who defied her father, which makes for a strange headline. And it turns out that even just two panels of Rupert The Bear is too much for me to pay attention to, as I found my attention wandering away immediately.

 Because I found the customer service good, and they got this out to me quickly and it was in good condition, I think that's always worth sharing - I bought it from www.greatexperiencedays.co.uk. But, anyway, I hope you enjoy. Let me know if there's anything that particularly gets your attention.