28 Nov 2011, Posted by Nick in General,Interviews,Journalism,Parenting,Spirituality, No Comments.

A chat with Annie Lennox

I’ve long admired Annie Lennox, both for the gutsy emotional honesty of her music and her commitment to human rights campaigning (not to mention my Eighties nostalgia for all those insanely danceable Eurythmics riffs). So when I got the chance to interview her for the December issue of Third Way magazine, I decided to dig a little deeper to find out what has shaped her philosophy of life. Here are some of my favourite moments from our 70-minute conversation…

In 1984, you were married briefly to a devotee of Hare Krishna. I’m wondering what spiritual searching was going on behind the scenes.

I certainly felt that sense of, you know, what is this all about? What’s the purpose of existence, and why was I born? You know, looking for authenticity and connection, whether human or spiritual… [Being on tour] wasn’t great for that – especially for a woman… So, again I experienced a certain isolation. 

That marriage was really a very foolish thing on my part. It was a piece of paper, absolutely a piece of paper. I met this person who sort of intended to meet me, and I was very impressed, because I thought: Wow, this is the real deal! He’s a vegetarian, he’s completely extreme! I mean, Hare Krishna is not conventional in any sense from a Western perspective. I would call the movement fairly fundamentalist – their views are set in stone.

You either believe it or you don’t?

I would say so. You’re either on the boat or you’re not. And I wasn’t and that’s the thing. That’s where the song ‘Missionary Man’ [on Eurythmics’ 1986 album Revenge] comes from – though at the end of the day it is, for me, really about any rigid belief-system that says, ‘This book is the only book, and if you don’t follow it, you’re going to hell.’ I find that kind of thinking really, you know, shocking.

It’s a complicated thing to talk about because I never want to talk negatively about things unless I feel that they themselves are negative, if you see what I mean. But that little dip into that subculture really showed me that people who have very strong ideas about things can sometimes be very twisted.

Why do we so often crave that kind of certainty?

We’re born into consciousness in a body that is so fragile that we could be smashed and our life could be taken away from us at any point, and I believe that we carry a residual angst within us. The perilous nature, the transient nature, of existence is a hard thing to deal with psychologically; and so I think we’re looking for clues as to how we navigate this passage that is so risk-laden, when we know for sure that at the end of it the body will go and we don’t know if the consciousness continues.

I mean, I appreciated aspects of the spiritual values [of the movement], and I found it fascinating. (I’ve just seen [George Harrison:] Living in the Material World, the film [by Martin Scorsese], and it’s so moving! It is beautiful.)

And then in 1988 came the stillbirth of your first child, Daniel. Are you able to talk about the impact of that?

You know, everybody who lives to a certain age is going to have a life-changing experience one way or another, and I would say that these are opportunities for a whole reframing, or even an internal recalibration. They are things you can [either] survive or – and if you’re going to survive, how are you going to? Because it’s just so totally… There’s nothing you can do. Death is death – and when you have a close-up, in-your-face experience of it, you realise (unless you’re terribly impervious) that, you know, this is just a temporary journey and you are not in the driving seat – or, if you are, you are not in full control. And this is humbling, and maybe wisdom can come through this.

You made a decision, I think, that this was not going to floor you, it was going to be an opportunity…

I don’t think you ever make a decision like that, just at one point: I think it’s a process – I think it’s a daily process, a daily choice, a moment-by-moment choice, and you’re always being tested. I don’t think there’s ever a point where you cease to make that decision.

Since then you have had two daughters. Has being a mother changed the way you see life?

Well, having children is another opportunity for a great lesson, you know. It is so obvious, when a baby is delivered – any baby, but especially your baby – that it answers many of the questions immediately. Immediately. The sheer miracle of it, that from one human body emerges another, with all of the vital organs and the muscles and the skin and the features – all of those things; and this is a child just born into the world naked.

And it is a moment, you know, it’s a –

A spiritual moment?

It’s a moment of awakening, yes. Absolutely. And life changes for you. First of all, you no longer just live for yourself: you’re living for another person and you’re responsible for their wellbeing at every level. From a practical point of view, an emotional point of view, you have to be there. You truly are the person that this child is totally, totally dependent on. You are the one.

You always strike me as being very open emotionally, and your 2003 album Bare, in particular, has a sense of melancholy about it, or even despair.

It’s very stripped and very raw. There’s no extraneous artifice – it’s the opposite of Diva [1992]. I mean, the thing is that life is full of polarities and contradictions. You know, we just want it to be all good, or all fabulous, or all this or – and it’s as if we are afraid of the fact that we are full of contradictions all the time. We don’t want to be – we want to be solid and it all to be kind of explicable, and the fact is that it’s not. That’s human nature.

The last song on that album, ‘Oh God (Prayer)’, made a desperate plea: ‘If there was ever a soul to save, it must be me.’ Do you feel that plea has ever been answered?

I think I leave that to the person who is listening. There is not a conclusive answer – and that is probably what shakes you the most: that huge, huge gap between the tiny, tiny person that you feel you are and the emptiness and the imperviousness of the external world. You know, Nature is not necessarily benign: you can look at trees and they’re beautiful but they don’t speak to you, they don’t… Mountains and rivers and lakes, the beauty of the planet – it’s like they have a secret, you know, that you can’t necessarily penetrate. So, the isolation of your existence can be profound.

I often hear a child wailing (because lots of kids pass my house) and I’m like: Wow! Imagine if adults wailed in this free way! We’d all be feeling the pain.

At some point, you suddenly became very involved in campaigning for social justice. What prompted that?

 It wasn’t really sudden. It might have looked that way, but actually that sensibility has always been with me. As a kid [in Aberdeen], I was very empathetic – I would cry when I saw things like animals or people being vulnerable. There was a man with a hunchback who played the accordion on the street corner and it used to upset me terribly every time I had to pass him – I used to feel so sad. I think that most of us naturally do have a sense of compassion for others, and that is, fundamentally, what draws me into the pursuit of human rights and justice.

I wonder whether in your campaigning work you have found the connection you don’t seem to find in Nature.

I do feel that I’m plugging in. I feel that…

I don’t have the answers, you know – I look at the world and the problems, the issues, are just infinite. So, I have to really understand that my patch is absolutely tiny, tiny – and therefore I could conclude that there is no point, because it’s not going to solve anything, you know? But, having said that, I think that it’s when each individual engages in some way, at some level, in some aspect, that you start to find purpose.

Cynics will say: It’s all very well for the rich and famous to campaign about these things! What entitles pop stars to speak out on issues like poverty and injustice?

Because we have a platform. But you can’t speak up about something unless you have a passion for it or you’ll soon be exposed for the fraud that you are. And you have to continue until you create some results. Like, there’s a lot of people that’ll show up –

As in Live Aid and so on?

Yeah – and that’s fine, there’s no criticism in that, because that was part of the collective contribution. But the key is commitment.

And you have done eight, nine years of this kind of work full-time, is that right?

Yes, but it goes back even further. I really started to understand that advocacy can be a very powerful thing if it’s done well [when I saw] the Amnesty International [‘Human Rights Now!’] tour with Tracy Chapman and Peter Gabriel and Youssou N’Dour back in [1988]. I saw what they were doing and I was like: Oh, my goodness! I want to do that, I want to do that! And then [Eurythmics] took part in the [70th Birthday Tribute] Concert for Nelson Mandela, while he was still incarcerated on Robben Island; and that was a collective moment.

What got you so totally committed to the Aids/HIV work?

It was going to South Africa and encountering Mandela and the 46664 campaign [www.46664.com], which gave musicians like myself an opportunity to visit orphanages, clinics, hospitals, people’s homes, and suddenly [see] a whole new world. I hadn’t realised that the pandemic was wiping women and children out at the rate that it was – at that point, 17 million people had died. I was like: Hang on a minute! Why isn’t that…?

Mandela described it as ‘a genocide’. This is how he affected me, because he used the word ‘genocide’. When I heard this word coming from him, the man that the world reveres as the symbol of justice and humanity, I had to ask myself: What the hell is going on? And then I started to enquire, and I understood.

It still doesn’t resonate with people, but I identified with the women because I’m a mother, I’ve given birth to daughters…

But then you come back home and already people are talking about ‘compassion fatigue’…

And do you know what? The solution is not necessarily compassion. You know, you can campaign until you’re blue in the face but things might not change. The solution is collective political will and commitment. Which is why, when I was invited to become a UNAids ambassador, I [jumped at it]. I felt: Now I can get to the places where the change-making decisions can take place.

Given your ambivalence about religion, it may have surprised some people that your latest album was a set of Christmas carols – and filled with a sense of what I think you have called ‘exultation’.

For me, A Christmas Cornucopia works at different levels. The first is that it gave me an opportunity to reconnect with music that was in my blood cells, you know, because I sang all of these songs every year as a child. To come back to them as an adult, as someone who has had experience of life, was a wonderful thing.

I would probably describe myself as ‘agnostic’ – if I had to give myself a label, that could be quite fitting – but in a way I wanted to give out a resonance of the essential messaging behind these songs: something to do with humanity and where we’re at now. And also going underneath that, back to pagan times, to the acknowledgement of the darkness of winter, the bond between mother and child. In a way, I started to see the words as being very metaphorical and, even though I am not a Christian, I could interpret them more broadly to be more about the miracle of all creation.

You have implied that there are things that go deeper than religion, and underlie it. What are you thinking of?

The mystery of life. The mystery of existence. I mean, we still gaze in wonderment at it. We look through a Hubble telescope and we see the cosmos out there and we also know that a microscope will take us into the microcosm of existence, and we never quite can fathom it. Where does reality lie, you know? Is it in the external or is it in the internal? These are questions that people have been asking from time immemorial.

Who, or what, is God to you – if anything?

‘God’ is a word. It’s a word that describes – just give me a minute – that describes or represents the source of creation. Now, you can take that in different directions – you can say: God is love, God is Allah, God is Buddha, God is many different things. God is a man in the sky with a beard, all kinds of things. But I like to sum it up and say: It is the source of all living things.

And have you felt some connection with that?

Do I feel a connection? In the sense that I am alive and I have a consciousness and I am part of the human experience for this time that I’m on earth, yes, I do; but I don’t worship this, I don’t… I’m in awe, I’m in awe of the mystery of it, the magnificence of it, the extraordinary… I mean, you look at the human body and you cannot help but just be flabbergasted. Even the fact that each person has a unique set of fingerprints – and the billions of people before us and the billions that are yet to be born will all have individual fingerprints. That is the nature of God, if you like.

‘The Universal Child’ on Cornucopia is a very moving song. I imagine that many Christians would see Jesus in those terms. I wonder what he represents for you.

I hear the word and I immediately feel uncomfortable with it; and that is because I was brought up to sing about Jesus every day at school in assembly and I look at the imagery of the man suffering on the cross and I feel this disjunct between what people say and how they act and it constantly disappoints me. [The church] should not be like a club – you’re in the Jesus club and the people that aren’t are wrong. And the things that are done in the name of Jesus – I’m sorry, I’m really being frank about this – they appal me.

If people put kindness, consideration, compassion, understanding first, before the word ‘Jesus’, before the word ‘God’, half of our wars would not have happened, be happening. And why is it that we have to go to war because the God that we spoke to told us we were right? I don’t understand it.

Of course, fundamentalism arises in atheism as well – with Pol Pot and…

It does. It does. It is the camouflage for abuse of power.

And generally the abusers have the loudest voices, don’t they? Are you saying that the rest of us should be making more noise?

I’m not saying what people should be doing – I cannot be prescriptive. But I am saying that people should wake up. Wake up! See where your limitations lie! If you’re a fundamentalist and you’re coming out with statements like ‘God hates fags,’ what justifies this hatred? What is it that makes you feel that God segregates and says, you know, you are right and we’re all wrong, he has spoken to you and he’s given you the seal of approval?

So, you know, this is not – this is not spiritual.

If you had to give up either the campaigning or the music, which would it be?

Well, that puts me in between a rock and a hard place, really. I would… I would be a campaigner, yeah. But at the moment I’m so fortunate because I can do many things, and so I’ll just continue doing what I do until I can’t do it any more.

And when you can’t do it any more? Does that worry you?

Ah, you mean getting older? Well, it is what it is. Does it worry me? I don’t think it helps to worry about getting older, so I tend not to – I look on it as a journey, and I think that I’m very fortunate to be 56 and to feel like a – you know, my mind is incredibly inspired and driven to engage with things that I feel passionately about.

I mean, I’ve lived a long life and I’ve had the benefit of youth and I often look back on it and it seems like there was a lot of vanity in it (but no one realises that until maybe they’ve lived a bit longer). They say that youth is wasted on the young, and very often it is; but the trouble is, people keep seeking eternal youth as if that would be the solution, and I don’t think it is – I feel that you must move, you must keep flowing, you must grow old graciously and – actually, almost with excitement. Being older, I can let go of things that once were so important to me. It’s like: Do you ever look back on your childhood and think how obsessed you were with sweets and wish you were still that person? I don’t.

For the full interview, click here.

‘The House of Annie Lennox’ is on show in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Theatre and Performance galleries until February 26, 2012. Admission is free.

13 Oct 2011, Posted by Nick in General,Parenting,Spirituality, No Comments.

When White Lies Won’t Work

First published on the Fathers’ Network Scotland Website

“Daddy?”

“Yes, love?”

Story time is over, and the lights are out – but I’ve noticed my six-year-old son often uses his last waking moments to bowl me the kind of question that might stump a philosophy graduate.

Past belters have included: Is the Evil Vilgax (from Ben 10) really evil, or just listening to his naughty part? What is Charlie (our cocker spaniel) thinking about when he stares? Or what happens to us when we die? Lying on the carpet beside my son’s bed, I wonder what it will be tonight.

“I don’t believe in God any more,” announces my son. “A boy in my class says he’s just a myth.”

“Just a myth, eh?” I say, carefully. “Well that’s okay, people believe all kinds of different things about God.”

“But what do you think?” he says, anxiously. The clock ticks in the darkness.

*

Do any other dads out there struggle with just how truthful to be with their kids? Are there any useful rules of thumb on when to tell “white lies” and when to be absolutely honest?

I know it’s a dilemma that’s not unique to father-child relationships, or indeed adults: as an anxious pre-teen, I remember playing along with Santa Claus for several years after I’d worked out the truth, partly out of a desire not to spoil the magic for my parents.

In her book Why We Lie, the psychologist Dorothy Rowe writes: “If parents lie consistently about just one thing, say, the reality of Santa Claus, the child can be deceived. But if they lie about something that affects every part of the children’s life, the children know that something is wrong, even if they do not know what it is.”

I think she’s right. My son knows immediately if there’s any discord between his mum and I, however tactfully we feel we’ve been concealing it. In these situations, it’s better to tell the truth with specificity and compassion. “Sometimes me and mum see things differently and we have to work out a compromise – and sometimes we end up arguing. But it doesn’t mean we’re going to split up.”

Which is fine, as long as this is true. But what about those situations when the worst really might happen?

I always wince at those Hollywood movie moments where a dad facing a marital breakdown/terminal illness/terrorist kidnapping threat says with fierce love to his child: “Honey, I promise I will never let you down!” (Oh really? So what happens when you lose custody/touch/consciousness/your life? What will that mean to your child? Will they ever believe a promise again?)

Or conversely, do children need such well-intentioned absolutes, regardless of whether they turn out to be true in the long-term? Do we forgive our parents these betrayals in the same way that they learned to ignore all those socially conditioned white lies of their parents’ generation? (Don’t pull that face – the wind might change and you’d be stuck with it! You’ll go blind if you keep doing that! You’ll get square eyes if you sit too close! Santa won’t come unless you behave!) I don’t think so.

So what should I say about God?

I have an atheist friend who freely admits he has contemplated sending his kids to Sunday school because he thinks the modern lack of spiritual certainty has left us rudderless. In my own case, I know that my own childhood faith was crucial in giving me a sense that I was unconditionally loved (and therefore loveable) regardless of what was happening in everyday life.

God was important to my son too, particularly when he was three and asking what would happen if we died. I used to say: “Well, people usually die when they’re much older than me or mum. But even then, God holds everyone in his hands – and none of us can fall out of God.”

I still broadly believe this, but would be slower to define God than I once was. Nowadays, rather than the bearded interventionist patriarch of yore, I think about a “higher power”; an energy which I can call on, perhaps as much from within as without; the force of love which we humans embody at our best. So in that sense, I think my son is right that God is a myth – and a very important one at that. I mean myth in the sense of a powerful allegory or story which contains a larger truth.

But of course, that’s not what my son means. He wants to know if God is real in the way that my hand is real, holding his. So: do I believe in God?

I choose my words carefully. “To be honest, love, there are times when I find it hard to believe in a God like that. And there are other times when I feel sure there’s somebody bigger out there looking after us. And sometimes I just don’t know.”

Looking down from his Scooby Doo pillow, my son’s face lights up. “That’s what I think too, dad!” he says with relief. “Sometimes I believe in God and sometimes I think he’s a myth!” He yawns, squeezes my hand, and within five minutes he is asleep.

I still don’t know when or if it’s right to tell white lies. But looking at my sleeping son, I can’t help thinking that an honest answer, however complex, is sometimes preferable to the lingering suspicion of a kindly-meant lie.

What do you think?

04 Oct 2011, Posted by Nick in General,Spirituality, No Comments.

Paradoxical Commandments

Check out this great song by the Roches. Apparently it comes from a list of “paradoxical commandments” first penned by a guy called Kent Keith and since adopted by folks ranging from Steven Covey to Mother Theresa.

Stick them on your computer for those days that feel as if you’re pushing rocks up hill… 

Anyway

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, People may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you.
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight. Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough.
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway

04 Aug 2011, Posted by Nick in Broadcasting,Features,General,Journalism, No Comments.

How life became radio drama

Recording This Solitary Bird, May 11

 

BBC link to This Solitary Bird

Not long after my friend Will McMillan passed away in 2005 (see The Saving Grace), I began to consider writing about him. His angry public outbursts were no secret, but I knew a much deeper, more generous man too and wanted to commemorate his short but vigorous life. I remembered many conversations, often surprising to both of us, which lent themselves to drama – particularly the intimate, intense medium of radio drama. But I had no prior experience in that field.

Thankfully, I was able to get a place in 2009 on the excellent Radio Lab, at that time run jointly by the Scottish Book Trust and BBC Radio Scotland as a way of fostering new radio writers. About ten of us spent a week working intensively with seasoned BBC producer David Ian Neville and other writers/dramatists on exercises ranging from dry-run pitching sessions to a collaborative 45-minute play recorded at BBC Scotland in Glasgow. It was a great primer, and soon afterwards David encouraged me to write what would become This Solitary Bird. As a first-time dramatist, I would need a full draft to show to commissioning editors in London, with no guarantee that anyone would broadcast it.

WRITING THE SCRIPT

I duly started hammering out a script, and promptly hit a problem. Although the colourful memories from my friendship with Will made an interesting series of anecdotes, they didn’t automatically cohere into a compelling narrative. I would need to inject all the usual devices of suspense, plotting and characterisation in order to sustain interest – and that might mean being a little more playful with the story. As if to confirm this, Radio 4 knocked back a pitch from an early draft on the basis that while Will’s character was fascinating and dynamic, the journalist (ie a thinly-veiled yours truly) needed work to sustain interest. Ouch! Taking that one on the chin, I started fictionalising more freely, improvising with new plot twists and injecting some narrative tension to the play. One draft on, BBC Radio Scotland liked what they saw, and commissioned it.

However, completing the play still felt difficult – I kept getting stuck, particularly with the character of the journalist. I was simultaneously in the final stages of writing a very personal book, and frankly a little jaded with confessional writing from personal experience, however cunningly disguised. Yet for some reason I also balked at the idea of complete fiction. As the deadline for the penultimate script meeting with David approached, I had a sinking feeling that the whole project was about to die in my arms.

I CHANGE SEX

In desperation, I resorted to an old trick for overcoming writer’s block – I changed gender. Rick the rookie reporter became Kate instead, and the change in energy was immediate. The whole thing suddenly felt bigger, more spacious. Released from the shackles of literal reportage of what happened to me and Will, I began to think myself into larger truths, and found the writing coming alive as a result. Instead of the biography of a friendship, I accepted that the play would now be a fictionalised story only loosely based on Will’s personality – but still intended as a tribute to the man I once knew, and others like him.

While a number of scenes were still drawn from real life, I rather liked the fact that nobody would know which ones – that anything unhelpful could be blamed on my overactive writer’s imagination, not taken as biographical evidence against me or, more importantly, Will – who was of course no longer around to speak for himself. I whistled through the final draft, got a thumbs up from the almost supernaturally patient David Ian Neville, and by May 2011 we were ready to record it . It was almost two years since I first sent my application to Radio Lab, and six years since Will’s death.

Here’s what the BBC advance publicity said:

Kate is a young journalist starting work on a Scottish newspaper. Bill is a disenfranchised loner with an axe to grind. Their unlikely alliance begins in simple self-interest: Bill wants the ear of a privileged insider, while Kate sees a guide to the underclass she hopes to document. Neither is prepared for the intensity of their shared journey as they reach across Edinburgh’s dark social divide in search of the truth about one another. What is the dark secret that lies behind Bill’s disfiguring bruises – or his desperate religious certainties? Unknown to Kate, time is running out for her chaotic friend – and instead of an article, she is destined to deliver Bill’s funeral address.

RECORDING THE PLAY

Full cast, This Solitary Bird

Watching my written words take life in the studio at Pacific Quay was a bizarre and awe-inspiring experience. Thanks to David’s great casting, Finlay McLean as Bill sounded so uncannily like Will that I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck as he growled the lines. Kim Gerard was also an inspired choice as Kate the reporter trying to get to grips with Bill’s chaotic life, and Kenny Blyth and Julie Austin were pitch perfect across the various other parts.

I was on hand to clear up ambiguities (and excessive expletives) in the script and also to find cuts, often at a moment’s notice, to keep the play to its allotted 28 minutes. The writerly dictum “kill your babies” has never felt so apt, but there was no time for getting precious. Just slash this, cut that, and move on – invigorating stuff.

Meanwhile the intricacies of the recording process were utterly fascinating, if slightly more subtle than the sink-plunger sound-effects for Dr Who I’d once seen on Blue Peter.  The studio is laid out in different sub-rooms to create the maximum number of alternative acoustic environments. So, for example, the built in stairs were surfaced with three different parallel surfaces – concrete, wood or metal – leading to a front door equipped with either soft suburban doorbell or harsh tenement buzzer. And the guys in the sound booth could also overlay tracks from the archives to create anything from a newsroom with background murmur and chirping phones, to a busy Edinburgh street or boat trip to Bass Rock.

It’s all a wonderful illusion, yet it somehow works even when you can see behind the scenes. At one point I could look through a glass screen and see Finlay and Kim holding scripts in front of microphones and stamping up and down on gravel beds inlaid in the studio floor – and yet we were still unequivocally in the midst of an emotional showdown on the beach at North Berwick, thanks to overlaid sound-effects of gulls and waves, and some fabulous acting and direction.

That’s what they call the magic of radio. And I think I’m hooked.

03 Aug 2011, Posted by Nick in Broadcasting,Features,General,Journalism, No Comments. Tagged David Ian Neville, marginalisation, Nick Thorpe, This Solitary Bird, Will McMillan

The Saving Grace

Journalist Nick Thorpe tells of the inspiration for his new play – an unexpected friendship formed at the margins of society.

When I first saw Will McMillan, he was wearing a battered overcoat, a silk cravat and a frown which hung like forked lightning above the storm cloud of his beard.

He struck me as just the kind of man I would instinctively avoid in the street.

As a cub reporter, newly arrived in Edinburgh from London, it fell to me as a kind of rite of passage to field the latest “story idea” from one of my newspaper’s more volatile readers. “You?” he barked through broken teeth. “You’re barely out of short trousers! And you’re not even Scottish!”

It was an inauspicious start, particularly when I could make no promise that the paper would publish his hand-written musings on international war crimes. But against the odds it was to be the first of many meetings, and the beginnings of an unusual friendship.

It was mainly liberal guilt that motivated me at first, based on the assumption that I ought to help a marginalised fellow writer. But Will could sniff a patronising attitude like a shark scents blood and as time went by I grew simply to enjoy his bracing directness, such a refreshing contrast to the English habit of talking endlessly around an unspoken truth. It also helped that we hovered, for a while, on the fringes of the same Edinburgh church, both muttering about leaving, albeit for different reasons: Will liked the conservative evangelical theology, but felt ill-at-ease amid a wealthy middle-class congregation, while for me it was the other way round.

Steadily haemorrhaging faith, I increasingly saw myself as the embodiment of agnostic tolerance – at least until I aired my views with Will. After one of his diatribes on immigration or the reality of hell for homosexuals, I found it frighteningly easy to get into a stand-up row. I soon realised that my own anger was every bit as primal as Will’s, just directed at different things and buffered much deeper below the surface of my generally comfortable life.

Will had no such luxury. He lived alone in a series of grim council flats, and often woke up bruised and bleeding from the violent epileptic fits that had plagued him since childhood. At the age of 38 going on 50, he dismissed any suggestion that he might go into sheltered accommodation, proudly attributing his independence to his late mother, who had insisted he would do normal childhood things like riding a bike.

Now estranged from his father and remaining family, however, Will seemed to me to have crossed the line from independence to loneliness. His anger, like his epilepsy, was always threatening to boil over, often with complete strangers.

He ended up in court for assault on a couple of occasions, and took compulsory anger management classes – but I think what he most needed, when the red mist began to descend, was someone to listen. His furrowed face would relax visibly over our ritual cup of tea as he moved from ranting, to bemoaning, to musing and sometimes finally even a bashful hug.

The need simply to be heard is an undervalued one, and it worries me that professional listeners – social workers, health visitors, doctors, counsellors – are now more stretched than ever from austerity cuts and savings. And how would a man like Will survive without the back-up of Disability Living Allowance, which gave him the breathing space to pursue his lifelong passion for writing?

At first I encouraged him to write about his own life, as a kind of therapy as much as anything else, but he disdained such self-indulgence, preferring to tap out speculative articles on anything from the evils of unemployment to the intricacies of international law – a few of which did make it into print. But he also wrote poems, on subjects like nature, friendship and the solitary life of the wandering albatross. He loved bird watching, and on a subsequent birthday boat-trip to the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, gasped joyfully at the “sheer bloody audacity” of the diving gannets – before succumbing to sea-sickness. I felt privileged to see the gentler side of a man who had been forced, by harsh circumstances, to grow a tough skin.

With some trepidation I invited him to my wedding, where he acquitted himself with the manners of a society dandy and even coaxed my mother-in-law on to the dance floor.

His faith in a loving (if rather choosy) God remained more or less unshaken throughout our 10-year friendship, and it dawned on me eventually that for a man in Will’s position, my intellectual doubts were simply an unaffordable luxury. His beliefs were more like the navigation system of a wandering albatross – they made the difference between sink or swim. Once, after a severe fit which landed him in hospital, he told me he had fought off the devil and told him he was not ready to die yet – he still had God’s work to do.

But he did die, quite suddenly in 2005, alone in his flat in the midst of an epileptic fit. He was 46. By the time I heard, a week later, he had already been cremated and all his papers and possessions cleared. At a belated memorial service attended by a scattering of well-wishers – pals from his housing scheme, the proprietor of his favourite bookshop, the minister and other church friends – I gave a tribute and pondered his fascination with war crimes. Was it his inbuilt desire for justice, or regret at how we humans so often let ourselves down? The answer seemed to lie in a sentence he had underlined in one of his own articles: “It is not judgment that is important, it is forgiveness.”

Will understood forgiveness better than anyone I know. God knows he had to ask for it often enough. His temper landed him in police cells, in hospital, and often drove away people who could have loved him.

But it meant he knew about starting again, and that old-fashioned thing called grace – an increasingly scarce commodity in a hyperactive consumer society.

I miss the way Will helped me slow down – how he’d wait till I had my mouth stuffed with lunch before asking why I hadn’t “given thanks”. Or the way he playfully mimicked my answer machine with po-faced messages telling me that Will was far too busy and important to talk to the likes of me. He hated answer machines. Will was a face-to-face sort of guy.

I sometimes glimpse him in the eyes of those solitary, angry men I still instinctively avoid in the street, and wonder if they too have generous, undiscovered hearts. Recently I’ve written a fictionalised radio play in tribute to them all, based loosely on that scary, fascinating man I first met at front counter. I still miss him.

It’s funny: I always thought our friendship was about Will needing my help. Now he’s gone I realise how much I needed his.

Article originally published in the Herald, 2nd August. This Solitary Bird was broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland on 3rd August 2011. 

02 Aug 2011, Posted by Nick in Broadcasting,General, No Comments.

My Radio Play – This Solitary Bird

This Solitary Bird, my first radio play went out today on BBC Radio Scotland.

It’s a fictionalised story of an unusual friendship formed at the margins of society, based loosely on my late friend Will McMillan. I met him soon after I arrived in Edinburgh 18 years ago to work as a cub reporter on the Edinburgh Evening News.

I’ll be blogging shortly about the experience of writing and recording the play. But here’s my article in today’s Herald about the friendship that lay behind it.

07 Jun 2011, Posted by Nick in Features,General,Journalism,Urban Worrier, No Comments.

Confessions of a Self-help Junkie

Read full article in The Caledonian Mercury

I am in recovery from a long-standing addiction. While others may secretly gorge on chocolate or swig from a bottle hidden in the top drawer, I head furtively for the Mind Body Spirit section and binge on books promising to change my life in seven easy steps. I could once get an almost physical high breaking open the cover of another seductive promise – Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway, or How to Talk to Anyone – another scheme to eliminate the bits of myself I didn’t like, and win the war.

Then one afternoon, craving my customary hit in Waterstone’s, I overdosed on the Victorian grandfather of them all: Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. Rarely has a surname been so misleading. The cover ought to have been health warning enough: my edition carried a line drawing of a man clutching his forehead, his eyes dark sockets beneath a migrainous frown as he studied his books by candlelight. It looked horribly familiar.

Born in 1812 in Haddington, Smiles tried his hand as a GP, political campaigner, newspaper editor, railway secretary and industrial biographer before capturing the zeitgeist with Self-Help. “The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual,” he summarised in the first paragraph, effectively writing the manifesto for the vast modern publishing genre he would unwittingly spawn. “Exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength.”

Back then, it must have felt bold and empowering. Coincidentally published on the same day in 1859 as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it sold more copies that first year than Darwin would sell in his lifetime, and has now topped several million in a staggering 40 languages, with fans ranging from Chinese emperors to Margaret Thatcher.

On one level, it’s not hard to see why. While Darwin’s theories seemed to point readers back to the primordial swamp, Smiles bombarded them with potted biographies of human perfectibility, available to anyone willing to persevere with all that hard work.

It’s what we all want to believe, isn’t it? That if we just try a little harder, reach that next rung of the ladder, everything will start to fall into place. But what if the relentless trying with which we fill our lives becomes the very thing that’s blocking our happiness? Psychologists now agree that crude willpower, like oil, is an expendable resource – it won’t last for ever. The truth is that it didn’t ultimately work even for Smiles himself – because not long after the publication of Self-Help, the champion of the Victorian work ethic quietly had a stroke.

“I was habitually careless of my health,” he would finally confess in an unfinished autobiography, after aphasia had forced him to learn to read and write from scratch. “I did not take my meals regularly… My physical power was getting wasted faster than my enfeebled digestion could repair it… Why did not I stop?”

It’s a good question. A few years ago I nearly suffered a physical breakdown of my own trying furiously to work myself into the life I believed I needed. Exhausted with the perpetual slog of self-improvement, I decided to spend a year loosening up instead. I began by jumping off a Cornish cliff, and strapping myself to the wings of a biplane – a sort of adrenalin enema for my overstuffed mind.

Then I ambled at home and abroad in search of answers to my key questions: Will life grind to a halt if I stop pushing so hard – or might I regain a little playfulness instead? Ultimately, can I learn the capacity for contentment, or is it as arbitrary as hair colour, a trait we’re born with? My gurus and role models ranged from monks to naturists, clowns to schoolkids. Some were radicals who had abandoned the rat race altogether, but others had found a way to dance with everyday pressures such as mortgages, parenting and pay-cheques.

Their common message was as paradoxical as it was unexpected: as Carl Jung put it, “we cannot change anything unless we accept it” – a truth even the NHS is now promoting through mindfulness meditation or self-compassion therapies. For me it was an epiphany that changed the way I live.

After a year of learning the lost art of letting go, I can’t help wishing poor old Samuel Smiles had access to such distinctly un-Victorian methods. I’m told I’m more playful, less self-critical, and therefore (ironically) more productive. I’ve also found the confidence to adopt a son with my wife – one of the single most enduring sources of happiness in my life. And I’m rather more discriminating than I once was in my choice of self-help books – in fact, in the process, I’ve arguably ended up writing my own.

Ah well. Old habits die hard, as they say.

27 May 2011, Posted by Nick in General,News,Urban Worrier, No Comments.

Edinburgh Book Launch Jun 7th

Edinburgh Launch of Urban Worrier
Tues 7th June, 6.30pm
Blackwell’s Bookshop
52-63 South Bridge, Edinburgh
EH1 1YS
Ticketed but free 

Calling all Urban Worriers! Do you ever wish life could be a little less stressful? Well come and join the club! In less than a week my new book will hit the bookshelves and I’m hoping you’ll help me launch it with readings and chat over a relaxing glass of wine.

Urban Worrier: Adventures in the Lost Art of Letting Go (Abacus, 2 Jun 2011) is the story of my year-long quest to find balance and fulfilment by sampling everything from naturism to monasticism, Buddhism to ballooning. Ultimately it’s about bringing a kinder, more playful approach to everyday life. I’d love to see you at Blackwell’s to read you a little more about it – and the book itself will be on sale for purchase/signing if you like what you hear.

I will be doing other events and certain book festivals over the summer, but this is the only one with free tickets! To reserve your place, email: events.edinburgh@blackwell.co.uk or phone Blackwells on 0131 622 8222.

Hope to see you there!

27 May 2011, Posted by Nick in General,News,Urban Worrier, No Comments.

Pre-order Offer on Amazon

With less than a week until Urban Worrier goes on sale, I noticiced this morning that Amazon is doing a big opening offer for those who pre-order the book: reduced from £13.99 to £7.75 – so you’re almost getting two for the cover price of one.

So if you’re an Amazon user, please go ahead and pre-order here – I’m not sure how long this reduction will last. You can even sample excerpts from the book before buying, using their “Look Inside” function. And don’t worry, they won’t debit your card till they mail the books out on June 2nd.

22 May 2011, Posted by Nick in News,Urban Worrier, No Comments.

Sunday with Sally Magnusson