We’re currently out in Detroit making the second issue of Boat Magazine. You can follow our progress here.

I come from a place where people grumble about where they live, where people moan about the weather, the traffic, the Olympics, the cost of living, and where nothing’s every good enough. I come from a place where people say ten no’s before they utter a yes, where strangers barely acknowledge each other. London and Detroit are a thousand miles apart in a whole lot of ways, but one thing that is so immediate, more so than the blight you see driving from Ferndale to Downtown, through pot-holed Woodward Avenue, is the spirit of the people we’ve met here.

It was typified in the welcome we received from Dan this morning, one of the owners of American Coney Island, who spent half an hour with us talking about Tony Blair’s pay packet and using sauce bottles to explain the global oil situation. It was evident in the helpfulness of the lady from the urban farm next door, who called a few friends to see if they could talk to us about a story I’m working on. It was in the hospitality of Kristyn and Malikun from the Pink Flamingo food truck, who took us in and gave us coffee, nachos, and speeches, and in the generosity of Rob and Jasmin who we met tonight in Birmingham, who have offered to hook us up.

But there’s one story that stands out. Malikun knew I was invited to a party in Birmingham, and knowing that I had packed light, and hadn’t anything in my luggage that fit the dress code. After photographing him and Kristyn, he went back into his house to his room and came out with a jacket I could wear tonight. In shocking Flamingo pink.

I did eleven laps of Queens Park with Etta early yesterday morning trying to settle her.

In today’s Sunday Times AA Gill spends a night camping in the Forest of Dean, and his account oozes the warmth of autumn under layers of clothes and sleeping bags. I can’t link to the article because you have to subscribe to online content these days, so I’ve typed it up stroke by stroke, smiling all the way.

“We are not one of the great outdoors nations. We don’t go walkabout, camping is not in our blood. For us, camping is a comfortable, national joke: collapsible tents, sodden sheets, burnt beans, malevolent cows and flashed buttocks. The point is to cram as much of the convenience of home into the outdoors as possible. It’s a cross between a car boot sale and a big girl’s game of make-believe house. In the toilet block, fathers hold up infants in Spiderman jim-jams to brush their teeth. You get the feeling that most families won’t stray far; the tent or the caravan is accomplishment enough, a small but significant annual Everest. They’re happy to have moved the familiar chores to a new setting, surrounded by trees and each other. As I lie in my sleeping bag in the roof of the camper, I can see the flicker of light, the smell of congealing sausages, and hear the lowing of chat and the bursts of giggling that are the natural sounds of Britain under canvas.”

I wrote this piece last week for Make/Shift Magazine – a 48 hour magazine edited by Stack for the Royal Festival Hall’s sixtieth anniversary of the Festival of Britain. The accompanying illustration is by the super-talented Zoe Barker.

On the ground floor of the Royal Festival Hall is an area devoted to the year 1951. Wandering through I find it filled with patchwork quilts, propaganda films and Meccano; crowds of people who lived through the 50s stand around pointing out things they used to have, while hipster couples in skinny jeans point to things they want. In amongst the sea of adults, an eight-year-old boy in a Ben Ten T-shirt wrinkles his nose at a living room set up with its retro telly and Bakelite. He doesn’t want to be here – he wants to be in the gift shop, where every eight-year-old boy has wanted to be since eight-year-old boys were first dragged to cultural entertainments.

My wife and I had a daughter in June. We haven’t had a child before, and it changes a few things. In a week swept up in the London riots, you’d be forgiven for not wanting to imagine the Great Britain our daughter will grow up in. She was a picture of serenity while Croydon burned live on Sky News and flat-screens went missing from Currys. The Twitterati prophesied the end of the world, but civil unrest isn’t a new invention. In the summer of 1958, London was turned upside down by the Notting Hill Race Riots. Their ‘hoodies’ were called ‘teddy boys’. A small minority rioted. Five nights of unrest. A hundred police officers injured.

It’s common for pieces on the future to get carried away. To paint either a utopian vision of milk and honey, or an anarchic Armageddon, with Tarantino whispering stage directions from the shadows. The journalists of the 50s no doubt pictured us in 2011 zipping around on hoverboards and rocket-packs and living like the Jetsons. And there’s a bit of that – our impromptu newsroom for the weekend is just a few yards away from a 3D printer that literally ‘prints’ objects. But marooned in the Festival of Britain in 1951, with a Ben Ten eight-year-old tugging on his mother’s sleeve, what strikes me is not how alien this ‘Area 51’ feels, but how familiar it all is.

In 2071 there’ll still be love and fear. Men still won’t be able to understand women. Flat-pack furniture will still come with indecipherable instructions. Television viewers will still enter prize draws to win holidays to Vegas. There’ll be a minority that riots, and a majority that comes together and tries to figure out how it all got to this. We’ll forget to phone our mums, we’ll laugh at puerile jokes, we’ll spend far too much time worrying about things we can never change. Teenagers will smell of teenagers, tea will come in bags. Some people will believe in God and other people won’t.

I’m not worried about what changes in 60 years time. I hope one of them is that we find a cure for cancer. I hope homes become affordable again. I hope the internet doesn’t make us lazy. But when I think of the things I’m scared about, what Britain will look like isn’t of them. Naïve as I am, I still believe in humanity. And in the grand narrative arc of life, sixty years is like an evening gone.

This is an article I wrote for Boat Magazine – a nomadic publication that devoted its first issue to the city of Sarajevo. The photograph was taken by Max Knight.

Danis fiddled with an electronic cigarette.
“How old are you?” he asked me.
“Thirty,” I replied.
He put one end of the cigarette into his mouth, took the smallest drag and blew three perfect smoke rings that hung in the air like something from Disney’s Fantasia and broke just centimeters in front of my face.
“When I was one year older I won an Oscar,” he said.
In 2002, No Man’s Land won the Best Foreign Language Film at the 74th Academy Awards. It was the first feature Danis had directed.

When it comes to directing, Danis Tanović is undoubtedly a natural. When we met for lunch, he chose the venue, led the conversation, told the chef what to cook and me what I was eating – chicken curry, rice, fried potatoes, beef and mushrooms in pumpkin oil, then chocolate cake, and rakjia. I lent forward to chink glasses, unaware that he had already thrown his down his throat. He looked at me over the aluminum frames of his spectacles and smiled. No Man’s Land is the story of three wounded soldiers: a Bosnian and a Serb meeting in a trench between lines, and a third soldier who comes to, but can’t move a muscle because he’s lying on a mine. It’s an intelligent satire that explores the meaninglessness of war. There are no good guys or bad guys, for Danis they’re merely human beings caught up in an inhuman conflict. I asked him if the image of the soldier
lying on the mine was his picture of Bosnia at the end of the conflict.
“Not just for then,” he said, “for now.”
He said he thought that if nothing changes there will be another war. I hadn’t heard anyone talk like that in Sarajevo before.

The interview took an eccentric twist when he interrupted me to take a telephone call from his butcher, and after a debate I wish I could have understood, he settled on chicken for dinner. Danis has a great sense of humour. He asked what restaurants I’d been to, just to laugh at me struggling to pronounce them. He cites his favourite British films as Only Fools and Horses and ‘Allo ‘Allo!  Over lunch, just as in his films, he landed punches in between the laughs. He joked about life in the war. “It was a lot of fun,” he said, “You could shag whoever you wanted. But was it better? If you ask me if I would like a grenade landing next to my child, then of course it isn’t.”
Danis lived in Paris and Brussels for almost a decade. He returned with his family to Sarajevo a few years ago.
“So why did you come back?” I asked.
“This is where I was born,” he said, “I was born in this shit-hole. Where were you guys born…? Well you were born it that shit-hole.”
He shrugged in a very Bosnian way and then went on to explain that his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Family comes first, he told me, then film, then everything else. He passed me his iPhone and showed me a photograph of his wife and children.

When I asked him if he was optimistic about the future, he was already primed with the reply, “A pessimist says ‘It can’t get worse’ and an optimist says ‘Oh, yes it can!’ Am I an optimist? Well it could be worse, so yes I am.” It was a line from No Man’s Land. Optimism is almost a dirty word in Sarajevo. Sometimes when you look around you can feel the soldier lying on the mine, but then, from time to time you catch these whiffs of optimism. Not so much in words as actions. In 2009 Danis started a tiny political party called Nasa Stranka, or Our Party. It was a reaction to the political situation in BiH with the nationalists on one side and socialists on the other. “We look to the West, not to Pakistan. Though don’t get me wrong, you haven’t got it right. You’ve come here to talk about war, and yet your country is at war, you just treat it like a video game.”

In 2010 Danis was elected to the city council. I pictured the Oscar-winning film director opposite me, in unending meetings about refuse collection. I asked why he started the party. He told me because he is a dumb-ass, that it was a stupid thing to do, but Danis is a man who gets excited about what’s possible.
“Obama,” he said, “Yes We Can! Yes he rode on this wave of false hope, but as a result of
the health care reform, 80 million people have healthcare that didn’t before and that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.”
He pulled his iPhone out to reinforce the point.
“Twenty years ago this would cost you £1billion and no one would know how to use it.”

Though his film-making is classically story driven, he’s excited by the opportunities of 3D films, and doesn’t think anyone’s used it well to date. Take the man lying on the bomb in No Man’s Land. How much better, he said, if the audience could experience and feel what it’s like to be lying on top of it. We would have banned land mines if people could experience what that felt like. Some years ago, when Danis returned to Sarajevo he was approached by a drunk guy in the street. “I know you,” he said, “you are Danis Tanović. You are Star Wars.” Danis knows that these days he comes from a different world, but recognizes that that is precisely why he is here. He could easily have carved out a nice life in Hollywood, or continue to raise his family in France or Brussels, but he wanted to be in government, because what Sarajevo needs are people on the inside who have seen the outside. “Everyone here does not look out there,” he said, “they believe what the newspapers tell them. If the papers say that the ‘84 Olympics was the greatest Olympics in the world, that is what they’ll believe. Which is why we’re in politics to move the boundaries. Just being here moves the borders a little nearer to France.”
Their party spent €50,000 on the election and they’re still paying the debts. The main parties spent millions. I asked him what success looked like.
“Survival,” he said, “No really, survival. We’re playing by the rules.”
“There goes the optimist again,” I said.
He reached across the table and topped up my rakjia.

Mesmerized today by this page from Just Kids by Patti Smith. 

“My mother taught me to pray; she taught me the prayer her mother taught her. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. At nightfall, I knelt before my little bed, as she stood, with her ever-present cigarette, listening as I recited after her. I wished nothing more than to say my prayers, yet these words troubled me and I plagued her with questions. What is the soul? What colour is it? I suspected my soul, being mischevious, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.

Perhaps to satisfy my curiosity, my mother enrolled me in Sunday school. We were taught by rote Bible verses and the words of Jesus. Afterwards we stood in line and were rewarded by a spoonful of comb honey. There was only one spoon in the jar to serve many coughing children. I instinctively shied from the spoon but I swiftly accepted the notion of God. It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.

Not contented with my child’s prayer, I soon petitioned my mother to let me make my own. I was relieved when I no longer had to repeat the words If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take and could say instead what was on my heart. Thus freed, I would lie in my bed by the coal stove, vigorously mouthing long letters to God. I was not much of a sleeper and I must have vexed him with my endless vows, visions and schemes. But as time passed I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.

My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnificent within the fevers of influenza, measles, chicken pox and mumps. I had them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying though my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.”

I expected Erin’s body to grow, her tummy to swell, but I wasn’t ready for my heart to double in size.

Last week I became a dad. I’ve read a lot of men writing about fatherhood, about the moment when their partner pushes their first baby out into the world. They take turns to describe the feelings of pure magic, joy, pride, meaning, emotion. I hadn’t imagined what that moment would be like. I thought I’d want to hold Erin’s hand and stay up by her head. But I was down the other end, bleary-eyed, spouting encouraging words like a Volleyball coach, and pacing. I did a lot of pacing. I must have walked a mile in Delivery Suite 11. Erin was pushing like a champion. Sweat discharged from under her fringe in bursts, like a shower with a dodgy connection. From where I was standing I watched our daughter come a little way down with every push, but only a little way, then retreat again. On a monitor, bleeping away by the side, I watched her little heartbeat soar to 160 then crash to 61. She was facing the wrong way round. At first it was just us and a midwife in the delivery room, but gradually more bodies appeared, and all peace and calm went the other way. When Etta arrived into the world, she did so with a suction cup stuck to her head.

The moment arrived in a blur.

I don’t know what I was expecting.

I thought I would cry. But I just paced.

“Why isn’t she crying?” asked Erin from the bed, “Isn’t she meant to cry?”

They put tubes down her throat.

Life doesn’t always play out like it does in the commercials. Etta didn’t burst into the world with a Kodak moment. She was fine, she just needed a little help to breathe, and her blood sugars were very low. I may have shed a couple of tears, but they were tears of relief. I thanked the Lord for her safe arrival, between breaths, as I stared at her beautiful face.

The waterworks came later. And when they came they didn’t stop. It was when I left the hospital that night. When visiting hours were over and it was time to say ‘Goodnight’. And I looked at my wife with my daughter in her arms, and a golfball grew in my throat. I was only going to be gone for ten hours or so, but there was a feeling in my heart I hadn’t felt since the departure gates at Heathrow and JFK and Chicago. Only this time, the tears were twice as big, came twice as fast, and my heart ached twice as hard as if in the past 24 hours it was inflated with a bicycle pump, flattened with a rolling pin, pinched by the corners and stretched and stretched until it was twice as big as it has ever been.

This an extract from an article today in the Guardian. A poignant reflection of life and forgiveness.

The first piece of art that Karen Green made after her husband, David Foster Wallace, took his own life on 12 September 2008, was a forgiveness machine. She is standing in the neat, white studio at her house at Petaluma, north of San Francisco, explaining to me how the machine worked and how it didn’t.

“Before David died,” she says, “I had been working on some machines, with a five-year old – the son of a friend who had a gallery down the road from mine.” There had been a recreating-a-pig-from-bacon machine, and a prototype for a machine that cleverly pitted dates. The day that her husband hanged himself she had been working on a political machine that involved a bright-coloured circus tent, elephants and donkeys. For a long while after that, she says, she couldn’t make any art at all, wondered if she ever would again, but eventually, tentatively, she developed the idea for her conciliatory Heath-Robinson. “The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long,” she says, “with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell.” The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto.

Green put the machine on display at a gallery in Pasadena near the Los Angeles suburb, Claremont, where she and Wallace had lived in the four years they had been married. She was fascinated by the effect that it had on people who used it. “It was strange,” she suggests, “it all looked like fun, but then when the moment came for people to put their message actually in it, they became anxious. It was like: what if it works and I really have to forgive my terrible parent or whoever.”

In the end, Green didn’t use the machine herself, except to put a few tester messages through. “I couldn’t give it my full attention,” she explains. “I was worried it wouldn’t even work for the full four hours of the show’s opening. I was also kind of a mess about surviving the opening itself. Seeing people, chatting. Not ‘kind of a mess’ – a mess. I couldn’t imagine doing it.” She thought she would come back to visit the machine after the opening but instead she drove to her new home, not far from where she grew up, and stayed there. The machine was overwhelmed, too; it couldn’t process all the requests and was eventually dismantled. “Forgiving is never as easy as we would like,” she says. “Apparently quite a lot of people cried.”

In her studio, now, Green smiles at that idea, with all the weariness of someone who has lately done far too much crying for one lifetime. She is full of spirited life, continually doing her utmost to laugh, even to attempt bad jokes when she talks about the last two and a half years, in an effort to deflect herself from the alternative. Her eyes tell different stories. “I don’t know if David’s parents have anger at him,” she says. “Maybe because they were dealing with his illness, his depression, for such a very long time. But I have heard from other people who have lost spouses in this way, and fathers and mothers, and anger is perfectly appropriate. You can choose to be angry at the illness rather than the person, of course, but fury is completely appropriate: thus the forgiveness machine.”

When you are blind, you imagine how people look. Not by touching their face or gauging their height, but by their voice, and the kind of person they are. That’s what helps you form a picture. I realise now I can see that those pictures aren’t always accurate. But when I first saw my wife, Gurjeet, 10 years after we’d met, she was exactly as I’d imagined.

I lost my sight at school, Christmas 1972 – I was 10 and larking about when I fell in some nettles and came up in a terrible rash. The doctor gave mum some tablets to clear it up but I had an awful reaction to them – what’s called Stevens Johnson syndrome – and for a few weeks it was touch and go if I’d survive.

One of the effects of the SJS was my tear ducts stopped working; without tears, your corneas can’t work. They tried all sorts to fix the problem. Every two weeks when we went to hospital I’d buy comics – the Beano, Dandy, the Beezer -  thinking I’d be able to read them on the way home, but I never could. My sight just kept getting worse, and by the time I was 14 it had gone.

I went to a special school in Birmingham, where you had to board Monday to Friday. I knew my mum and dad found it hard to leave me there, but they knew it was the best thing for me. The turning point was going to college in Hereford to study IT – The Royal National College for the Blind, where I am now a governor. I didn’t learn only academic and vocational stuff, but how to be independent: cooking, cleaning, doing sports, going out and about.

I used to ring my parents every day and tell them how I was doing. They were proud and, if I’m honest, surprised, too. A lot of people are surprised. They imagine that when you’re blind you “manage” rather than “achieve”, and that I must feel those years of being blind were wasted somehow. That’s simply not true. It was an amazing period of my life.

The best thing was meeting Gurjeet. It was an arranged marriage. I didn’t think anyone would want to marry me, but she said she did. She said it felt right. I sensed she was lovely and couldn’t believe my luck. Even on my wedding day my brother-in-law and I wondered if she’d turn up. But there she was, waiting for me. We have been shoulder to shoulder since.

After I married I started a business building computers. I could do all the programming myself through a Braille terminal but I remember the first one I built. Gurjeet and I worked through the night – she was my eyes while I was building it, orientating me around the circuit board. Then she’d drive me around the country so I could deliver the computers to clients, with our two daughters in the back. I bought a shop and it went from strength to strength. At our height we were one of the largest suppliers in the UK and turning over millions.

Being blind was just part of our married life. We didn’t talk about it, we just lived with it. I never thought it would be any different. Then one day – when we’d been married about 10 years – an optician I knew came rushing into our office saying he’d read about a new technique he was sure could help me. Two weeks later I was at an eye hospital in Brighton and booked in for this new experimental operation. When they took off the bandages and cleaned up my eyes, it was like having Windolene cleaned off a window. I saw the doctor’s tie, then his huge smile, and then everything was crystal clear. When Gurjeet and the girls walked into the room, they were just as I had pictured in my mind. So familiar. I will never forget that moment. “I can see you,” I said to them. “I can see for miles.”

The world seemed so bright – that’s what struck me most. The colours of the 70s – the dark red curtains, brown lino, drab shopfronts and black Morris Minors and Austin 1100s that I had remembered from my childhood – were replaced by this array of bright shades. We all walked down to the seafront in Brighton. It was a beautiful day, and I was walking in front, holding the girls’ hands, showing off a bit. I couldn’t stop staring at everything. There was so much to take in. It was wonderful. I still have to pinch myself when I think about it today.

PS: I’ve just spring-cleaned the blog. Take a look around.