Culture Shock

Culture Shock is a very strange beast.

It’s not the big stuff – the high-rise Miami condos and the golden beach – that’s expected, absorbed parts of the background noise. In a Brit’s constant exposure to American culture, both tele-visual and through Twitter, some stuff just sinks into your subconscious.

No, it’s the little stuff that has the power.


Some of it’s half-expected, but still humorous – driving on the wrong side of the road, overhead traffic lights and ceaseless intersections, fire-hydrants and strip-malls, the guys who put their bikes on the front of the bus (yeah, that one absolutely foxed me). Some of it’s sheer ‘I-don’t-fucking-believe-this’ comedy – the juxtaposition of sunshine and palm trees with Christmas decorations. Sign-spinners (tell me they’re not real)… and what is it about the denizens of Miami and bloody pom-pom dogs?

Some of it, though; some of it just brought me to a dead stop.


Partially it’s the poverty. There’s no shortage of it in central London, but seeing it another context is both surreal and, rather uncomfortably, too real for words. The suburbs are a tessellation of street-art, chickenwire and urban decay; over them, the skeletal overlords of the empty skyscrapers stand grim against flawless blue. Miami smells like concrete, like sun-baked stucco; I hadn’t realised how much the absence of rivers and parks bothered me until I got home.

In a city built on a swamp, where hurricanes are a fact of everyday life, such ‘urban’ things as I take for granted are luxuries. That’s kind of an eye-opener.


Coming back to the tele-visual thing – I seemed to be forever walking into filmsets. The Tobacco Road bar was waiting for Arnie and a shotgun; the very poverty itself was straight out of Robocop. The fantastic, 50s ‘Art Deco’ buildings seemed two-dimensional – had I leaned far enough over, I could’ve nudged them to fall flat. Seeing white bird feathers decorating a grave… it took a minute for me to realise that the ritual employed had, yes, been absolutely sincere.

No Danie, just because it’s a churchless graveyard doesn’t mean it’s an episode of Buffy…


The tourist in me took in The Everglades (damn those ‘gators are big!), the Coral Castle, the KidRobot store, and wandered along the sprawling pretentiousness of Art Basel… evidence of which was washing up on the beach a couple days later. Plus a shout, here, to the wonderful Tate of Tate’s Comics and Videos – when he realised who I worked for, he and his team granted me Ambassadorial status. That’s a whole new and different form of Culture Shock!


In all of this though, there’s one thing that stands out as the greatest Culture Shock of all.

Twitter has made the world smaller; broken it into bite-size pieces and allowed everyone to find their own involvement. It’s also become saturated with spammers and life coaches and soulless marketeers – it’s very bloody noisy.

And it’s all too easy to lose track of your friends.


The opportunity to meet some of those friends – people I’ve been talking to for nearly four years, people from the Little Blue Bird’s first nesting days – was a wondrous thing; I have no words to really do it justice. However small the world may shrink and however swiftly its changes may pass us by, some things are worth taking a moment to remember, and to take a hold of.

Just like the city itself, they have to be done in person.

And that’s not just Culture Shock. It's magic.

You can read another viewpint on my visit here.

Adventures in Scotland

When you’ve been called mad by Iain Banks, you know you’re in for an interesting holiday.

And after a week of – well, weather – on the Isle of Mull, I’m beginning to think Banksy had the right of it.

Mull is beautiful – glacier-carved rocky severity shrugging its way out of blankets of rich autumnal colour. Cloud lifts in wisps from the mountaintops – they look as through they are on fire – and they layer back into the mist as far as you care to see. You want to call it ‘rugged’, ‘desolate’, ‘bleak’, craggy’ – but no world suits the Isle more than this one: -

It’s WET.

We’ve walked in it and we’ve cycled in it. We’ve got drenched so many times that my abiding holiday memories are not the Martian Red Weed that decorated the grey loch shore, the golden beach at Calgary or the blissed-out religious types on their pilgrimage to Iona… no, it’s playing constant Tetris with endlessly sopping clothes and realising just WHY the Scots love their whisky as much as they do.


It goes with the climate.

One day of blue skies had us leaving the cabin with the sunrise, testing our endurance to the limit with 45 miles around the north of the Island. The beauty was overwhelming; maybe it was sheer physical effort in getting bikes up those hills, but eventually we became completely blasé.

“Heron.” “Yep.” “Waterfall.” “Yep.” “Standing stone.” “Yep.” “Ruined castle.” “Yep.” “Oh look, it’s another fucking great hill.”

We found ourselves in Tobermory at conveniently lunchtime – and went looking for Archie the Inventor… a quest foiled by my smashing both knees as I fell off the pavement (Archie, it seems knew we were coming). A long ride home brought us to our friendly field of radioactive (yes) sheep at sunset, worn down after a long day.


Devin tackled all 3100ft of Ben More – a pleasure I wussed out of due to the hail, gale and bog that awaited me. I tackled the laptop, instead, and watched the lunatic antics of the local chaffinches, auditioning for parts in a certain Hitchcock movie.

A couple of pitch (and I mean) pitch dark treks through the pass to beer and the nearest civilisation didn’t turn up the Headless Horseman… but we did rather feel like we were going for a pint in the Slaughtered Lamb and spent much of the walk discussing how we could off the Wereworf with a couple of mag-lites and a leatherman.

Our local guru Steve, owner of the cabin we stayed in, commented that people had ‘seen us round the island’ – but he also told us that the weather would be good and there was ‘one hill’ coming out of Tobermory… so much for that.


We’ve ended our holiday – and celebrated our new engagement (yes, the diamond ring variety, scary huh?) – with a proto-honeymoon Samhein night in the scariest hotel in Scotland. Bonus points for the king size four-poster and colossal orgy bath… but bleak dark stone and an isolated location are further spooked out by ghastly floral décor, stags heads on the walls and a memory palace of nik-naks creepy enough for a Roald Dahl story.

And why is there a large abandoned building in the hotel’s gardens that’s just full of discarded junk?

It’s all gone a bit Rosemary’s Baby… thank the Gods we’ll be in Glasgow tomorrow…

Incommunicado: Four Days No Twitter

A warm log cabin, wide veranda stretched along the edge of idyllic wetlands. Mornings spent exploring the Island, walks and museums and parks – ours alone in the quiet off-season. Evenings devoid of television, playing Gloom in the clear night air, accompanied by good whisky and the brassy impertinence of geese…

Sometimes, you need to stop.

Recently, I passed the epiphany that was Tweet 23,000: shocking myself slack-jawed as I totalled out 230,000 words. Two novels (or half a Neal Stephenson) – and my two-year twitterversary next month… How much time have I spent?

I plead sophistry – I can tweet while looking after my home and family, wheras writing requires concentration – but that number grins too stark to be denied.

Hence, my holiday has been totally Incommunicado; leaving my phone in the office was both unintentional and perfectly timed. Before I left, I sent everyone and his cat a panicked email to explain my silence – more for my benefit than theirs, I know – and then turned to face that cold, beady-eyed turkey…

The world without the web.

On the first day, I wanted to tweet everything – the hovercraft ride, the cabin itself, the great food in the local pub – I was bereft, reaching, craving to share.

On the second day, I found distractions – a veranda-breakfast with ducks and moorhens, watching the cormorant pose like the Angel of Death – I involved myself with family and outings and allowed the hankering to recede.

On the third day, it had almost gone – I walked through an eternity of mud, saw a red squirrel in an ancient wood, made friends with an ocelot kitten – and Twitter was a world away, another life. My universe was smaller – yet each thing in it was precise and significant. Real.

On the fourth day, I reached for a RSPB book to discover what a Marsh Harrier looked like… and realised I was cured. No longer dwarfed by epic, breaking news or world-shaking media achievement, there was enough silence in my heart to be looking at the little things.

And understanding why they matter.

Call me a Social Media heretic if you will, four days Incommunicado has not only upped my wordcount (and my confidence to produce it), it’s also reminded me that red squirrels and ocelot kittens really matter – even when, especially when, they’re not validated by an audience. In the greater amphitheatre of Social Media, the mass-onslaught of feedback and information can deluge us, bury us under Significance and take our eyes from the things right in front of them.

Just like wordcount, just like Twitter itself in fact, we should remember – if we’re going to build BabelTower 2.0?

Even the biggest things are made up from the little ones.