Lovely to report that I’m listening to my old friend Lemn Sissay on BBC Radio Manchester being interviewed by Alan Beswick about the fact that’s he’s been awarded an MBE! Regular readers of this blog will know that Lemn is not only an inspiration to me, but also thousands of other people, especially children – he has spent thousands and thousands of unreported hours doing workshops and talks for kids all over the world. In fact, when we used to knock about in Manchester it always amazed me how many bouncers we’d bump into who suddenly drop their guard and say stuff like “Fuck me, it’s Lemn Sissay!”, then give him a big, star-struck hug and spend 20 minutes telling him how much he inspired them in a talk he did at their school years before (much to the chagrin of the other revelers in the queue desperate to get into whatever house of ill repute we were attempting to enter).

Apart from being Best Man at our wedding (the poem he wrote and read at the ceremony “Heart Garden”, is one of my most treasured memories and possessions), he is also Godfather (in a non-religious type way, if that’s possible:-) to my son. Here they are just after he was born:

You can get further background on Lemn here, and you can get his work from Amazon here:

His second published book was “Rebel without Applause”. As he said on Alan Beswick’s show this morning, after Alan chastised him for moving from Manchester to London, he’s now a “Rebel with a baguette”. I can’t publish what he said MBE stands for. “Might Be Ethiopian” was my suggestion – not as funny as his.

One project Lemn has created that is really exciting is the GPS (Global Poetry System), a typically brilliant idea that is a user generated world map of poetry. Watch the video about it here:

We’ve often chatted about the use of poetry in the commercial world over the past 20 years. A couple of things we did together that I’m very proud of include the famous poem on the wall of Hardy’s Well pub on the busiest bus route in Europe on Wilmslow Road heralding the entrance to Rusholme from the South in Manchester. I pulled that together along with Toby Hadoke and the then landlord of the pub, Andy, back when there was a little comedy club in the back room.

That was back in 95/96 – and it’s still there!

The other thing was that when I won a sales promotion contract with Stagecoach to promote their weekly Megarider ticket (with the company I set up in 2001 that’s still going strong, AIM Solutions) I convinced them to them to do the whole thing around Lemn and use his poems in the promotional material.

We got Lemn on the side of hundreds of buses lying down “Sex and the City” style, his face on millions of tickets and posters inside the buses with his poetry all over them. I’ll never forget the meeting with Stagecoaches’ management when I proposed it. One of them said “I don’t want to do it if he’s associated with drugs”. Oh, racism. What a bizarre and stupid thing you are.

Lemn Sissay. Friend. Brother. Member of the British Fucking Empire!

I came across this video recently whilst looking into the so-called Global Warming/Carbon Crisis following all the hullabaloo after the Copenhagen debacle.

It shocked me.

Are we actually living in a fascist state? Did the Nazis win the 39-45 war? Has everything predicted and illustrated by Orwell and Kafka come to light but hidden in plain sight?

If you care one dot about the concept of free speech, this should frighten the living shit out of you:

I’ve just come across this guy Phelim McAleer – seems like a decent citizen to me. Whether we agree with his views or not should not detract from the fact that he has a right to ask questions, and a right to his views which seem, to me in this case at least, simply to get Al Gore to clarify the fundamental errors identified by the British High Court in his film, “An Inconvenient Truth”. Especially as this film is being shown in schools to our children!

Nothing should be presented as fact like this (although that’s never stopped the religious indoctrination I witness at the nativity plays I am obliged to attend every year).

I watched that film about three years ago and it scared the bejesus out of me.

I’m starting to think that was it’s intention. Another tactic designed to keep us all like rabbits in headlights, along with wars on terror, swine flu, recession – the never ending list of nonsense designed to get us all distracted from massive changes in legislation that effect our rights as human beings on this Earth.

Anyone else getting fed up with them?

An amazing amount of snow on Sunday (which has me on a wild goose chase skidding from shop to shop looking for an elusive sledge – most of which had been sold out to more organised parents presumably) led me to take this picture from the car today. It was an experiment to see how the iPhone camera dealt with looking the sun right in the eye (something I teach my kids to do when they shake hands with anyone).

It’s also a salient reminder of just how beautiful this world really is.

Regular readers of this blog may be deluded into thinking that all forms of inspiration for me come from business shenanigans.

No so.

One man who has always inspired me, and always believed in me, is Lemn Sissay.

Lemn was best man at our wedding. He was my soul mate throughout our twenties back when lager, kebabs and last night fights were a regular occurrence. We both grew up (sort of). Now he lives in the smoke continuing his career/calling as a truly inspirational and brilliant writer and performer.

Lemn was recently made an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Huddersfield University. Here’s Lemn alongside Theo Paphitis.

This is an extraordinary achievement, especially when you know what Lemn has been through to get to this elevated status in society.

He was fostered as a child and grew up as the only black person in Atherton, Lancashire, in the 1970s. He was dumped uncermoniously at the age of 11 by his foster parents, then put into a succession of children’s homes. When he found out his true identity as an Ethiopian called Lemn, he painted the Ethiopian flag on the ceiling of his room. This earned him 12 months in a detention centre.

He escaped to Manchester as a 17 year old and started performing the poetry that was ripping through his soul.

Soon after. he traced his true roots. His father was a pilot from Ethiopia and had died in 1973 in a plane crash. The BBC made a documentary about this called “Internal Flight”:

Even if you have no interest in poetry, you cannot be failed to be moved by Lemn’s work. Here he is doing some of his stuff:

I am so pleased that he is being recognised for his brilliance in this way. You deserve it all my friend.Thanks for everything.

One of the things I love about the internet marketing community is the constant drive to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

In a tenuous link, one of the things I love most about Ireland, where we spend a lot of time, is the abundance of rainbows caused by the fast moving and usually very wet weather system.

Today we were extremely lucky to catch not one, but two rainbows appearing at the same time. You can also clearly see where the end of one of the rainbows lands. We didn’t have the time to chase it, but I did get a chance to snap them with my iPhone (wide angle app please someone). Click to enlarge.