Exactly 4 years ago, I wrote the first piece here. This is the 600th and final youdothatvoodoo blog. Nothing ever ends though, and in this case some of you will already be aware that I’ve started a new site, writebyyourside. It’ll still be me, and I’ll continue to write roughly the same mix as I’ve been presenting here. The difference? You’ll receive the pieces by signing up. And I’ll be changing the mix that I’ve established here. For one thing, I’ll be featuring occasional interviews with some of the writers, filmmakers and other creatives I’ve got to know, some of them since youdothatvoodoo started. And there’ll be a new focus on prose, which coincides with my renewed enthusiasm for short stories. One commission I really enjoyed a few months ago was for a short story, and I’m now reading more fiction again having spent a long time focusing on non-fiction other than in the form of comics.

Writebyyourside is also an exercise in adapting to the evolving situation for writers that the online world presents, and is itself still evolving as some fine-tuning takes place. I’ve bundled together nearly 200 pieces from youdothatvoodoo into two volumes, one on the craft of writing and the other with reviews written from a writer’s perspective. A third volume rounds the package out with previously unavailable scripts and treatments that are compiled with the intention of giving writers a practical idea what the industry expects. All of this has been done with the invaluable support of Edd Hillier, who is also responsible for the sound and music of the video at the new site.

Working with Edd is a good example of the way I approach the business of being a writer. For a start, it’s about recognising where your strengths are. And mine don’t include much in the way of computing skills. So, I reached out to Edd in the same way that I’ve approached producers and directors, with a view to making something happen. This comes under the heading of what many call networking, and which is second nature to those who flourish in the creative sector. It’s also, interestingly, a strategy that helps increase the quality of the work produced by all those within a network. The number and quality of ideas rises as people join forces, and that’s true whether you’re looking to make a feature film or do something online.

‘Something’ is the interesting word there, since it’s in the nature of what a lot of interesting people are doing online these days that there are no strict definitions and boundaries for what’s being brought to life. I was sent an email the other day by someone I’ve worked with in the gaming world, looking for beta testers and funding for a gaming experience that integrates a number of geographically-focused social media programmes into a realtime vampire-hunting game where people try and turn the tables on their supposed undead overlords. There’s something very interesting going on there, with participants using the same sort of suspension of disbelief that would typically be employed passively in front of a cinema screen to participate in a shared fiction.

I can only suggest that more of this will be happening in the future, as immersive media and gameplay and new uses of technology allow us to cast our imagination into the world. That’s part of the journey I’ve been on for a couple of years with artist Andy Tudor as we continue to develop a multi-platform concept including animation, games, and theme park attractions for a concept that we’re collaborating on, and which we’ve attracted the attention of a highly successful international entrepreneur with.

All of which is to say that writing is alive and kicking, and that there’s no shortage of opportunities for writers. In my case, I’m realising that I’ve got the makings of a businessman too, and it’s something I’d urge any writers reading to consider. The world is at a very interesting point right now. Rather than rely on dinosaur institutions which haven’t got your best interests at heart – whether they’re publishers, broadcasters, or studios – why not embrace the potential presented by the digital scene? As a warm blooded mammal with a brain, you’re more agile and adaptive than the lumbering beasts that have dominated the media landscape. It’s not so much about taking them on as doing your own thing, and enjoying the rewards.

Thanks to everyone who’s read, got in touch, and enjoyed. Here’s to a great 2012.

A woman discovers her husband is missing, presumed dead, just before Christmas. And sets about ensuring that her children – his children – have the best festive season ever. It’s a situation that could play out all kinds of ways. Broadly speaking, approaching it in fiction, there are two camps. In the first, you’d emphasise the alleged reality of the situation, and concentrate on the grim emotional aftermath of the loss of a father. In the second, you instead sidestep the issue and keep it in the background by putting something else front and centre.

The first route is what a lot of people believe to be the responsible one. It lends itself to the sort of stories that newspaper reviewers get excited about, perhaps because commenting on other peoples’ stories is an inherently frivolous way of making a living and that by imbuing it with apparent moral seriousness it can seem to be a job worthy of the name. The second route takes us into the realm of the imagination, which serious types find deeply suspect when it’s employed to its full. We should be reading worthy novels by emotionally constipated puritans and nod to ourselves how right they are about the short and painful lives we lead. Yes, keep our heads bowed, and don’t look up. Up to the skies, where you might just see reindeer flying, and a TARDIS whizzing past.

The scenario with the putative widow and the fabulous Christmas is this year’s Dr Who festive special. And what a treat it was. Bringing together elements of Narnia and eco-fable, it once again brought home that the power of love wins over everything. Even, in this case, the possibility of death. The lost airman returned, but his flight home was won and won truly through the faith and love of his wife and children, who lived their lives to the full in his absence and discovered that he was at the other end of their adventure on another planet. Had they done what most grown-ups recommend you do, and get all serious and tearful and wear black, they’d have been so involved in that indulgence they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to enjoy the possibilities that imagination presents.

Fiction allows us to explore the possible through presenting the impossible. Sure, you’re unlikely to ever explore another planet in the course of your grieving…but approaching your future as an astronaut is going to make life rather different than wearing sackcloth and ashes. The Doctor is special because he’s not bound by conventions of time and place that happen to have emerged through historical accident and got taken seriously by people who prefer things that way because doing what the others do saves them having to exercise free will.

After my brother died, my mother went to a grief counsellor who could have stepped straight out of an Anne Rice book. All in black apart from a single red rose affixed to her, she insisted that my mother talk to her about the details of Nigel’s death. She didn’t know some of the particulars then, and doesn’t now. Therapeutic orthodoxy has it that you have to confront the truth. At any rate, that version of the truth that’s sanctioned by bleak conformity. Mum had the sense to back away from the vampire, and choose to live her own way. Not that it was an easy choice, but it was the right one for her. Twenty years on, people say she’s looking and acting years younger than her age…she used her imagination to find a way forward that was preferable to the one that was offered by someone who wanted her to stay in the darkness.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

You may be aware that this site is folding pretty soon; with the next entry in fact. Fear not, it will live on. New site writebyyourside gives you the chance to buy a downloadable anthology of the best of the pieces here, along with previously unavailable material selected to support writers. And there’ll continue to be articles and reviews as here, with an expanded remit including interviews and a focus on prose. See you there!

I went to my first party of the festive season last night. I have reached an age where there’s an equal number of children and adults at such gatherings. And that was interesting in all kinds of ways, not least when the matter of taking young children to see films came up. One couple were sensitive about their young son’s reaction to depictions of evil and moments of tragedy in stories. Not because they wanted to shield him from them. Their concern was about how to introduce him to the emotions that stories can provoke in a way that he could cope with. They wanted him to be affected, but not overwhelmed.

A lovely memory came out of the conversation, as the subject of a panto came up. Don’t know which panto it was, but bad magic was involved to do wrong to one of the good guys. At which point one of the kids had hysterics, and ran out of the auditorium…only to come across a fully-costumed Good Witch who – rapidly realising what had happened – stepped in with a promise to put matters right. Cue satisfied child, who was now happy to return with accompanying parent to the production.

All of this was discussed as children did their best to watch Merlin in a room where adults supped mulled wine and socialised. Noisily, at least as far as the kids were concerned. Didn’t they know important television was happening, and we were talking over it? No wonder kids think adults are hypocrites: grown-ups insist on smaller people being quiet when the news or soaps are on, but parents are happy to talk over key moments in their childrens’ favourite shows.

Meeting in the middle wasn’t going to happen. The kids were rightly absorbed in Merlin, which seemed to be a well put together show with high production values and a reasonable script. The main issue for some of the adults was a female character, who according to one of the party guests looked like a contemporary urban youngster wearing a Wonderbra. The kids were having none of it: she was a smuggler, run afoul of the powers that be, and caught up in a fight where Arthur Pendragon and Merlin failed to save her life.

And I remember my own childhood, and my demand that whatever we were doing on a Saturday, we got home in time for the latest episode of Dr Who. Much of the time we made it, and I don’t suppose I thanked my parents for their decency in honouring that request. But sure as hell I’d castigate them if we missed any of the episode.

Stories matter. They’re how we explain the world to ourselves, and ourselves to the world. Is it any wonder kids get upset when adults talk over their favourite programmes? Or that parents feel likewise when children interrupt theirs? And it’s this that I’m conscious of as I set about developing stories for what, if I’m lucky, will be a major part of what I do with my life in the next decade. A story that wouldn’t exist without all the other stories that I’ve read, seen, and been told one way or another. A story that has been brought to life with an artistic collaborator whose character designs have brought to life characters who in some cases were not quite known to me before I saw them in drawn form.

Well, we shall see. I was lucky enough earlier in the year to secure seed money from an investor to develop that story into a form that makes sense in business ways. And he was attracted by that work to request a costed strategy for bringing the project to market. Which is what I and my collaborator Andy Tudor are waiting for news about as this year comes to a close. Wish us luck, and you’ll be among the first to hear the good news if and when it comes. And that might be soon, or could be weeks away. It doesn’t matter, in truth. What does matter is the journey, and the knowledge that we as children would be proud that the adults we’ve become are engaged in it on their behalf.

It’s taken me quite a while to catch up with two of America’s biggest heroes. Years after everyone else was praising the series, I’m still only into the second season of House. Masterful stuff, Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of the wiseass doctor making him one of tv’s most compelling leading men. I’ve been on board with Jack Reacher a while longer. Lee Child has been chronicling the adventures of the maverick ex-military cop for some years now, and I’m currently thrilling to the latest — and 16th — book in the series, The Affair.

Greg House is a partially crippled doctor with a genius for diagnosing difficult conditions, his focus on uncovering the truth and challenging lies responsible equally for his professional brilliance and his personal and interpersonal difficulties. Jack Reacher is a wall of muscle with a surprisingly cultured worldview and a resolute commitment to justice — not in the abstract but in seeing it through, whatever the cost to himself.

For all their differences, the two men are as one in being maverick loners. No great surprise there — it’s an archetype that goes back to the oldest stories. What stands out for me is that both men win through because of their remorseless belief in — and application of — logic. Not something you’d think would make for contemporary heroes, but both Reacher and House achieve their extraordinary results, saving lives regardless of what it means for them personally, through the laser application of impressive mental capabilities.

Now, there’s no shortage of smart heroes. But typically we’re told that someone is smart, and get to see its impact. What we don’t normally experience is the thought processes of the intellectually adept protagonist. And that’s exactly what we get with the doctor and the vigilante. Each is characterised by precise mental rigour that we as audience can track when they’re doing what makes them special.

Logic on its own is not always captivating. If it was, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell would feature as comic book heroes. But logic allied to principle is inspirational. It enables us to see how that principle is attained in life, rather than merely being held up as something to cherish. For House, the notion that people lie is ingrained. It informs the foundation of his questioning, guides him through the layers of lies that people tell each other and, more toxic still, themselves. Reveal the truth, and healing can take place. But House himself is the wounded healer, a true shaman — a key episode late in Season One reveals that he has died and been reborn — and as such walks (hobbles) outside the bounds of society, which needs his brilliance, but cannot bear his x-ray insight.

Reacher’s compass is different. He is guided by morality. To do what is just. And in the course of righting wrongs the former military cop employs a world class mind to see him through difficulties. One of the great pleasures of the books is to be in Reacher’s head as he calculates how to take out a group of enemies. He is frequently outnumbered, never outclassed. The decisions he makes are outlined with clarity, uncontaminated by emotion. He knows exactly how to relieve you of a weapon, to break your arm, to kill you without breaking sweat, and will do whichever expends the least energy to achieve the most rational result in pursuit of his objective.

Neither Reacher nor House are men you want to be around for long. Sure, they’ll put matters right for you. But being around men whose cause is just, like paladins of old, is not comfortable. It shows up your own weaknesses, and that’s not easy to live with. Which is one of the reasons that heroes like this never settle. Reacher is forever on the move, in search of the next adventure. House is physically static, but his mental agility unsettles those around him. And always, unable to switch it off even if they wanted to, minds that notice and compare and assess and conclude, while the rest of us stumble semi-conscious through a world that we don’t understand, and fear in the fuzz of our incomprehension.

It’s time for a change. I’ve been doing this blog since the last day of 2007. For a long time I was writing entries every other day, sometimes even consecutive days. And I got a lot out of that, and enjoyed doing it. In the process, I clarified my thinking about many matters concerning writing, and the way it’s realised in film, tv, and comics. And, as I did so, I built up an archive of over 550 pieces of writing, each between 600 and 700 words.

Much of that material I remain proud of. I know, because I’ve been looking at it all again lately through new eyes. If you’re a long term reader, it can’t have escaped your attention that I’m writing here less than I used to. In large part, that’s because I have less time. And for entirely good reasons: the seed money I acquired for Andy Tudor and I to develop our multi-platform entertainment concept has allowed me to devote the majority of my time to that project alone. Progress is significant: the model is now a humungous interconnected beast of a thing, and we’re talking to people in the worlds of gaming, animation, and immersive media to move it all forward to the next stage, which is when our investor hopefully presses the button that says ‘Go!’.

So, a new phase of work is in process, and it’s tremendously exciting. And I’d like to wrap up what’s happening here in a fitting fashion. Which is why I’ve been spending time with my friend Edd, who has technical expertise I haven’t the patience to develop, to create a fitting capstone to the years that youdothatvoodoo has existed.

What’s on the way is an e-book comprising three sections. The first contains the cream of the pieces on the craft of writing. Articles about everything from archetypes and The Hero’s Journey to metaphor and visual storytelling, using examples from well known sources to bring principles to light as I’ve experienced them. Next up, the very best 99 film reviews from the back catalogue, written to be useful from a writer’s perspective. You don’t have to agree with my opinions – far from it – but developing a critical appreciation of the work that others have put into films is a key part in shaping your own style.

I wanted to include material that’s never been seen on this site as well. What I’d got in mind was an anthology of my own writing designed to help writers develop milestone projects of their own. They don’t always seem like that at the time, but some of them prove to have real value in your career. The easily staged play. The sample script. The treatment. Looking back, I spotted a thread that went through some of my work, with particular pieces having real significance in the way my career has gone. By sharing them, I want to help readers think through their own choices, and their part in the bigger picture.

We’re pretty much there with the e-book. Edd’s done a cracking job pulling it together and has come up with some great artwork too. Next step is to get the website up, which will feature a promo video. Hey, I can’t have a website selling an e-book without me looking awkwardly into the camera intercut with kind people saying nice things about me. That’s the way these things are done, so that’s the way I’m gonna roll.

As for youdothatvoodoo…it’ll still be here. For a while. And I thought the best way to let you into all of this was to tell you now, so you can enjoy what’s going to happen, and get your electronic wallets out to buy the ‘best of’ set when it’s ready. Hey, it’ll be a perfect Christmas present for any writers you know, or fans of film – if I can bow out by causing arguments around the festive table, I’ll know I’ve done my bit.

A little while back, my co-conspirator Andy Tudor and I attracted the first chunk of investment money to realise a multi-platform creative concept we’ve devised. ‘Multi-platform’ meaning we’re looking at something which could, in the long run, straddle gaming apps, social media games, an animated series, merchandise, and more. Our investor has cannily given us enough money that we can start to make progress on some of the above, but not so much that we can convince ourselves that we’ve got it made. We haven’t. We’re in the early stages of a long journey, and the job at this point is to prove what we’re capable of.

All of which makes our current situation a fascinating one. And Andy and I have no shortage of ideas of what we’d like to do. We’re also blessed in knowing a seasoned coach/consultant who works with big grown-up organisations at board level and helps them clarify where they’re going, how they’re going to get there, and what needs to be done to make it happen. That friend, Annie, spent a highly productive day with us in which we set out what we’re going to do in the next three months — primarily with the intent of impressing our backer so he’ll continue to invest in this project and have us majorly involved in its development, and not just coming up with concepts for work that others then undertake.

We’re in a privileged position. And we want to make the most of it. So Annie got us to dig into our motivations, what drove us to come up with this project in the first place, what we hope it can become, and use that impetus to ensure we follow through on a whole series of meetings with people in games and digital media and animation we need to befriend to get all of this off the ground. The buzz is palpable, and the timing good — I’m about to go to London for a weekend workshop on immersive writing, ie exactly the approach that’s necessary to create a stimulating experience for people who come across some or other aspect of what we’re up to, and encourage them to find out more.

A key part of this plan of action is the creation of a 3 minute animation to capture the core of our concept. All of which sounds very dry and dusty, as maybe a lot of this will since I can’t at this point share anything of what we’re up to. But I can share this: the inspiration for the short animation is the famed sequence in Up where the old guy’s past is revealed, in a stunning and moving montage that some people have said is a triumph of cinema. Well, if you’re going to have a benchmark, it might as well be an impressive one, and the reason I honed in on that sequence as inspiration is for its emotive power.

This will not be news to regular readers. I consider the most significant aspect of any narrative to be its emotional impact. That’s why we listen to, or watch, or share stories in whatever form. And I want people’s first glimpse of the project Andy and I have been developing for the past three years to be something which has real impact on them. It’s not enough to impress people at a technical level. Or become the envy of your peers for getting a project off the ground. For it to become what we want it to be, it needs to connect with audiences. And that’s something we need to get right from the start. Especially given that we’ve got a science fiction setting for our concept, and all too often science fiction stories are reliant on the latest CGI techniques to impress audiences. Sure, we want our baby to be all shiny — but most importantly, we want people to feel the love.

These are interesting times. It’s looking like the multi-platform entertainment concept for children that I’ve devised with artist Andy Tudor has a seriously credible and business-savvy backer, who is putting money into what we’re doing to allow us to develop our ideas further in collaboration with people who have expertise that we admire. That’s majorly exciting stuff, and I was buzzing when we concluded our meeting at the St Pancras branch of Carluccio’s.

Still in the station, I wandered around prior to getting my train back and came across a book I’ve been aching to read: Grant Morrison’s Supergods: Our World In The Age Of The Superhero. It was at full price, but it was a signed copy, and I couldn’t conceive of a better treat to celebrate the start of a new phase of things. And who if not Grant Morrison is going to be a good guide to what happens when reality dissolves and something bigger and grander appears in its place?

The book is a delight. Grant, it turns out, is a fine non-fiction writer as well as being perhaps my favourite comics writer. He’s without a doubt my favourite comics character, and the book is in part a chronicle of the way he invented and reinvented himself. There’s Grant the working class lad whose parents’ politics and reading matter shape the young Scot’s development. He was creating comics alongside friends to share with them at an early age, so by the time he approached the industry for work he’d already got quite a bit of experience.

His capabilities recognised by DC back when Vertigo was starting, Grant and the other Britpack writers cultivated by editor Karen Berger were encouraged to present themselves as hip young things, and made the most of the opportunity. Those were extraordinary times, which gave rise to Pete Milligan’s Shade, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, and Grant’s calculated reinvention of Animal Man, the audacity of which led to continued work in America.

The book covers all that, along with tales of Grant’s adventures in magic, psychedelics, and uncategorisable experiences. Some will dismiss those aspects of what he discusses, but having experienced parallel adventures myself I can only applaud him for being so honest about what he’s been through and what he believes it means. Besides, there’s no doubting that Grant walks his talk: a huckster wouldn’t have the energy for the concepts Grant spins casually, and which form a central thread to his work and life. To pick up on a joke in the book about an exquisitely painful fan encounter, he’s the surreal deal.

Besides, look at what Grant’s approach leads to. Encountering someone dressed as Superman at a point when he was puzzling how to reinvent the character, Grant engaged him in conversation as if he was the icon he purported to be. He was impressed by how relaxed this big fit guy was. That registered: why wouldn’t Superman go round in a casual fashion, when there’s pretty much nothing on the planet that can harm him? That conversation was one of the threads that came together to form All Star Superman, the collaboration with Frank Quitely that’s unquestionably the finest the hero from Krypton has been written, and drawn.

As well as Grant’s own story, you also get his generous and perceptive account of the work of heaps of other creators working in the field of superhero comics. It’s clear that Grant loves what he does, and has a unique and fascinating vision of the field that’s coloured by a quiet radical optimism about not just the artform, but about humankind as a species.

I decided to check out the new Transformers movie. Sure, I knew it would be trash. But Michael Bay trash has a certain something. Not least shapechanging robots who behave like adolescent boys. And who doesn’t enjoy a bit of giant robot action from time to time? Hey, I grew up on 2000AD, Dr Who, and Asimov: of course I’m going to get there sooner or later.

Only, it wasn’t quite that simple. I left the house, headed down the street. Where I live, there are terraced houses, and some of them have arched passageways to the rear, with gates at the front. I passed one, and a man looked out at me. He gestured to a cloth on a car parked outside the house, and said “Can you pass me the tissue?” in an East European accent. I passed him the tissue. This was all a bit odd. Why couldn’t he get it himself? The gate was closed. Was it also locked? He was smiling. Was he a prisoner, or reassuring me that everything was fine?

I texted a couple of friends about the incident on the way into town, and settled down to watch the film. Seems Americans landed on the moon in 1969 to check out evidence of an alien presence. Doubtless there are some on the internet who claim this as a fact, and that the film is a cover-up designed to make the idea ridiculous. Anyway.

Stung by accusations that the last Transformers film was a piece of meretricious racist shit, Bay has furrowed his brow and decided that this new opus needs weighty themes, and a substantial script. In practical terms, this translates as having the kid from the previous films being older now, and looking for his first proper job. See, real world resonance, social commentary — Bay is exploring new territory here, which maybe explains why it’s so hamfisted.

Oh, and it’s all in by-the-numbers film vocab. Meaning that the hero’s parents don’t arrive in a week like they’re supposed to, they turn up on the doorstep while he’s still jobless, maximising his humiliation. There is probably a name for this particular kind of character reveal happening at this moment, but frankly I don’t care. Besides, there was a thought nagging at me –

But hey, not for long. Turns out the bad guys have among their number a sneaky snaky piece of work who can move through buildings like a sea serpent would. If sea serpents existed. And travelled through masonry rather than water. That was a mondo cool display of software magic, the equivalent of a showcase guitar solo in the arena cinema that Bay traffics in.

Only, something wasn’t working. For all the heady excitement of shapechanging robots, lunar missions, Chernobyl and the hero’s leggy girlfriend, my mind was on other matters. The Polish man asking me to pass him some tissues. Really, what was that all about?

It’s a good sign that a film is failing to capture your attention when you spend more time mulling over an odd incident from earlier in the day than being engrossed in what’s happening on screen. Only, that’s exactly what I was doing. Realising the parallel between my curious encounter and those folk tales where a farmer meets a trapped goblin. In those stories, the goblin rewards the farmer by being of service to him and making his wishes come true.

Maybe I’m due to reap some karmic reward by being a benefactor the the trapped Pole. Maybe not. I do know that the incident fascinated me more than anything happening in that cinema. So I left. Early. And ran into a friend who as far as I know was supposed to be miles away on a silent Buddhist retreat. Only there he was, before me. I wasn’t fooled for an instant. Obviously this was his tulpa, a psychic thoughtform that looks exactly like him, of which there’s a long tradition among Buddhist adepts. All of which goes to show you’ve got to be pretty nimble to make your stories more enticing to audiences than what’s already going on in their heads…

It’s Father’s Day. Not a time that meant much to either of us when he was alive — our mutual take on it was that the day was nothing more than a con by greeting card manufacturers. But less than a year after dad’s death, it takes on some kind of significance. Just as Christmas can have meaning other than the exchange of gifts, so it seems can St Hallmark’s day assume a stately resonance.

My love for films, and indeed stories of all sorts, owes a lot to my father. He was an excellent natural storyteller, sharing nuggets from his past through to the last weeks of his life. Even caught up in his own reminiscence, he understood intuitively that a story was there for its audience. As a child, I’d listen awed as he told me about his entirely fictitious role in winning World War Two (he was in short trousers at the time).

Some years later I was just as fascinated when he told me the supposed truth. How an uncle had worked on a ship and — thanks to the effect of seasickness — vomited into the massive pot of porridge he was making for the officers, serving it up anyway as he’d have got into trouble for it being late. How the same man had been indirectly responsible for the only successful escape of a German from Britain during WW2, thanks to his dereliction of the guard duty he was supposed to be doing. This all chimed with dad’s experience of National Service, an experience he’d turned to his advantage by getting a position with duties involving doling out highly prized rail warrants, the result of which being that he never had to do any of the more arduous tasks himself, instead focusing on canoeing trips through the countryside he loved so much.

In his youngest days I know he’d been a fan of Sabu, star of Thief of Bagdad, released when my father was just 3. Later, a young adult, he found a liking for the films of Kurosawa, seeing them first time round at a city centre cinema in his home town Birmingham. I’d love to have known him then: a working class guy who was watching art house films, playing chess, and listening to jazz and had the world ahead of him. His fascination with foreign cultures came through in his choice of films, loving French cinema in particular and in his retirement sampling an eclectic international selection of DVDs.

That love of world cinema was itself reflected in his love for meeting people from different cultures. I grew up around the foreign students he took under his wing when he was a lecturer. They came from Malaysia, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Uganda and elsewhere, and I got to hear their stories too, and appreciate differences in culture and worldview that were a stark contrast to the rigid mindset that my dismal secondary schooling failed to install. Dad’s friends were just as varied socially as they were in other ways: he knew a one-eyed furniture restorer, lecturers involved in lawsuits with their colleagues, race track touts, an Irish plasterer who consumed 12 pints of Guinness a night, a market trader rumbled by the Inland Revenue for the disparity between his spend on brown paper bags and the average worth of a single bag’s contents, a louche hairdresser who’d learned his trade in jail, a former politician who’d been dangled out of a helicopter in his home country after a coup.

He recognised the value of good tv, coming home early if he could to watch Clangers with me, and getting us all home on Saturday in time for Dr Who. And he gently nudged me to watching particular films when they appeared on tv, and I realise now in taking me and a friend to see Kagemusha at an arts cinema in Birmingham when I was 15 or so that he was passing a baton on. Not that he’d have been so crass as to put it in so portentuous a fashion. But in introducing me to Kurosawa, he was sharing something of his own past with me, and shaping my future.

I’m delivering a workshop on creativity and spirituality tomorrow, without being quite sure what I’ll be doing, and quite how I’ll connect two domains that for many people exist in separate boxes. It gets even more unlikely when you consider that there are those who deny that they are creative while acknowledging that creativity exists, and others who don’t recognise a spiritual dimension to their own or anyone else’s lives. And I’ve got an hour or so to set the record straight, and ideally give those present an experience which makes clear the traffic between both areas. Gosh.

It’s currently quite fashionable to be an atheist or humanist if you’re a creative of some sort. And that’s fine, but more often than not such a stance is about people making a political statement concerning organisations whose dogmatic outlook leads to repressive behaviours. In that regard, I’m all in favour of taking a stand. But what I don’t want is for spirituality in its widest sense to be sneered at in the way that I sometimes feel is being done by the advocates of atheism.

Now, admittedly one of the biggest problems with looking at creativity and spirituality is the outpourings of those who advocate that there is valuable common ground. I’m not at all sure the world needs any more New Age wibbling about sacred energies and the cosmos and all that. What perhaps we do need is more creators along the lines of Blake and Turner, both of whose work has a sense of the numinous without ever pinning down exactly what such might be.

‘Numinous’ is frowned upon by many in the contemporary art world. There’s a suspicion of experiences that evoke awe, as witnessed in some of the critical reaction to the ‘indoor sun’ that Olafur Eliasson created for the Tate Modern. That notion of being lost in something greater is pretty much the antithesis of academic-style art appreciation, which tends to be a cerebral experience where the role of the curator in choosing stuff is seen as just as important as the stuff chosen.

Cutting through the wads of theory surrounding both fields, my conclusion is that creativity and spirituality are often in practice names for the same experience, of going beyond our usual bounds and into something other, from which we bring back affirmation and inspiration. It’s a very personal business, but because it happens to lots of us, it’s possible to see patterns of similarity — which is pretty much the sequence I’ve just outlined. Which is also, if you think about it, another way of articulating the Hero’s Journey.

In the days before heroes improvised raps to see who was mightiest, or fought against the evils of a corrupt police department, they had other things to concern themselves with. They stole fire from the gods, learned from the birds the secret of flight, took for themselves the secrets of speech. These were epochal experiences, sure enough likely to be metaphorical, in which humans learned about the ways of the world they lived in.

Maybe it’s because we live in a world where music is created by manipulators with business skills rather than issuing forth from the hands of players into the ears of grateful audiences; where stories are associated with people whose names are embossed on the covers of books and who continue to write even after they have died; where films are more and more designed by committee to remind us of the tv shows we enjoyed as infants, that the notion of spirituality being an aspect of creativity is seen as ridiculous. And that’d be a shame. Making spirituality embarrassing is the surest form of censorship I can think of, and that’s something worth contemplating at greater length than here or in the session I’ll be running tomorrow. Wish me luck…