Can You See The Real Me?

This is for The Remarkably Real Vocal Challenge, the challenges were one of the reasons I joined Vocal but since then I have discovered something far more precious, my Facebook Vocal Friends and Family who provide me with love and support and encouragement and without whom I would not be here writing this.

I wrote a story called Immortals that you can read here, basically positing that in this digital world as long as there is power and the technology keeps working , we can be there forever.

Fifteen years ago I started a blog called Seven Days In , that I thought would be a travel blog , but then it veered away from that and became more like a diary about things that caught my attention, with a lean towards music. In 2019 I posted more than one piece a day (368 posts) and this year I made a decision to scale back my writing , but then I joined Vocal. This year I have posted 104 blog posts and 285 stories on Vocal, so that is a total of 389 before I post this.

Because Vocal’s search facility is imperfect I created a directory of my work so I can easily find stories when I need to reshare, it is here.

Billy Bolero A Favourite Of Mine

So back to the premise of this story.

With two and half thousand posts on Seven Days In and close on three hundred on Vocal , my written work is digitally stored forever plus I have nine thousand Instagram posts both videos and pictures with the odd selfie.

But who am I? What do I look like and sound like?

I have a YouTube channel here and have done a lot of slideshows with music. My Christopher Lee video has had over eighty thousand views and my Nick Cave / Dr Seuss take on Red Right Hand is nudging towards ten thousand , but recently I started having more of me in videos.

You may not believe it but I am ridiculously shy, although I do love performing for people , but right up to getting up and doing it I am very very scared. I have performed on stage over ten years from 1995 to 2005 in front of admittedly partisan audiences , but those performances are now just memories bar some photographs and one professional recorded concert at the Tyneside Irish Centre , plus an amateur one that I am trying to recover from a Video CD.

Then I thought about singing songs I love and seeing if I can put it one YouTube , effectively busking on social media. So I did it .

This is me raw , full of mistakes , and having the nerve just to do it. Whether it is worth listening to only the audience can decide , but some of the performances , well to be honest all of them , I am well satisfied with.

Most of the time I strip the song down to the absolute minimum chord sequence , and some are for people who mean a lot to me and others are just for myself. That is one way of stripping myself raw in public. There is a complete YouTube Playlist of me performing and singing here , though the song I will lead with is my attempt at The Magnetic Fields “Book of Love” , a beautiful song that I managed to perform.

As well as the singing I have put together a couple of basic cookery videos and also ended up doing a twenty minute one where I climbed Castlebergh Crag in Settle which you can see here.

Two days ago I was interviewed for possible inclusion in a forthcoming film about my sadly missed friend Craig Puranen Wilson . I thought it would either be an email or phone interview, no it was full lights and camera for ninety minutes, I hope the editors are kind to me.

So Can You See The Real Me?