Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
One February night in ’74
the Army occupied Heathrow Airport.
The BBC’s Nine O’Clock news explained
the occupation was an exercise
in how to deal with a terrorist threat.
The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,
learned of the exercise from the TV,
recognised it as the dress rehearsal
of a coup against his premiership –
a coup that would have been sanctified
by an announcement from her Majesty,
an emergency government led by
her husband’s uncle,
Anti-Semitism is the demagogue’s
canard, the resort of the populist,
the calculating racist’s dog whistle,
the opportunist’s bigotry, hatred of,
and prejudice against, Jewish people.
When Alfred Dreyfus was humiliated
on the Champs de Mars there were three hundred
Jewish officers in the French Army,
ten of them generals. The real spy,
Major Esterhazy, with official
connivance, died in his bed as Count
de Voilement at ‘Holmleigh’, 21
Milton Road, Harpenden,
To dominate the conflux of the rivers,
the Minnesota with the Mississipi,
a place inhabited for ten thousand years,
Bdote in the local language,
Fort Snelling was built on the bluff above.
The confluence of the rivers was sacred
to the Dakota Sioux, who believed
that their first ancestors had come as spirits
from the stars, and had been made human
from the clay along the riverbanks,
with life breathed into them like a newborn’s cry.
The evangelist – spiritual aide-de-camp
to Old Glory’s Commanders-in-Chief,
and nostrum-monger of eternal life –
in white shirt, black shoes, socks, trousers, the Good Book
open in his hands, sits astride a donkey
near the Garden of Gethsemane
on Mount Olive. Below him on Temple Mount,
in noonday brightness, is the Dome of the Rock
and the Al-Aksa Mosque and, out of sight,
the Western Wall. He looks at the camera
as one who might say, ‘Behold! When the Jews
hold Jerusalem heaven will open.
Found among the effects in the bullet-pocked,
blood stained rooms of Bin Laden’s hideaway
in Abbottabad – named for Major Abbott
of the British Raj – was a journal
describing Osama’s time in the UK
as a young, ultimately disillusioned,
teenager. For some reason, unexplained,
with his hosts he visited Shakespeare’s birthplace
every Sunday. ‘Here’s a knocking indeed!…
How now? A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!’
Also found: ‘Mr Bean’s Holiday’
dubbed in Pashtu;
I wrote the screenplays between 2001 and 2008. They are presented below in the order in which they were written. Each is set against the background of armed conflict.
I was inspired to learn how to write screenplays as a result of a number of conversations in New York in August 2001 with Annabel Honor-Lissi, a fellow creative, and digital tutorials with her which followed.
THE MEMORIAL
The Memorial is about redemption through kindness, compassion and love. Set in the immediate aftermath of the 1st World War, it is a love story that explores class,
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
TOWARDS A DEFINITION
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS
THE PLOT AGAINST THESE ISLANDS