Markham Nolan | Literary Mercenary

Thank you is so simple, yet so important. This post from a blog about fundraising for nonprofits illustrates the negative power of failing to thank donors. And it jogged my memory, as did some fairly robust pleas for cash from the RNLI at a dinner on Saturday night.

I’ll be honest – and this isn’t a popular stance if you’re a sailor – I’ll find it hard to donate to the RNLI again. In 2003 I ran the Dublin marathon for three charities – the MS Society, the RNLI and Lohada, a small Tanzanian NGO I helped set up as independent back in 2001.

Of the three, the RNLI were positively ignorant about the donation I was trying to give them. The MS Society wrote to thank me, I was sent a hand-made card by one of the kids in the Tanzanian orphanage. The RNLI were obstructive from the start (as I wasn’t running solely for them, they had no way for me to fit into their system), and were completely ungrateful upon receipt of the cash.

I handed them just over €1,000, and was met with a ‘right, whatever’ response.

And at the dinner this weekend, their speaker, who was gifted the MC role at the event, seemed arrogant in her assumption that she had a right to demand money from us, as we were all marine-related folk gathered in one room.

All of which made me very angry indeed.

The old mantra of no shirt, no service, is a manners thing. If you can’t be bothered putting on a shirt to show me some respect, I can’t be bothered serving you food.

Same goes for NGOs. If I go out of my way to raise funds for you, it probably means I’d do it again. I’m a renewable revenue stream.

No thanks, no donations. Simple.

Below you’ll find a short vid I put together for the Irish Sailing Assocation’s Annual Conference, which kicked off today. I spoke at 11am on promoting your club and at the dinner tonight, the Youth Sailor of the Year award gets given out. The two candidates are profiled in this vid: Finn Lynch who sails a Topper, and Philip Doran who sails a Laser Radial. The video is being used to announce them to the audience at the dinner.

ISA Youth Awards Intro from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Rory, who works for the ISA and features in the video, had seen the aul social media guru vid from last September and wanted some of the xtranormal.com animation used at the start. The remaining 80%  was cut together from training videos of Philip that Rory had shot on the water. All we had to work with was pics of Finn so they had to be made work to tell his story. I edited the whole thing in iMovie. This was my first editing job ever, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

On the whole, this was low-budget, low-tech. Rory was sitting on a kitchen chair in my garden shed office. I hung a black sheet behind him and sat him with a window on his left (camera right) so we had nice soft, natural light.  On advice from Adam Westbrook, I had splashed out on a Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera to record the interviews with Rory (a whopping €130). The Zi8 has a microphone line in, so I nabbed a cheap lapel mic, and the sound quality is great as a result. (I’ve worked with the Flip HD too, the Kodak is nicer, but a little bigger in the hand).

I coached Rory through what I wanted from him, and we taped his notes (scribbled in marker on the back of a plane ticket) to the tripod just below the camera so that he had something to cog from. I downloaded a free converter to convert Rory’s .wmv and other Windows-format videos, and nabbed a song from Mr Scruff.  All in all, we recorded three minutes of chat with Rory, which was more than enough.

There are some things I’d like to be able to do that iMovie won’t permit, like layer audio from one slide over another, but for free software it’s remarkably easy to use, and the end results are great if you put some thought into it.

“NGOs that are really good and efficient should survive and grow, and those which really don’t add value and can’t be competitive should wind up. You’re wasting money that could be applied to the poorest people in the world in a much more efficient way. Unless you can do it efficiently, I don’t think you should be in this business.“

Sunday Business Post, August 3, 2008

CHARITY IN A PC WORLD

Cormac Lynch’s charity supplies computers to the poor in Africa, but he admits his capitalist instincts are the reason for his great success.

The Irish love to play games that involve degrees of separation. For example, plenty of us can map out, in three or four steps, a link to the likes of Bono with little effort. Dubliner Cormac Lynch, founder of Irish charity Camara, is a master of the art – taking us from the world’s poorest people to the world’s super-rich in two short steps. [Read more →]

If your taxi driver had  been awake for the guts of 57 hours, would you be happy to let him drive you home? No?

What about if your doctor had been awake for 57 hours – would you let them take out your appendix?

Didn’t think so.

Sunday Business Post, August 07, 2005

Working around the clock, grabbing a snooze when there’s a lull in the action, going without meals and pepping themselves up with caffeine – how long can Ireland’s over-worked junior doctors keep going under these conditions? ‘You wouldn’t want your mother or fathe r on that operating table,” says the junior doctor, yawning down the phone. [Read more →]

Every now and then you do a piece that catches you in the throat. This piece stemmed from an interview with a blogger who was tackling some intensely personal stuff on his blog about his own self-harm, which he has now ditched as he has stopped harming. Result.

Sunday Business Post – Jan 26, 2006

John cuts himself. He takes a razor blade, draws its edge slowly across his upper arm until it parts the skin and glides smoothly, steely into the soft flesh beneath. He says that when he sees the blood, it feels good; it feels like the sting of sunburn and a release of pressure. [Read more →]

Beginning of day one of horse trek: Happy face. End of day two of horse trek: Sorry arse. This is the story of a silken-assed young city boy, the ghosts of some famous cowboys, and a feisty ride called Cynthia. (Sounds like a night in Coppers).

Sunday Business Post, September 23, 2007

There’s a certain comfort in some of life’s old reliables, the things you can count on staying the same when all else goes haywire. Yesterday will always be better value than today, and night will always follow day. In the travel world, backpackers will always blindly follow the highlights list in the front of guidebooks but claim they’re trailblazing pioneers.

Most of the trails in the world were well blazed long ago, of course, but a few still lie relatively unbeaten and not far from the main bottlenecks in South America’s backpacking logjam. Notorious highwaymen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hit them in the early 1900s when they hung up their outlaw spurs in search of an honest life. They didn’t want to settle somewhere well signposted, so they headed for the isolated plains of Bolivia. [Read more →]

Having taken a step back from blogging and all that ‘meta jazz’ for a while, I’ve had a good long think about the Social Media Guru (SMG) vid I put together in September, and what motivated me to be so cynical. The video is the only web ‘thing’ I’ve ever really created, it has generated 143,000 hits and counting. That’s unexpectedly large given what it was (ten times the hits of the much-vaunted DJ Hip Op vid), yet infinitely small in Youtube terms (20 million people have watched this surprised kitten video).

It sparked some pointed animosity from American SMGs, already sick of being mocked, despite the video being aimed squarely at their clients, whose gullibility and laziness of mind is the root of the real issue. One full-on viral case study was done on its global spread, which was very interesting indeed.  The video was met largely with a wall of silence by those in the sector in Ireland, in comparison which is unsurprising due to the small marketplace here.

I’m not a guru or a techie, I’m not selling any guru-like services (at present), but I have helped friends get started in the sphere and written copy for plenty of websites. I’m also a chronic lurker. [Read more →]

Ah, the wireless. Sure where would you be of an aul winter evening without the magic box in the corner?

I’d spent a long time looking for this old radio documentary I cobbled together for a college project when, finally, it appeared in an old clippings folder.

It’s an interview with my dad’s aunt Peggy, a Loreto sister who spent 43 years in Kenya with the order as a teacher. She crossed paths with Mother Teresa and taught a child who ended up winning a Nobel peace prize. Not a bad lifetime’s work.

I’ve started doing some podcasts for another website, and thought I’d throw this one up here for the record. Enjoy.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Last week I took a bunch of college students back to school. After three hours of poker, I stood up and walked away with 70 of their softly-bludged euros. It was a rare, rare win.

While I was busy fleecing them, we got talking about work, and the fact that I’m back freelancing again. The lads started asking me about what articles I most enjoyed researching. I’m not a big poker player, but when I mentioned a long feature on student poker, and promptly scooped another hefty pot of chips, there was a collective groan. He’s a fucking shark.

The article appeared on the front of the Agenda magazine while I was still a student myself.

Sunday Business Post, Feb 27, 2005

Poker School

It’s 7.30pm and the last of 270 students are trickling through the doors of the Gresham Hotel. Ten to a table, they sit and make guarded small talk, eyeing each other nervously.

With a top prize of €1,500 on the line, there’s little time for making friends, and everyone is anxious to get down to business. Niall Hughes of Trinity College’s Card Society announces to much applause, that the prize fund has reached €6,500. [Read more →]

This was one of the hardest articles I ever chose to write. My mum (pictured) had a short but intense battle with MS in her mid-forties, which she ultimately lost. I paired up with Damien Mulley, who had been diagnosed recently, to write about our experiences of the condition. It’s heavy.

I wrote this six months after my father died, and some people remarked that it was an article I could never have written while he was alive, given the situation it describes. It doesn’t attach any blame to him for his response, but it would have been….awkward. And as for the motives behind it – I don’t know. Therapy, I guess. It’s still hard to re-read, and seeing it in print was much harder than the process of writing it, which I undertook pretty much on autopilot. I picked up a copy of the paper and went into a coffee shop to read it that day, and nearly collapsed when I saw the pictures of my mother in the paper. Anyway, here it is:

Sunday Business Post, September 07, 2008

MS, which attacks a person’s nervous system, directly affects more than 6,000 people in Ireland. Diagnosis often prompts a frenzy of research, as the new patient scrambles to arm themselves with as much information as they can. Often, the first stop is someone whose life has already been affected by MS.

For Cork-based journalist Damien Mulley, diagnosed this January, his first port of call was a fellow journalist, Markham Nolan, whose mother died in 2004 after an unusually brief time with the illness. Here, they share their very different perspectives on a condition that is a familiar presence in thousands of Irish homes. [Read more →]