The wonderful Jennifer Sullivan who was so immediately enthusisastic about the idea of a an online beacon of badassery for punk minded Parkies…led directly to my drafting this invitation to Jeremy Paxman…who may of course be too ill to have any interest in such tomfoolerly but here’s the latest draft which i plan to send to his agent this week.
All comments and suggestions welcome….well up to point…if you don’t likt the idea then you know what you can do…
Dear Mr Paxman,
I’m working on the idea of creating some kind of online rallying point for people who refuse to let Parkinson’s turn them into something warm and beige, but want to continue to shout “fuck off” and give the finger to polite society as often as they can.
On my own I won’t get far — as Claude sharply observed, a one-man mosh pit is a sad sight. But if you would be interested in becoming Leader of the Punks — Parkie’s Unbowed Noncoms Krapp’s Society (WT) — that would cause a stir.
Me — I’m ex-BBC, ex-Discovery Channel (briefly SVP Disco Europe). Now 80, diagnosed with the P six years ago. I write a Substack, Fvcking Parkinson’s! This half-crazed idea came out of my sense of being a lone wannabe badass in a sea of tepid niceness that seems to pervade the PD scene.
Movers & Shakers, minus your baleful input, epitomise the deadeningly cheerful & maddeningly middle-class tone that led me to the idea of PUNKS.
One other thing — not connected to PUNKS. Demis Hassabis has just stepped back from running Google DeepMind precisely so he can pursue his original ambition of AI-driven medical breakthroughs at Isomorphic Labs. Parkinson’s is now the fastest-growing neurological condition in the world, and it is, at root, a protein-misfolding disease — squarely in the territory of the work that won him his Nobel Prize.
A letter from you making that case would be rather harder to file in the bin than one from me.
If any of this takes your fancy even slightly, I’d be very glad to tell you more.
Yours,
Nick Calder
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