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I've never really found a community of other adults who lost a parent as children. I have friends whose parents divorced and they became estranged from a parent, and other friends who have sadly lost a parent as young adults, but it's not quite the same pain.  On Father's Day last weekend I felt a bit sad. Nothing major, and nothing that prevented me from getting on with my day. Just a bit sad. It's a pain I carry always, that part of me frozen in time on the Sunday afternoon when my dad died in 1993.  On this year's Father's Day, I wondered if anyone had an idea how I feel, to the extent that anyone can given how individual an experience bereavement is. I'm eager to seek common ground in all human experiences lately, and a community of this kind has a particular draw for me.  When my granda died in 2004, my mum told me she finally knew how my sister and I felt. But we were children. Her trauma was a very adult one culminating three years of intensive

Full video recording of my chat with Connecticut-based writer Caleb Harris about his work dealing with issues around mental health in young men. You can also subscribe to Audiovisual Cultures wherever you get your podcasts to hear the audio edit. Slip me a fiver at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peablair .

Preview of Audiovisual Cultures Podcast episode 69 with Caleb Harris. Slip me a fiver at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peablair .

I haven't much felt like writing lately, not because I don't want to, but because I feel I have little to say. I missed posting last week, but given that it's the first week I haven't posted since mid-November and we're in the middle of a pandemic and political/civil turmoil just now, I'm not going to beat myself up. I'm feeling contemplative and am staring down my future, trying to figure out what it could be. I know what I want the immediate few years to involve, and bringing that to fruition seems challenging to say the least.  What I feel I'm tugging towards is establishing a small production company as an umbrella for the various things I'm working on. I've been listening to and learning loads from the fantastic careers podcast, Wanna Be , hosted by the equally fantastic Imriel Morgan. To my shame, I've known about this show for 3 years but had not listened until recently. Mind you, I reckon we often come to things - or

In which I read my essay 'Panopticonicity: Sites of Control and the Failure of Forgetting in Willie Doherty’s Re-Run (2002) and Drive (2003)' published in Post-Conflict Performance, Film and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory edited by Des O'Rawe and Mark Phelan, and purchasable here . Slip me a fiver at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peablair .

Slip me a fiver at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peablair .

5 June 2020 Trying to jot some notes in the days of fall-out after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis resulting from the heavy-handed (mis)conduct by police officers - one black man begging the group of white men in positions of power for his life - and I'm led to think once more about collective trauma and social justice. All the while in the UK, racially motivated violence and abuse are just as prevalent and the government are insisting we 'move on' from a virus that is only getting started and about which our understanding is shifting all the time.  Yet again, the public are being pummelled by political urgency on both sides of the Atlantic to already be in the post-times while the crisis is still ongoing and very far from any resolution. We are as post-Covid as we are post-racism and post-colonialism, that is, in truth, not really post at all. Until we confront our legacies and lineages, we are ever stuck in the present. Those of us who choose not to turn aw