Sunday 6 April 2008

A plug for another Unchained

A few months ago, when Unchained was pretty young and we hadn’t started to get our names into the newspapers, I was telling one of my colleagues about it. And when I mentioned the name ‘Unchained’ they said “Oh. Do you mean that Dave Gorman thing?”

“What Dave Gorman thing?”, I asked, slightly baffled.

“The thing where he travelled across the States trying not to spend any money in chainstores”, they replied. “It was on Channel 4 last night.”

“Ehm. No. Dave Gorman has nothing to do with it. But that sounds interesting. Please tell me more.”

So that was when I found out all about his fantastic ‘America Unchained’ film/book/pyjamas/lunchbox project. If you don’t know anything about it, you can find out more here, here, here and here.

Obviously we at Unchained think he’s come up with a wonderful name for his project. We loved the film and I’m currently enjoying the book. So Lea and I went along to a reading he was doing at Borders on Oxford Street yesterday (yes, even Dave Gorman commented on the irony of that one). I must admit that I’m not a great fan of readings. I’ve been to a couple in the past where I’ve just sat in the audience thinking how much I’d rather be reading it in the corner of a quiet pub with a pint of nice ale beside me. Thankfully, this wasn’t one of those. It was more of a question and answer session where he shared more funny anecdotes as well as a lot of the personal pain he went through on his cross-continent adventure. And – best of all – it wasn’t remotely preachy, flagwaving or militant.

He’s doing some more talks around the country this week – so if you get the chance to go and see him, I’d highly recommend it.

And, if you don’t, go out and buy the book anyway, From an independent bookshop, if you can.

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