It's a big Internet but still a small world

I had a message from my brother a couple of days ago. Nothing unusual there, you might think, except that we are seldom in touch, not for any personal reasons but geographical. He's lived just about as far away as you can get for the last sixteen years, during which time I've only seen him two or three times. Add in the complication of the diametrically opposed time zones and regular communication, over time, just fell into the too-hard pile. So it was a nice surprise to get a message, even if it was just one line: "This wasn't you was it?" A hyperlink was attached.

Turns out my brother had, for reasons only known to himself, been Googling a slightly obscure and largely forgotten short film from the 1970s. Incredibly, the thumbnail for one of the search results showed a grainy black and white photograph of a now-defunct cinema he remembered from his youth, literally half a world away. What a coincidence, eh? So that was, inevitably, the link he clicked on to read about the film.

The more he read, the more uncannily echoic of his own cinema-going experience the article became, to the point that he happened to say (presumably to his missus) "This could have been written by my brother." Lo and behold, when he got to bottom of the article, there was my forename. Too much of a coincidence, he figured ... and hence the message.

You've already guessed from the fact that I've bothered to string out this tiny tale into another blog post that, of course, it was me. This was the article he read, something I wrote seven and a half years ago about The Waterloo Bridge Handicap and long-forgotten cinemas (... and a girl called Denise). That post later got republished by none other than Andrew Collins on his short-lived but much-liked blog Digging your Screen. Now, all these years later, it and a series of small coincidences were enough to prove that, although the Internet is a vast and sometimes horrible place, underneath it all there is still a small world.

Better finish with a song, I suppose. My brother was a big fan of Adam Ant in his younger day, so here's a very early track from him, Deutscher Girls, set to footage from Derek Jarman's 1978 film Jubilee (which included both Adam and this song). Adam is accompanied here by a pre-fame iteration of the Ants, many of whom went on to back Annabella Lwin in Bow Wow Wow when Adam put a white stripe on his nose and recruited a new guitarist, two drummers and a much more tribal sound for the Antmusic that was to sweep the nation's playgrounds.

And yes, I did choose the Jubilee clip for the embed to link all this nonsense back to the ideas of film and cinema-going - these posts don't (always) just throw themselves together, you know?