PREFACE (UNUSED!) to CHAD CALLAND's 'BECOMING A MAN'

"The task of being a man is not easy," says Chad Calland, in these powerful pages in which he guides us on how to be our "best self", and God knows no one at times has made it look harder than Chad. Long thought (wrongly as it turns out) to surely be the illegitimate son of Oliver Reed, England's greatest ever Englishman, Chad Calland, hellraiser, heavy drinker, womaniser, sharp dresser, WRITER, MAN, has been brought to the brink of destruction in his life, until a 'miracle' and an act of mercy saved him at the eleventh hour. In that moment he resolved to save others as he had been saved. Now he explains what it takes to "become a man" in today's world that wants us to fail. "Using your edge to an advantage and using it to gain a foothold." Any man who is lost, and is losing his footing, and feels himself slipping down the mountainside, needs to learn how to find this "edge" and gain this "foothold".

"Our demons grow in the shadows and burn in the light of truth, we cannot face them without discipline, hard work and the will to iron and burn them out. They will attempt to cling on and hold on, we will scream in agony as they attempt to hold on."

BECOMING A MAN has a Nietzschean air to it and Nietzsche is one of my favourite writers ever. I like the kind of almost exultation in Calland's writing, but an exultation not without struggle, a striving for exultation as it were. A hard won exultation. The words are driving, propulsive one might say. Heading for an explosion. "A slow burning fuse approaching its moment of detonation". "Jesus is Great and so am I" graffiti I saw on a subway wall in Nottingham comes to mind.

A stamp with a flaw will be worth millions in years & centuries to come and collectors will travel the world to track it down. A stamp that is perfect is boring and worth almost nothing. If Chad Calland was a stamp he'd be a Penny Black but a Penny Black with something very slightly wrong with it that was posted from a Victorian era Manchester brothel and opium den in a last desperate attempt to communicate to the outside world. A cry for help and a cry to help. And that is what we search the world for. Here is Chad Calland's Penny Black, and here is that letter.

An admirer

Ernst Graf