Book Synopsis/Extracts
‘Being Malcolm – Too Many Heartbeats’ ©
Malcolm R Fane
Scroll this synopsis with extracts to view captioned photo montages and selected story extracts. ©
Synopsis:
A cathartic autobiography blending the emotionally disturbing with inspired life fulfilment.
One life lived at the very edge of reality, at times pushed beyond limit as unbridled ambition successfully produced the unlikeliest of positive project scenarios.
Award-winning career success interwoven with extremes in personal life failures.
‘Being Malcolm – Too Many Heartbeats’ charts a lifetime with four marriages; psychologically damaging episodes of tragedy; excessive repetitive personal losses; and of recovery from multiple invasive surgical replacements and repairs to a body shattered in a catastrophic fatal road traffic accident.
Cyclical recurrence of recovery upon recovery, culminating in brutal home truths of a life adjusting to the onset and effects of Parkinson’s, & the double whammy of more additional diagnosed conditions. Polytrauma – a condition formed of multiple trauma ta. And heart arrhythmia condition now managed by implanted pacemaker and mini defibrillator.
From catastrophic car wreck survival, to successfully fighting through a throat cancer, to a life-changing diagnosis of Parkinson’s and more recent heart operation; each forming a life with ‘Too Many Heartbeats’.
‘Being Malcolm’ also journeys through many positive heart warming stories recalled from an extensive career archive, including the uplifting ‘Finding Mum – Susie’s Story’.
Emotionally charged recollections of a daughter’s search for her mother forced by circumstance to give up twin babies at birth. Exhilarating investigative journalism which led to their emotionally charged reunion following thirty years of an adopted family’s obstruction of detailed truth.
Inspirational moments of one reunited family’s joy, wildly contrasting with career work documenting and reporting on the horrors and tragedy of war tearing apart innocent peaceful family life with murderous consequence.
Too Many Heartbeats.
BBC Radio 5live broadcasting and television documentary film making from within the worst of Europe’s wartime tragedies – the former Nazi death camps of Auschwitz.
Exceptional media projects which formed inspirational friendships & relationships, extracts* of which follows this synopsis.
A motor sports dalliance as lead driver with Swedish factory managed Team Challenger SAAB, was as exciting as it gets.
A post-accident return to racing against the clock in European time trials ahead of a Guinness World Circumnavigation record attempt, which proved psychologically and physically tough, but absolutely spine tingling.
Too Many Heartbeats.
Recollections of a year-long blood, sweat, and tears project to organise Scotland’s National Polish Tribute – held in the Scottish Borders town of Peebles during August 1997.
The project included a monument’s design, stone quarrying and mason sculpting processes; a forging of three bronze plaques; the friendly invasion of 8,000 additional folk into Peebles; WW2 military sideshow events; a huge banquet; a Royal Air Force flypast; and the unveiling of a Polish National Memorial dedicated to its exiled forces who fought and died alongside British Forces.
Most challenging was to initiate, organise, and to have signed off by the MOD a dedicated Royal Air Force flypast. Three RAF Tornado F3 aircraft flying formation above the memorial’s unveiling became an acclaimed dramatic highlight, completing a weekend of military events organised to compliment the televised tribute event.
It will long remain the finest of tributes honouring Scottish Polish culture, and the many thousands of Polish exiled WW2 forces who sacrificed so heavily for Scotland and all of Great Britain.
Too Many Heartbeats.
These examples present just a few primary media projects. I am immensely proud of all the successes enjoyed during a busy media career, even though some major projects walked a very fine line between success and failure in what seemed impossible tasks.
Too Many Heartbeats.
From the depths of despair soaring to the highest of highs, there is often a price for extremes in life. Invariably its paymaster is to be found in adverse health.
Ultimately, an anguished bloodline story is exposed describing the loss of individuals from a family riven with hostility and petty jealousies. A family permanently fractured by its own manufactured web of toxic self-serving lies, with a greed-driven conspiratorial sibling sisters’ obnoxious decision to deny their mother’s Final Will & Testimony to be legally executed, instead pocketing their plunder and hiding away from due process.
False accusations whipped up and shared within a frenzied group of intellectually bankrupt, shallow and poorly educated people. Bespoke nastiness.
Broken FamiLIES… the clue is found in one word.
Background checks undertaken by investigative media colleagues these past two years are concluded.
From New Zealand to Australia; from Milton Keynes to Edinburgh via Essex; from Cambridge to Canterbury; and from Dover to Deliverance …
… dig deep enough and to the surface emerges the corrosive stench of a convicted drug dealer; examples of illegal tax-dodging contraband cigarette and tobacco doorstep dealing; deliberate household insurance fraud; and the bizarre misappropriation of church funds in Kent, England, by a judgmental and unforgiving pious Christian.
There is even a self-styled ‘Sexuality Priestess’ whose trail of ‘intimate teachings’ and ‘stimulative advice therapies’ attracted media attention. Antipodean law enforcement agencies’ files made interesting reading and analysis, all of which is topped off with the emergence of disturbing Police records and UK Social Services’ background reports.
The treacherous story of a former trusted friend and project colleague finally goes public.
A vainglorious hanger-on who sought fame in his own self-aggrandizement while two of his colleagues lay critically injured in hospital and as one other lay dead in a morgue.
A truly sad story of a vicarious wannabe whose career successes were as limited as his own wee man stature.
‘Let those without sin among you cast the first stone’.
There was a time when I thought such biblical teachings as sanctimonious tosh, but this one fits.
The clock is ticking.
My powder has been patiently kept dry.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
Too Many Heartbeats.
Following immense heartache, multiple invasive surgical replacements, body rebuilds and repairs, and losses no one person should be expected to sustain I discover that, no matter what the mix of adverse multiple circumstance, it is within us all to eventually locate and embrace that hitherto elusive tranquility. A tranquility which affords inner calmness, one which allows us to be at peace with ourselves.
A strength of human spirit? Is it just fate? Perhaps it could be in the Almighty’s grand plan for each of us?
Carefully considered, legally scrutinised cathartic writing is blended to produce an ultimate expose of those who caused so much unnecessary pain, and it is this which formed my belief the answer to all three questions occupies a space somewhere between all three possibilities.
We love anew, and we rebuild life with even greater strength gained from adversity and painful experience.
I trust you will enjoy reading my lifebook as much as I have whilst writing its cathartic content.
Truth always triumphs.
Malcolm R Fane Scottish Highlands 2021
Captioned photographs subject to copyright.
