Mark Demeny

I met up with a few friends in New York to see the last 3 GBV gigs in NY. On the last night, I was scheduled to fly to Washington DC, and was planning to get to my hotel, get a few hours sleep and catch the 6am flight out of LaGuardia.

Anyway, after the gig, we went for a quick pint and just as we were flagging a taxi, who do we see entering a bar but GBV, and the opening acts. We got royally smashed with them all (drinking? GBV? no…) and I ended up going right to the airport straight from the bar.

Bob is by far the coolest dude I have ever met.

The first time I was in London, I was working in Canary Wharf. I was running very late for lunch, and went into the mall at Cabot Square when I saw his new book in the window. Being a huge Ian Rankin fan, I went to go buy it and noticed that at that exact moment, he was about to start signing books – which was a fantastic stroke of luck. If I hadn’t been running late and went down for lunch at 2pm, I might’ve missed him completely.

I met him when I was living in London, England. He was at Books Etc. in Covent Garden signing copies of ‘Hey Nostradamus!’ and I brought along my copy of ‘Souvenir of Canada’ for him to sign as well.

When he saw it – he grabbed it for a few minutes to show his publishers, since it wasn’t in print in England. It’s clearly one of his favourites as he was quite excited about seeing it and showing it around. Afterwards he signed it ‘From a friend back home – Douglas Coupland, London, England’

He also did a book reading later that week, which was excellent. He talked a great deal about things that interest him in an insightful and funny way and only read one chapter of the book, but spoke for perhaps a couple hours.

He is by far one of my favourite authors.

Rob works odd hours. Rob sends emails at 2am. Rob is one smart dude, and we all expect great things from him – though I suspect he’ll procrastinate for a few more years only because we keep bugging him about it.

Mark is never home. Mark travels a lot. I am mildly jealous of Mark travelling so bloody much… :)