Grim news from Paris. What is to be done? What can we do? Whatever it is – stop the warring in Syria? –  we agreed this morning that one thing we have to do is make the best we can of our time. So here is the blog I’d prepared for today.

Round and Round:

Odd how themes that come up in a life can come back, round and round, circling in on themselves. Black people who’ve changed the world by challenging people’s perceptions have been a recent theme in this blog. This week the theme returned several times – and, in one case, in a most unexpected way.

Last week I’d mentioned that, after  retelling here that wonderful story I’d first heard told some years ago by an Aboriginal Australian storyteller – hands, legs and head finally working together –  Meg from Brisbane had written in to let us know that she’d heard this story told by the very woman who created it, Maureen Watson. Evidently, a specific point in Maureen Watson’s mind had been for it to help teach children about the importance of working together. Then during this week came another follow-up message from Meg. She wrote again to say that Maureen Watson had died in 2009 and that information about her life can be seen on the following link:  https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Maureen_Watson. Having now read the link, I can thoroughly agree with Meg: ‘She was an amazing activist and advocate.’

Then on Thursday at the theatre, a world away from Maureen Watson but in spirit very close, I met another emanation of Francis Barber, the Jamaican freed slave I wrote about last week who’d become manservant and companion to Samuel Johnson in 18th century London. We’d gone to the theatre to see Mr Foote’s Other Leg, a play about the real-life actor and impresario, Samuel Foote, who’d lived and worked in London in the same era as Johnson. For me, a main reason for wanting to go to this play was that Simon Russell Beale, one of my most admired actors because of how he makes his parts so real, was playing the part of Foote. Another attraction was that the play was set in Georgian London (why has Georgian London become a theme that’s popping up all over the place in London at present?). (more…)

Report-back sessions can be real eye-openers. A vital part of any storytelling course I’ve ever run, they’re times when people can say what they’ve been making of stories and techniques that have come up in the course and also, just as importantly, what new directions they’ve prompted in their thinking.

A blog is by no means a course. Yet it’s beginning to feel to me as if it can act in a similar way. Might it even help create a new community of people with a common interest in storytelling however far afield they live?

From Bangalore to Brisbane:

On one single day this week, I opened my computer to find messages from two such far-flung places as Bangalore and Brisbane in Australia. I was amazed and delighted. The person in Bangalore does storytelling with children and is working on a dissertation as part of a Diploma in Storytelling. Meg in Brisbane had not only recognised the story I’d told in this blog last week. She’d herself heard it told by Maureen Watson, the Aboriginal storyteller who created it. Maureen is a great community leader, says Meg, and she’d created the story to encourage children to work together. (more…)

I’ve said it before: storytellers enjoy making links and I personally seem to be doing it more than ever. Sometimes the link emerges through thinking what photos to use for this blog. This week, as you can see from the photos chosen, it’s bits of the body that created an association.  

Antoni Tàpies was a Catalan painter. I’d scarcely even registered his name before last weekend when we went to Barcelona for a few days off to celebrate my birthday. On our last day when we went to the Fundacio Antoni Tàpies, a museum devoted to Tàpies work, I found a lot of his paintings hard to be drawn to. But where he focused on simple stuff – wood, windows, doors, eyes, feet, an old sock, a shoe-print in sand, the sand itself – I felt considerably more at home. Tàpies took inspiration in ordinary things and found them of spiritual value. He felt they are evidence of our common humanity connecting  us to the earth and to our selves.

After we got back to London, we looked back at our photos as you do (we’d been allowed to take photos in the Tàpies gallery as long as we didn’t use flash)  and I found myself linking some of the work we’d seen with a story I’d heard some years ago at a storytelling evening at the South Bank Centre. The event was associated with a huge exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art at the Hayward Gallery and the storytellers were two Australian Aboriginal women. 

Legs, feet, fingers, thumbs: here’s the story that came back to my mind. It’s one I’ve always enjoyed passing on. (more…)

Sniffle …snuffle … sneeze. Snuffle … sniffle … sneeze. I’ve had a horrible cold. I’ve still got a horrible cold and it has made me remember a Kenyan story I once came across which I’ve always enjoyed telling to children.

A Kenyan story: In search of Sun

There was once a boy called Kabebe (though in Jan Knappert’s African Mythology, he’s a man and not named).

Kabebe’s family always had colds. His brothers got colds, his sisters got colds, his mother and father kept getting colds. So one morning early, Kabebe got up (too many sniffles and snuffles around him to sleep?) and, standing by the door of his house, he saw the sun climbing up into the sky. It seemed to rise from a far-distant mountain (imagine the colours, imagine the sight).

‘I’d like to find that mountain,’ Kabebe said to himself. ‘I’d like to see where the sun rises from and I’d like watch as it goes into the sky.’

Without any ado, Kabebe set off. (Imagine the journey – a river with crocodiles in it? Another river with very strong currents? Night falling and the sound of hyenas?) By the time Kabebe reached the bottom of the mountain he’d been aiming to find, the day was over and night was falling. He settled down to try and sleep. (Noises he heard? The fears that he felt?)

As day was returning next morning, Kabebe woke and started climbing the mountain. But by the time he got to the top, the sun was already way up in the sky. (Disappointment?) Yet there on the top of the mountain, what do you think Kabebe saw? A golden palace! (Big? Glowing? I’ll leave the words to you.)  (more…)

When coincidences happen, they often come as pleasing surprises. ‘How amazing is that!’ But coincidence itself is far from being unusual in stories. Indeed, it’s extremely common, a key element in what makes a story into a story. Whether it’s a traditional tale or a personal one, coincidence creates a sense of purpose,  a feeling of something meant. Thus when three brothers in an African story go off to explore the world, each goes in a different direction. But when all three eventually decide to go home, what happens? Completely without any plan to do so, they happen to meet at a crossroads and it’s as a result of their apparently accidental meeting that their story takes shape and develops its point.

I love coincidences. I look out for them. (I think storytellers may be prone to them!) So how about this for a good one? Actually, it’s a two-part coincidence – what you might call a double wow!

Last Friday, I was about to set out for Castell Henllys, the iron-age fort in North Pembrokeshire where I’d done a training day back in the summer. The event this time was to be an Author Tea and in my bag were copies of each of the various books I’ve either written or compiled. Just as I was about to leave the house, the telephone rang. (more…)

Last weekend, a wonderful story was read to me over Skype by a seven-year-old girl in Australia. I felt lucky to be able to  hear it and see it – her drawings were brilliant.  The story was entitled  The Magic World and the Tragic World. It first talked of the dragons who inhabited each of these worlds. Then one day, it said, everything changed: the dragons of the Tragic World attacked those of the Magic World. Happily, by using and testing their magic, for instance to grow themselves wings, the Magic World creatures became able to pacify their attackers. 

Some human problems are harder. I think in particular of all those people who become obliged to leave the world where they grow up to go and live in another. War exacerbates the problem.  Among all those millions of Syrian refugees now desperately seeking a new safe place where they can live in peace, so many are reported as saying that where they’d most like to be is back home. Is there any prospect at all that they will ever be able to return?

This problem speaks to me personally because, like so many people today, I feel conscious of living in two worlds. But I am fortunate. Coming from one place (north Pembs), settling in another (London), I’ve been able to move easily between the two and increasingly over the years, and massively helped by my storytelling, have been more and more able to integrate the two. But what if you cannot ever go back? Perhaps you have to learn to live with the idea of carrying your sense of home in your heart. It’s the idea expressed in a very beautiful Welsh song, Paradwys (Paradise) which my husband is currently learning.  Its final line expresses the theme with the thought that the key to your paradise lies in your own heart. A similar thought underlies a Chinese story I came across a long time ago which I refer to as The Peach Blossom Forest. (more…)

A note to readers is where I should begin this week.  Here it is. If any of you is in North Pembrokeshire on Friday 9th October, please come along to Castell Henllys where I’ll be doing what is described as an Author Tea – and hopefully selling some of my books.

Will there be red leaves and red berries in the lovely Castell Henllys glade, I wonder? I ask because red has been on my mind all week. Perhaps that’s because of all  the red, red leaves on the pavements round us in London. Or perhaps it was the red, red moon on the night of the eclipse? Or could it be the red jerseys of the Welsh Rugby team when they played and won against England? 

I can’t be sure. But what I do know is that just thinking about red has led to me remembering the red ears of the gleaming white hounds that accompany the Lord of the Underworld in the first branch of  the Mabin0gion, that most ancient and strange cycle of stories.  The red hounds appear there in a forest which could not have been far from Castell Henllys.

But red on my mind has also led to me remembering some very different things, for instance The Red Wheelbarrow, that extraordinary William Carlos Williams poem.  I wonder if you know it? (more…)

Yesterday evening, my old friend, storyteller Debbie Guneratne, was performing with dancers and singers at a Malaysian Night in Trafalgar Square. A few days before, on the phone, she was apprehensive – entirely understably you might say. Trafalgar Square? On a Friday night? But her apprehensions also made me chuckle.

A personal tale:

‘Don’t worry too much,’ I responded. ‘Trafalgar Square can be surprisingly kind. Once long ago, when we had our first car, I broke down in Trafalgar Square in the middle of a Saturday morning. I was on my own. What a nightmare!’

Except it turned out to be almost a pleasure, not a nightmare at all. Two young policemen turned up as if out of nowhere, pushed the car onto a safe, quiet spot at the south of the central island of the square and helped me call the AA. (It was long before mobile phones.)

Phew! Often when I’ve gone through Trafalgar Square since then, I think of the way in which a horrid situation that turns out OK can transform into a happy memory. Another Trafalgar Square event which also often returns to mind seems somehow related. (more…)

You may well remember the story. Or perhaps you’ll have retained just some essence of it. Often entitled in print, The Soul as Butterfly, it’s an Irish tale which  I’ve recounted in this blog before. It seems to me to encapsulate something about the kind of symbolism I talked about last week.

A story worth knowing:

A butterfly emerges from the open mouth of a man who lies asleep in a field. His companion who has just woken sees it and, astonished, follows as it flies towards the stream that runs beside the field, then through the reeds that grow at the water’s edge until it comes to a place where the branch of a tree has been placed over the stream to make a crossing.

In its hazy-dazy way, the butterfly flies across the stream and the man who’s been following it follows there too until it reaches a skull that’s lying, whitened, on the ground. The butterfly alights on what must have been the forehead of the creature whose skull this was (it looks like the skull of a horse),  then enters through one of the holes where the eyes would have been. After a long pause, it re-emerges and, in the same hazy-dazy way, makes its way back to the sleeper who still lies prone in the field. Suddenly it’s gone. Now the sleeper’s companion can’t be sure if it’s gone back into his friend’s mouth. What he certainly experiences is his friend awaking, sitting up and saying, ‘I’ve had such a marvellous dream.’ (more…)

In the depths of the ocean lived a king. (What was his name? I don’t remember.)

The king longed for company. He lived all alone. (Had he ever had a wife or children?)

One evening as he rode out on one of his tides, the king became aware of sweet sounds of music and, looking up at a house by the sea, he saw two lovely young women sitting in the firelight playing their harps. 

A longing grew in the heart of the king until one late evening on a high Autumn tide, he rode out of the sea on his finest white horse, rushed to the girls’ house and snatched them away together with the harps they were playing. (Were the girls alone when he did that? What were they called?)

When the king of the ocean had brought the two girls into his palace beneath the waves, they first felt fear, then became very sad. They missed their home. They missed the bright light of day. The king of the ocean would ask them to play him their music, but the music they made for him lacked any joy.  

After much sadness and pleading, the king of the sea knew this couldn’t continue. He must show pity. He must listen to the two young women he’d seized and return them to their home on land. But when his white horses brought them in from the sea, just as they stepped onto the land, they changed. (Did the king of the sea command that to happen? Or did the pity that the girls felt for him play a part?)

As they stepped out of the sea, the two lovely girls became transformed.  (more…)