A tiny pink bird has migrated to my desk from the cupboard in my study where I keep my notebooks, stationery and some storytelling stuff. It perches on a small chrome clip and the other day, I persuaded it to come across to my desk to keep me company. Perhaps I thought it might decorate a present I was planning to give to someone or other. By now it looks likely to stay.

But I like it. I like the birds in my life. Since installing a bird-feeder in our garden, we regularly see a troupe of goldfinches arriving – often eight or ten of them. Not surprisingly, these have attracted a bustling gang of pigeons that gather below the feeder to hoover up the scraps of fatball and grain that drop onto the grass when the little birds feed. Plus a lovely pair of robins arrive quite often, moving quietly round the garden’s edges before visiting the area below the bird-feeder. The bossy green parakeets are not so welcome. (more…)

Remember that moralising tale? A young woman is on her way to market. Over her arm is a basket of eggs, in her head is a whirligig of plans. She’ll sell the eggs for a very good price (they’re beautifully big and brown and farm fresh). Then she will have money. MONEY! And with that money, she’ll be able to do so much. Like choose the best cake in the cake-shop window and eat it sitting in the sun. Or buy a new pair of sandals –  and if not sandals because they’d cost too much, certainly new ribbons for her hair. Oh, so many things she could do. (more…)

 ‘Tennyson is crossing the desert!’ A few days ago, that was the strapline on one of the emails in my Inbox. It was followed a day or so later by ‘Tennyson has crossed the desert!’

Such a headline does make you think. For me, it brought to mind a grand-looking poetic figure, bearded and with hair reaching down to his collar: what could he be doing walking the desert? And on his own? Perhaps dreaming up new poems along the lines of The Lady of Shalott or Enoch Arden?

Tennyson, the cuckoo

Well, no! The Tennyson that had succeeded in crossing the desert was not the Victorian poet-laureate but a cuckoo, one of this year’s tranche of cuckoos named and sponsored under the auspices of the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology), its movements tracked as it flies alone across the vast distances that bring it into Central Africa and then back again to the UK where, of course, we think of it as ‘our cuckoo’ even though it’s in the UK for only a few weeks. (more…)

Forgetting is the other side of remembering. It has its value. Not remembering unpleasant things can be very health-giving, something which eventually allows unhappy events, emotions or people to slip away.  Sometimes the forgetting happens of itself. Sometimes the techniques for forgetting have to be learned.

The pain of forgetting:

But it’s that involuntary forgetting that can be so annoying. Perhaps it’s the same in many different circumstances or professions. You need to remember. You simply can’t bring whatever it is to mind. You set about trying to find the book or paper or person that may be able to supply the missing piece of information. And when you can’t find it? It’s a pain. Especially, say I, when you’re a storyteller. (more…)

Being on cancer treatment makes for a kind of half-life. Getting to the hospital, sitting through the chemo transfusion (typically for me about eight hours from sitting down to getting out), feeling strange for several days afterwards with not much else going on because of the after- effects. Sometimes getting up much earlier than usual, sometimes very much later and rarely going out in the evenings because of generally feeling knackered.

Brightening things up:

But always there are kind contacts from friends and neighbours, phone calls and cards with enquiries as to how it’s all going and many messages of goodwill. In the odd way that illness produces, there’s even the brightening of relationships with some long-term neighbours in the street. Never before on particular talking terms,  having learned what’s going on, they now always enquire how things are going.

Meantime, you’re looking for more ways to make life feel brighter. Crosswords and word wheels are good, but I find they can only last a relatively short time. Reading is a must but you need other things too.

Missing the storytelling:

And I miss the storytelling. I ask myself if it will ever come back. Programmes of stories begin to form in my mind, stories for children, stories for adults, ideas of stories I’d like to tell and how I’d like to tell them. Short ones, long ones, quirky ones, ones that have happened in my own real life: they present themselves to my attention, swirling out from choppy seas or clouds of mist and wanting to get acknowledged. Writing them down is one thing. Telling them is quite another. I hope I’ll get or make the chance to be telling them again.

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Ten days of summer down in Pembrokeshire make a very welcome break before the next horrid chemo. I’ve been admiring colour – the orange-red of the poppy that has cropped itself up in the gravel at the back of the house, the purple of the foxgloves like sentinels in the hedges.

Colour is appetising. It makes you look and it makes you savour. Thinking about it has reminded me of a little story I once made up which has also been one I’ve told many times.

The Yellow Blob

The Yellow Blob lived in a world where everything was yellow. Yellow house, yellow grass, yellow fields, yellow sea. One day, the Yellow Blob went for a walk. He closed his yellow door, walked along the yellow brick  road and climbed up the yellow hill. At the top of the hill, he looked down. The Yellow Blob was very surprised. At the bottom of the hill was a huge blue lake. (more…)

What a beautiful singer! Watching the Cardiff Singer of the World competition on TV on Thursday evening this week, Mingjie Lei was obviously going to be the clear winner of the Song Prize. He sang in such an unforced way, giving time and space and feeling to the words and emotions of his songs. His performances put me in mind of the kind of storytelling I like best.

The storytelling I like best can’t be described as entirely natural. And yet natural it is. For wherever it has reached, it has resulted from a combination of awareness and study but also continues to derive from a natural love of the medium.

A Natural Art:

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Last week it was Farizad of the Rose’s Smile. This week it has to be the old riddling story that must have come back to my mind in the wake of Farizad because it’s also got roses in it. In the last few days, I’ve been trying to update it a bit to make it more suitable for our modern times.

That’s why the gardener’s wife in the story (she’s crucial) is now an entrepreneurial Cake-maker who sells her excellent cakes not only to Lord Top Noddy, her husband’s employer, but to everyone else on his vast estate. Indeed, it is probably the fact that she is doing so well that has aroused the ire of the Jealous Evil Spirit of Capitalism whose mean-mindedness is the motivating force of the story as it is now.

The story: The first bit

One evening, our gardener came home from a hard day’s work to find that although the smell of newly baked cakes pervaded his kitchen, his wife was not there.  What could have happened? Where could she possibly be? (Such questions are especially helpful when telling this story to older children. The zanier the answers, the better.) (more…)

Remembering stories can be a comfort when you’re poorly. And, dear readers, have I felt poorly since the third of my third chemo treatments. Still, I’m halfway through bar the shouting and that’s something worth holding onto.

A story that came to my mind when I couldn’t get back to sleep very early one morning this week is one that needs the best part of an hour for the telling and it’s one that I love. It comes from the Arabian Nights. Here it is in brief.

A story with a human touch:

The third of the three children of a king is a girl. With her brothers she has grown up in the home of the king’s gardener not knowing who she is by birth. The children’s mother was imprisoned long ago because of lies that were told against her, the gardener is poor but loving and the three children he took on as his own are leading a sheltered life not knowing who they really are. An important feature of that life is the gardener’s beautiful garden. It is a place of peace and refuge. Why should anything change? (more…)

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

This verse is just the first in the wonderful poem by William Blake which was one of my father’s favourites. He used to recite it to all his secondary school English classes.

It’s a poem that surely makes anyone who hears or reads it feel incredibly aware of the power and beauty of the tiger. And tigers have been in my mind over the last few days following the death of Judith Kerr, author of the hugely-loved children’s picture-book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. I first got to know that book during the first four years of what would become my storytelling life. A leaflet on the notice board of Brixton Library had led to my applying for a job on the Lambeth Libraries Storytelling Scheme. How different my life would have been if I hadn’t got that job. Very part-time and very badly paid, it involved doing picture-books with young children in various Lambeth centres during the mornings and telling stories to older children in the afternoons. (more…)