What’s new?
What’s new? Jamie Oliver’s Dream School (last night on Channel 4) tackled an urgent and difficult problem. Trouble was his celeb teachers appeared to know nothing at all about teaching, let alone dealing with the kinds of youngsters Jamie Oliver set up Dream School to help – youngsters who’d become completely disenchanted with education to the extent of truanting, being sent to Pupil Referral Units and ending their school careers with nothing. I bet most storytellers who go into schools could have done a whole lot better.
What’s new for me? This Tuesday, 1st March, at a fabulous St David’s Day celebration at the London Welsh Centre, I told my special story……..…..about the statue of a monk with a book that sits outside St David’s Cathedral. According to some St David’s boys in a Local Legends project a few years ago, the monk in the statue is St David himself and, every midnight when the moon is high, he lifts his right hand and turns a page of his book. That’s just the start. The rest I wrote up in my story for A Gift for St David’s Day (Pont Books). Poor old St David! Sitting outside in the wind and the rain, plagued by seagulls who come and sit on his head, it’s been hundreds of years since he started reading that book. He’s obviously in dire need of one of the million volumes to be handed out on World Book Night at the end of this week.
What else is new in my life?
Apart from getting over my illness of last year, I’ve been writing an extended piece about oral tradition. Funny thing – I suppose most people think of oral tradition as something very past and gone. Yet in one way or another, it’s happening around us all the time except that most people do not consciously ‘tell’ stories any more – not what I call story-stories.
My piece is about my attempt to resurrect a particularly fascinating oral tradition – the life and stories of the famously mischievous 19th century Welsh storyteller Shemi Wâd. This tradition was alive and well when I was a child and still has remnants of life today. More so, I hope, since the school and performance programmes I carried out on Shemi after publishing Shemi’s Tall Tales. If you’d like to read my piece (warning: it’s about 20 pages long), send me a quick email (mary.medlicott@storyworks.org.uk) and I’ll send it to you as an attachment.