Storytelling Starters ~ The value of friendship
Pleasure and pain co-exist. One of this week’s great pleasures for me was the bright sunny mornings on several of the days, including this one as I write. Another was getting on with reading George Eliot’s Adam Bede, a book which, despite having been an English student at University, I’ve never read before and which I’m greatly enjoying. But perhaps the greatest highlight of the week was getting to spend a whole long afternoon with a very much-loved friend whom I hadn’t actually seen for a long time.
Sal Tonge lives up in Shropshire. She was visiting London this week in order to attend a kind of audition which, if successful, could provide financial backing for her new show. For Sal is now as much of a performer as a storyteller and she is very much involved in the creation of new shows. But it was in the early days of what became known as the Storytelling Revival that Sal and I first met. I don’t actually remember the particular occasion. Very likely it was connected with me going to perform at the Festival at the Edge which was, of course, a storytelling festival and not far from where Sal lived. What I am sure of, because it’s been a feature of knowing Sal ever since, is the early recognition of how we share so many pleasures, including the delights of the things people say, of being out and about in the world of nature, of making and eating a good supper, of music and children and laughter and, very much, of friendship itself.
Valuing laughter and the pleasures of family and friends is not to deny the pain that life can bring. What is currently happening in Ukraine is so gut-wrenchingly awful that, before it became the huge crisis it now is, I would have found it unimaginable as something that could happen in this modern world. It’s far from being the only war that is going on in the world right now. But, being so much in our newspapers and on our television screens, it has made me very aware – as no other war in my time has done – of what life must have felt like to our parents and their generation as what became the Second World War loomed and grew and became the environment in which they lived.
What’s to be done? It seems that there are persons in this world – persons such as Putin? – who value power over lands and populations more than peace and what peace gives. But despite the Putins, or perhaps because of what we learn in consequence of people like him, it has to be true that the rest of us must never forget what friendship is and how much it means.
PS: Of course there had to be photographs during Sal’s visit. So the picture today is one Paul took then.