What a good week I had last week on my Story Telling Course. It was with Ben Haggarty who is a wonderful Story Teller (if you haven’t seen him perform make sure you do!).He got us throughout the week, through a variety of methods to unpick a “Wonder tale” and adapt another story for telling (I fixed this story in the present day). Many of his methods helped me to visualise my story clearly in my mind. I had taken the Six Swans from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. From listening to others telling stories and unpicking this story I was able to ask myself much about the story. The culmination was we had 12 minutes to tell part of this story on the Thursday night-what we didn’t know we would be in a pitch black environment (I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face), so the story would be doing the work. I quite surprised myself with my telling because I felt “in the zone” and although I had an idea of what I wanted to say words seemed to cascade from all around me as I was telling it. So much so I was probably only a quarter of the way into the story when my time was up! it was good to let the voice do the work and not rely on the visual-certainly helped with the imagination.
Really enjoyed the company of my colleagues (all younger than this old man). We were well looked after especially by Kate (Ben’s partner) who catered brilliantly all week especially for the one difficult veggie (there is always one!) The only down side was the awful weather.
Returned to Glos and we entertained old friends John and Gill Cooban (we all go back a long way to our school days) and had a great time. Managed to take John at last to the wonderful Old Spot pub in Dursley.
Monday was a nerve wracking day listening to the 2nd leg of Luton’s play off semi. We managed to scrape over the line for a Wembley appearance on the 20th May. Straw boaters will be dusted off and many members of the Church family + friends should be there! I hope it is 3rd time lucky for us because it gets harder watching football in this league with no away fans to speak of. No doubt more of this in the next few days.

Heard my first cuckoo this weekend!