Sunday 30 August 2020

OLD WIVES TALE (One)

A short story.


Of course Jenny knew it was an Old Wives Tale.    

So why was she standing on the other side of the canal staring across at the tree?   

Jenny shook her head and smiled at what remained of hundreds of scraps of paper pinned to the peeling trunk.  Stuff and nonsense.   

Robbie would be in from school soon.  She hadn’t even made his lunch yet.  Every day she gave him money for school dinners. Every day he brought the money back home. 

He was so like her at his age.  She remembered how her mother had despaired of her.

‘You’ve got to make the effort. You’ve got to talk.’

All the way through Primary School she’d hugged the corner of the playground in silence.

Jenny stood before the tree holding onto the piece of paper in her fist. 

Ten minutes and Robbie would be walking sullenly through their back door. He would sit and watch cartoons and not say a word, waiting until the very last minute before crossing the road to the school.  And like every day she would watch him walk alone into the mass of chattering schoolchildren.  His head down, bumped and buffeted, as the other children pushed past him.

She shivered as she remembered.

Jenny pinned the note on the tree.

She wouldn’t tell her husband or anyone or it wouldn’t work.  That was the rule.

She turned and headed home. 

She reached her back door as the school bell sounded. 

She didn’t make any lunch.

She waited.

 

 

Monday 3 August 2020

THEATRE IS METAPHOR

THEATRE PART ONE:  SOME THOUGHTS.

Theatre is metaphor.

Theatre is image.

No such thing as a blank page.  You already have thoughts, feelings, history, work you have done before before you even type one letter. How to get beyond that to something else so that you are not colouring in the words already there, but something beyond.

Like can you ever really look at a famous painting like the `Scream` as a painting or something already in your minds from a variety of sources, mostly you don`t even realise or remember.

It is being aware of that and go beyond it and then the audience can get beyond and behind what they have already seen and heard.

Howard Barker.  “You don’t have to sit in a theatre going, ‘Yes, yes, I agree with that! I recognise that! That’s just like my mother!’ You have to be seduced by the power of an actor and of language. Taking you somewhere you don’t want to go – that’s the point of theatre.”


Sunday 2 August 2020

READING ONE OF MY STORIES PART TWO

Myself reading another one of my short stories ` A Short Story About...`   Also published in Dreich Shorts.   A serious story, as probably all my stories are really, so if looking for laughs not here I`m afraid!



Saturday 1 August 2020

READING ONE OF MY STORIES PART ONE



Myself reading my short story  `The Man Who Fell Into His Own Head.`   The other story mentioned I`ll post separately.

Hope you enjoy.