A New Love!

It has been a week for the theatre and cancer support. 
Much as I love Calendar Girls as a play and as a means of raising the profile of cancer research, its place in my heart has been superseded by another.  Spoonface Steinberg left me absolutely speechless.  I was invited to review it for Spikemike, and struggled to find the words to capture it. I found some eventually but I really feel they don't do it justice. Read the words, but if you are near a performance in July, book a ticket and go see this amazing play!

Spikemike...is breaking a leg: Review - Spoonface Steinberg - People's Theatre: Spoonface Steinberg 28th June 2013 Freerange Theatre Company Originally a radio play, Spoonface Steinberg was Lee Hall's breakthr...

Words and Memories

My Granda was an avid reader. He read everything and anything, from westerns, Dick Francis, Jeffrey Archer and John le Carre to my Grandma's "Woman's Weekly" and Mills and Boon romances. Basically, if it had pages and print he would read it. Christmas and birthdays were easy; a book, or two, would always be received warmly.

After a minor stroke he lost the ability to recognise words on the page. His loss was sudden and led to angry outbursts from this usually mild-mannered man. On one occasion he threw a book across the room claiming it was impossible to read as it was all in Russian. 

It was heartbreaking to witness his anger and distress as he struggled to understand. Why had we given him books in a language he could not read? 

But would it be worse to gradually lose your spoken language, and to be aware of it? With every misremembered word, to know that your means of communication was leeching away? 

 I first came across this work by Marc Nash as a written piece in his collection of flash fiction 16FF and although my Granda's speech remained perfect, this immediately made me think of him. Language - whether written, spoken or signed - is wonderful. How do we cope if it is taken away from us?

Visit Marc's blog at Sulci Collective. 

What's the story?

Tonight at the Writers' Group poet Sheree Mack shared some ideas to get us all thinking and writing. One of the prompts she offered was a set of sepia photographs of a derelict world submerged by water. We were asked to choose one image from the set and write about it. This is my attempt. It's not great but I like it, which is quite something for me - generally I dismiss my own words almost as soon as they hit the page...

"The man stood amongst the rubble, surrounded by the bricks and mortar that had once been his life.  Nothing remained that was recognisable, nothing to show the years of living that had gone on here. No love. No laughter. Only sadness and loss. All  his possessions were gone, his memories stolen away.
Behind him the great yellow arm of destruction worked its devastation. Pounding and scraping to dust the lives of his neighbours. Soon there would be nothing at all. No homes, no roof to shelter a family from the storms of life. No warm hearth to gather loved ones around. Everything was battered to nothingness. All sense of identity gone. The precious treasures of each family intermingled in a mass of dereliction.
As he stood amongst the rubble of so many lives, his memories were caught up like wisps, cast away on a sudden current, into oblivion." 

http://www.flambardpress.co.uk/books/show.php?book=1232&author=sheree.mack

http://www.broadbang.fr/blog/le-temoignage-du-photographe-chinois-yang-yi