Outside the box
REJOICE; for exams are over. Those of us who have picked our way through the GCSE curriculum, texts, and rubric in an attempt to support revision are more exhausted than the children who actually took the exams, and now possess a great deal of useless knowledge about what an examiner will want you to say about poetry.
For those like my daughter, who enjoys reading poetry and watching Shakespeare plays but does not have the skills and language necessary to express any of it within the specifics of a mark scheme, the experience has been somewhat soul-destroying. Thankfully, she was (at the eleventh hour) eligible for a scribe, and we can only hope that enough of her inventiveness and passion made it on to the page to gain a few marks.
If only the system were interested in knowing about her joy in the subject, not to mention her unusual ability to remember book characters by recasting them all perfectly as personalities from My Little Pony!
Alas, we have a system that insists on judging all birds only by their ability to fly — hard luck on the emus and penguins.
Transports of delight
FOR a while now, we have been the proud owners of a Citroën Ami. Officially, Buddy (named as a translation from the French Ami) is not a car but an electric quadricycle, with a top speed of 28 mph and the powder-blue charisma of a retro toaster. He has room for two people, a school bag, and a trombone if you all breathe in, and is so cheap to run that my husband calculated that the cost of the electricity to transport such a load is less than the cost of calories needed to walk the same distance.
We use Buddy for the school run and for quick trips into church, the vicarage being a good quarter of an hour away on foot. In fact, Buddy is so small that my husband once literally took him into church and drove him down the central aisle as a gimmick for social media, captioned “Taking my car in for a service”.
This horrified those who were concerned that the churchwardens might not have been consulted, but greatly amused the co-conspirators from our twenties and thirties group.
Buddy attracts attention wherever we go, and I have to remind myself that the pointed fingers and general amusement are more likely to be about the car than my choice of outfit (well, most of the time). My favourite incident was when I picked up my son from where he had been performing in a cast of fairytale characters for his school musical. “Look at that funny little car!” exclaimed a passing parent, to which their child solemnly replied: “Oh yes — that’s Pinocchio’s car.”
Noises off
I TOOK a trip to Hereford Cathedral to do some recording with BBC Radio 4, linking in with the cathedral’s Year of Storytelling.
For my Daily Service offering, I had chosen Psalm 19: “The heavens are telling the glory of God.” We set up the recording equipment on the bank of the river Wye, the better to incorporate the voice of creation declaring God’s glory in the background. Enter, stage left, a large, unaccompanied yellow dog, which raced excitedly past us into the cool shallows, splashed about invisibly for a few moments, and then, as inevitably as only a very wet dog could, reappeared and covered us all in river water.
We had been hoping for serene birdsong and the gentle river trickling by, but it’s good to know that God also speaks fluent soggy dog.
Scenic route
LATER, we recorded Sunday’s worship programme in the chained library, where the Canon Chancellor, the Revd James Pacey, introduced us to the Mappa Mundi, a 13th-century map of the world with Jerusalem in the centre and an array of stories — both biblical and mythological — depicted in minute detail. When I subsequently took my daughter to see the map, she delighted in discovering the mermaid, unicorn, dragon, centaur, and griffin: creatures possibly just as plausible to the mind of the illustrator as the polar bear, leopard, and elephant that were also portrayed.
Canon Pacey pointed out his favourite touch: a line representing the journey of the Israelites across the Red Sea to the Promised Land, with a tangle in the middle where they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. For a graphic representation of any story — or, indeed, life in general — you can’t do much better than that.
Taking flight
HUTCHMOOT UK is a meeting of Christian creatives where the programme is spread across the disciplines of word, visual art, and music, and the joy lies in discovering the less familiar ones. This year, as well as speaking on storytelling, I was one of six participants commissioned to create a piece on a prompt given by Seth Lewis, author of The Language of Rivers and Stars.
I began a poem about a murmuration of starlings, but quickly realised that nobody could possibly put it better than the starlings themselves. In the end, my performance was a duet with the birds: poetry spoken over a video of the murmuration making its strange, airborne art before swooping down into the reeds. The starlings had a solo when the video captured the sound of their wings as they all changed direction at once. The combination of bird and word made a unique experience and I came away imagining what other duets with creation I might attempt. I am thinking of approaching some skylarks — royalties paid in birdseed.
Larger than life
AS THE country undergoes yet another change in leadership, here in Bury St Edmunds we are once again preparing to remember the seismic shift in power and welfare from the rule of the Benedictine abbey to the town council. The Jankyn Smyth service is the longest-running commemoration ceremony in the country, celebrating a benefactor whose immense wealth freed the town guilds from the abbey’s taxes, provided schools, healthcare, and almshouses, and started a trust that still runs today. Jankyn Smyth’s will specifically provided for annual cakes and ale, which continue to be a part of the proceedings, and every year we lean a little further into the eccentricity of the occasion.
This year, an eight-foot puppet of Jankyn will be paraded through the town’s medieval quarter from the church to the Guildhall by the children of the school, which still benefits from his 545-year-old endowment. We have commissioned a local-history module that involves the children in things like learning the Lord’s Prayer in Middle English and illuminating medieval prayer-book pages.
It has been wonderful to see whimsy and creativity in the classroom while still ticking curriculum boxes. On the auspicious day, I will be sporting a medieval gown and matching headgear. So, this time, when passers-by point and laugh, I shall know that it is because of the outfit, not the car.
Amy Scott Robinson is an author, editor, performance storyteller, and ventriloquist.
BBC Radio 4’s week on The Power of Story begins on Sunday 5 July.