Blog 122 – Gathering Rosebuds …by Ms Paige Turner MSt (Cantab)

I had a Hepatitis A jab last week for my much anticipated trip to Kruger where I plan to take a much overdue break watching elephants brunch on Bushwillows.
The nurse said to me when jabbed, “There. That will last you twenty five years.” She then looked at me and said. “So you shouldn’t be needing any more of those.”
I’m lost for words.

It must have been the back end of summer for the blackberries were heaped in lightweight wooden crates on her stall.
Winnie Brambles was as darkly fleshy as her mature purple plums, tending an orchard of fresh fruit on the road where I lived. She smelt of raw vegetables. Her calves were threaded with fine mauve and green lines. My father said the Brambles ‘descended from a long line of travelling communities’. Percy Brambles brought home stray dogs and men to sup in their tiny kitchen which spilled over with seasoned cooking fragrances and dusky grandchildren. Percy had used his carthorses to transport stock, but he also collected rag and bone as well as tramps down on their luck. The Brambles’ hearts were as huge as autumn pumpkins and as tender as the way Winnie cooked them. Her blackberry pies were blessings; she kneaded her pastry with fingers like sausages hung in the butchers but those fingers also deftly wired tea roses for summer weddings. I was invited to sup ‘above the shop’ on those sturdy, crusty pies wrapped with love and edged with Winnie’s thumb prints.
The Brambles had just begun to adapt reluctantly to the engine, parking the van at their rear entrance in the back road rather than at their disused stables at the rec. They grieved for their carthorses and sighed mightily when usurpers parked on their drive.
The blackberries sat on her stall and seemed there for the picking. I knew blackberries were free on the local hedgerow but I also knew these were Winnie’s business and that downstairs was not upstairs. Undeterred, I grabbed a handful and took the bitter sweetness to my lips, crimson staining my fingers. Then I saw Winnie’s: her stubby thumbs spinning the brown paper bags filled with Spanish oranges. She tilted her head with navy beret and looked at me with all my six years. She stood, canvas apron with zip up purse above her swollen knees: a silent policewoman. My parents’ grocery shop and punishment were only two doors up. She shook her head slowly, sighed mightily at those blackberries and the crimson guilt at my fingertips and turned her bulbous back. I had been caught red-handed.
I learnt to respect boundaries.

Blog – 120 – Beating Myself Up …

A couple of months ago my best friend came to stay: Mrs Carrieoke. She had driven all the way from Cardiff and about 6.00pm we poured ourselves two glasses of small red and proceeded to my lounge which has a cream carpet. I placed the two glasses on the coffee table (do you know what’s coming?) and passed Mrs Carrieoke her birthday present. We don’t know how it happened or how a small glass of red could make such a scar on that cream carpet but we spent two hours, six roller towels and three basins of water pumping at the carpet so that it might be restored to its former glowing glory. At eight o’clock we looked at our watches and agreed to cease operation. The next morning it shone but for a few minor mucky marks and I got Mister Cleancarpet in. He had a go and said one could hardly see a stain on this shining silence but if I wanted to perfect the area I could bleach the small persistent damned spots with bleach.
So when Mister Justin Case and I were watching Cilla Black’s funeral I got the bleach out and a cotton tip. Except I didn’t realise that I had lemon bleach. You can barely see the damned spots of red wine but there’s a huge yellow stain by our coffee table now. Stay with me. I promise to sew this up with my title.
Mister Justin Case and I went to see the film ‘Legend’ last week. Tom Hardy who plays both of the infamous Kray twins did a wonderful job of beating himself up. (The Krays beat everyone up including each other.) The next morning I bought a magazine – one of those magazines that’s wrapped up in cellophane – so I had to dig into the wrapping. My own fist came up to hit me hard on my chin. When I sat down to read the magazine I discovered that I had bought and read the same one some weeks before. I beat myself up in more ways than one.
I’m beating myself up about tackling a small problem and leaving a greater stain. I should have quit when I was ahead but the tiny damned spots bugged me. It really didn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. There are always stains upon golden silence. Then I read a status written on Facebook this week by a young actor I know. He had written: ‘Why am I beating myself up? I must remember my achievements.’ Well, I remember his Wrath in my play: ‘The Deadly Factor’. It was a breath taking performance. Bugger those damned spots, Ben.
The thing is … I haven’t told Mister Justin Case about that stain. I’m not sure if he has noticed or if it will remain silent.

Creative Ink classes are back this week. Tuesdays/Get Inspired is full but 2 places left on Thursdays.

Blog 119 – Creative Ink for Writers’ Autumn Term

There are still some spaces on the ‘Get that Book Out of You’ Thursday morning
course at the Fitzwilliams Centre, Beaconsfield beginning Thursday 17th September
for 5 weeks. 10.00 am until midday. The fee is £160 which includes up to 3000 words assessment
and editing and coffee and biscuits. If you cannot make any Thursday you can make up
by coming to an alternative Tuesday ‘Get Inspired’ course.

Assessments are now open. Email me if you would like a syllabus.

Tuesdays/Get Inspired is full.

Other news: a sonnet from my Masters dissertation collection God and Lipstick has been
commended in Oxford University’s St Cross International Poetry competition. Judged
by Mimi Khalvati it will be published in their prize winning pamphlet.

Do let me know of any of your successes.

Smoke Screen

We both wear wigs.
But at the end of the day
hers will be taken away.
I know.

Several sexual partners
account for bank deposits
of huge amounts of cash,
then again it’s
not just hash but
Class A Drugs: cocaine;
six and a half kilos
vacuum- packed in the lining
of her lesbian lover’s luggage.
“Corrupt Caribbean bag handlers,”
she has told me. “Plants.”

For now she re-applies lilac lippy,
her green nails unfortunately chipped
and bloodied at her dark cuticles.
“Divine Pine by Jessica Nails.” She smiles.
I do not need to know this.

“You must remain within the confines
of the court,” the judge has said.
I do not say, “This is not a good sign.”
But knowing today is not one to abstain, I inform her,
“You can smoke outside.”

Her eyebrows open wide.
“I don’t smoke.”

“Toshelle. You told me you smoke.”
She points a Divine Pine sideways
and mouths, “My. Mother. Is. Here.”

Mother sits square-lipped, squat and resolute.

The judge sentences Toshelle to ten years.
There are tears.
There are always tears.

Stashing away my wig and gown
I tell Mum I can take her note down.

I always check the notes.
In the robing room.

Mother writes:
God does not sleep.
I know you are innocent.

From my poetry collection ‘God and Lipstick’. Published in issue 6 of Lunar Poetry.

Some places left on the Thursday ‘Get that Book Out of You’ Creative Ink for Writers’ course beginning September 17th. Email me.

Blog 117 – Northern Lights in Summer by Ms Paige Turner

I thought I would see polar bears when I went to Iceland but I think I thought I was going to Alaska. Polar bears can be sighted in Northern Iceland as some of them can drift on ice floats from Greenland. What a thought. What a journey.
What a journey we had aboard Cruise and Maritime’s Azores which left from Liverpool. We drifted down the Mersey completely unsurprised by the port’s efficiency and friendliness. I first visited Liverpool a few years ago but had not forgotten Liverpudlian warmth. I do believe they swallow happy pills like the people who work at Waitrose.
Iceland was cold. I didn’t expect it to be so cold as, during my research, I discovered there would only be snow on the top of mountains in August. The Northern Lights suffuse the Arctic nights in winter but I truly discovered different kinds of northern lights on that Azores cruise. Ten nights and it’s a microcosm for the human lifespan: some people pack a lifetime in. One writer attended all my classes and then swept off to do ballroom dancing in between swimming in hot springs and dodging geysers. Another Liverpudlian was passionate about scripts and comedy. He said his play hadn’t been published but it had been performed at a Liverpool theatre. What more could you ask from your script than to have it performed in the city of the Beat, the city that collected the best of London’s young actors in the 60s and 70s and produced raw, exciting theatre and the city that is home of Gormley’s life size cast iron figures?
I should be writing about Iceland and it was a place like no other where cod and volcanoes and light and the Gulf Stream is of the utmost importance. It’s a population of 300, 000 with 200, 000 centred on the capital Reykjavik. I worked out that if everyone in Iceland donated £1 the population couldn’t buy a decent London flat.
There were 500 passengers on Azores and they mostly came from the North. I didn’t hear a word of complaint when we had to sail back to Iceland so that a sick passenger could be air lifted by helicopter to hospital. Or a word of whinge when we battled through a force gale seven.
I think harsher weather makes you hardy. Here’s to the Northern Lights I met on the Azores.
Thanks, gang for meeting for Creative Writing sessions almost every day, and holding my tonic water when the waves crashed around us and I was lecturing on Stomach Churning Plots.

PS Worra place to be born, Cilla.

Creative Ink for Writers’ autumn courses begin September 17th for 5 weeks – Get that Book out of You – some places left. Email me for a syllabus.
Tuesday ‘Get Inspired’ course is full.

Highlighted Roots and More …

On Saturday 18th July this year something magical happened.
We graduated on the steps of the Central School of Speech and Drama on Friday 11th July, 1975. Forty years on we met up on those steps, where celebrity alumni’s names are now set in concrete. After mirth (some of us had re-united at the Old Vic Centenary in 2006 and some of us were still connected socially or professionally, but some faces had not been seen by each other for the full forty years so there was more than smiles) we took a tour of a place that Gilly (nee Macguire) said with our collective skills we could probably now run. We were T75. (Teachers, and we were referred to by our departure date lest we forgot our goal it seemed.)
We followed in our former footsteps, inhaled the same theatrical air and mirrored that attendant gossip in the old sanctuary of the Ladies opposite Marianne’s coffee bar. (Thank you, Claire Hill nee Harrison for this.) Nige (Pamment) wrote that he felt the most emotional in our old working spaces. Kate (Moon) wrote that it was in Studio A that Chrissie (Hearne) taught us to unfold our spines. The New Studio belonged to us and, but for the lack of leotards, we could have been in class when our tour guide made a speech.
Kerry, (nee McKerral) in charge of organizing our Central tour transported us by London bus to Charm’s (Hoare) where we met up with the remaining members of T75: a bit like group A meeting group B. Seamless highlighted roots shone out in the July sunshine. Sally (Edwards) wrote that we had been so young but that it seemed just a heartbeat away. Big Dave (Ramsay) thanked us for tracking him down; an amusing notion for a tower of a man whose Scottish roots could now only just be detected with a trace of a retroflex ‘r’.
Some kinds of roots can always be cosmetically re-touched but we thanked Central and each other for giving us a different kind of firmly established grounding. “The tone of our re-union,” Jonathan Nibbs wrote, “was testament to its, and our, breadth and sensitivity.” Kate wrote that if Joan Washington had asked us to take down notes phonetically we would have pulled out our pens. “What a gorgeous group of people you are,” Joan wrote.
Well, we are and that includes you, Joan. Last Saturday was our payoff as Flip wrote for, “growing into our skins together”. And Maureen (Bennett) writes the last word. “I feel we should all still be joined together.”
Seamless. Well, almost the last word, Maureen.
Edited by Jan Moran Neil (nee Titterington) www.janmoranneil.co.uk
Attendees: Maureen Bennett, Sally Edwards, Sallie George, Mike Gray, Claire Hill (nee Harrison),Charm Hoare, Gilly Hollis (nee Maguire), Kate Moon, Jan Moran Neil (nee Titterington) Jonathan Nibbs, Nigel Pamment, Dave Ramsay, Hillary Stallard, Alan Titley, Joan Washington (Tutor), Flip Webster, Elaine White (nee McKerral).
Remembering Ian Barber (52- 11/11, Slow Loris and Torvald/A Doll’s House) and Joanna Stevenson (25/11/52-29/3/12, Wild Boar and Celia/As You Like It.)

Blog 115 – At Sea – by Ms Paige Turner
I’ve just finished lecturing aboard Cruise and Maritime’s Magellan around the British Isles and it didn’t start well.
The landline rang at lunch time on the day before sailing. It rang with that kind of urgency that spells and smells of alarm. We all know that scarlet signal before we pick up the receiver. Maybe it’s the time of day or just old fashioned hunch but we know. Our daughter Miss Trial usually calls the parental mobiles especially when she is abroad. She was in Sicily. Alone. A colleague was getting married. Our daughter’s husband couldn’t take leave.
“Mum.”
“Is everything all right?” I can tell it isn’t by the shape of her vowels.
Of course it wasn’t. She was in hospital. The little she could decipher was that they were soon going to operate. Not keyhole surgery for suspected appendicitis but a general anaesthetic would be required and a scar would result. I don’t care about scars. They are there to be worn with pride but Miss Trial was alone, in a hospital I knew not where and she couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Neither could I when I phoned the hospital and asked repeatedly to speak to an English surgeon or even a cleaner who spoke fragmented English.
Within a half an hour, Mister Justin Case had located a translator in the nearby vicinity of this hospital and it seemed that Lorenzo appeared whilst I remained in mobile contact with our daughter for this sorry hour or so. By midnight that day her husband Master Mind was at her bedside. We were faced with the conflict of not wanting to be at sea when we didn’t know what would be the outcome of this sorry tale. But I had a professional commitment and Mister Justin Case is not so called for nothing. He had the number to organise tickets back from Inverness if the tale would transpire to be even sorrier.
The Sicilian hospital ran every test at their toe tips. The Sicilian bride in all her splendour visited our daughter an hour before her ceremony. An operation was not required and at much expense and relief Miss Trial arrived home safely some days later.
I told this story when I was lecturing ‘Writing Your Life Story’ to the lovely Magellan cruising writers. One writer asked me at the very end of the session if it was true. It was. I was proud that my Life Story sounded like fiction. Life Writing is story telling after all: an inciting incident, turning points, conflict of interests and a race against time. And the resolution? We hope one day to meet Lorenzo. He didn’t want any remuneration for his services. We texted him with our thanks. He texted back: ‘Don’t thank me. Thank God’.
The British Isles’ cruise is another story …
PS I know what ‘English surgeon’ is in Italian now.
Creative Ink classes/Tuesdays – full – Thursdays – some places – beginning September 17th for 5 weeks. Email me for a syllabus.
‘Writing Your Life Story’ Marlow – Day Workshop – Monday 27th July. Email me.

Blog 114 – Unreliable Narrators

They’re everywhere: Paula Hawkins’s ‘The Girl on the Train’, SJ Watson’s ‘Second Life’, Gavin Extence’s ‘The Mirror World of Melody Black’ and former Creative Inker Luana Lewis’s ‘Don’t Stand So Close’. Psychological thrillers.
But they also emerge with the naïve narrators in Mark Haddon’s ‘The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time’ and Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’. In fact who or what is reliable in this world? I’ve run two Deception/Unreliable Narrators workshops at the Blossom and Grey coffee shop in Chesham Bois and also in Fitzrovia in conjunction with http://newlondonwriters.com where writers also gained feedback from a literary agent who had read their work. My understanding is that three of the 12 writers have been asked for more and I’m chuffed that two of those writers have run their early chapters through Creative Ink. We hope to run more. Do not let any grass start growing before enrolling as Alice from New London Writers is efficient and supportive. I would go into a business scrubbing school floors with her.
Back to last blog’s ‘Pillow Talk’. When my duvet was returned I wasn’t convinced it was the one I sent in for dry cleaning. I felt a bit like the mother feels when you can’t swear your new pup is yours when it’s returned from the Poodle Parlour. But I couldn’t swear on the duvet, so I let it go …
Creative Ink Classes beginning Tuesday 15th and Thursday 17th for five weeks at the Fitzwilliams Centre: Tuesdays/full with some places left on Thursdays. 10.00 am until midday. Email me for a syllabus.

Blog 113 – Pillow Talk
Now that my Masters in Creative Writing has been spirally bound, catapulted down the chute and registered by ‘special delivery’ now is the time to put my house in order and get to the cleaners.

The local dry cleaning firm has an offer on: £15 for any duvet. I phoned and asked the sales assistant, (she sounded young) how long the offer was on for and was it £15 even if the duvet was goose down stuffed. She said she didn’t know but would phone the manageress and ask her. This sales assistant sounded not just young but very eager like it was her first day at a summer job. A few minutes later she called me back and said it was £15 whatever the stuffing. I said but what about the length of the offer. Would it be on next week? I explained that I couldn’t get in until next week as I was changing my guest room sheets (I do that – not everyone does) for my best friend Miss Carioke and I’d like to bring some pillows in too. She wasn’t sure if the offer was on next week but sure it would be all right with the manageress. I said could she check. She said, “Oh, you’re like me. You’re a Virgo. You like everything settled.” I said, “No, I wasn’t a Virgo. I just wanted to know that the £15 offer was still on for next week. Well, I’ve trusted her but I’ve learned to never ask two questions at the same time. You will only get a response to the last question.

It’s been a good week. My play ‘A President in Waiting …’ has been long listed for the British Theatre Challenge www.skybluetheatre.com and the opening sestina of my dissertation which carries the title ‘God and Lipstick’ was highly commended in the Words for the Wounded fiction, memoir and poetry competition. We also had a great evening on Wednesday at the Blossom and Grey coffee shop in Chesham Bois when I lectured on ‘Deception and the Unreliable Narrator’. Mister Red Hat has finished all the changes on my new-look website www.janmoranneil.co.uk and you can access not only my Marlow FM interview with Dermot Fitzpatrick by clicking on the bottom left hand corner of the Home Page but also listen into the ‘Dear John, Dear Anyone …’ monologues under the Creative Ink for Actors/Dear John drop down. These were written by Elaine Mulvaney who won the Creative Ink prize for that competition in 2012. Mister Red Hat has also mounted some of my stage photos under a new section entitled Performance. I’m so looking forward to seeing him at our Royal Central School of Speech and Drama reunion of T75 next month. I’m also feeling as brand new as I can possibly feel with all that clean bed linen.
Creative Ink classes: Tuesdays – Get Inspired – 1 place left.
Thursdays – Get that Book out of You – a few more places left.
10.00am until midday at the Fitzwilliams Centre, Beaconsfield.