Blog 83 – The Word Bus … by Ms Paige Turner
I feel as though I am on one at the moment. I daren’t say ‘treadmill’. Next week sees my third Masters Module residence at Cambridge and our writing toes don’t touch the ground.
In celebration of sending my second prose module assignment down the chute, Mister Justin Case (husband) took me to see Matthew Bourne’s ballet ‘Swan Lake’. It was like a word holiday and I think I must take one soon. There wasn’t a word in sight and quite frankly it was bliss.
Having said that, enrolment forms for Creative Ink for Writers’ summer term (after Easter) are now out and I have just one place left on the ‘Get that Book Out of You’ course on a Thursday and some more places left on the Tuesday ‘Get Inspired’ course. Iver ‘Get that Book’ was a great Saturday workshop as was Martha’s evening ‘Beginnings’ workshop at her lovely gift and coffee shop at ‘The Collection’ in Chesham Bois.
Email me if you would like a syllabus for the Creative Ink terms.

One Day – a short story by Jan Moran Neil

Once upon a time there was a virgin called Patience.
Patience was raised slowly to maxims like, “Every dog has his day,” “Everything comes to those who wait,” and “Patience, stand in the queue and take your turn.”
And so she did.
As a child, Patience never took the chocolate biscuit. There would always be another day. Competitions were not for Patience. Solitary card games were her strong suit.
The NHS loved Patience: she loved waiting rooms. She spent years waiting on tables, waiting for her number to come up, which could be a show business break or catching the eye of the graduate in the corner of the publisher’s office, his calves knee deep in the slush pile. Or waiting for an agent to ring because they had asked her to give them a moment: she was happy to give them several and some day to get ‘a round tuit’.
Patience remained a virgin as she was always waiting for her prince to come along and wake her with his kiss, or find her shoe or climb up her long hair. (She never could get a hairdresser’s appointment.) Her middle name was Hope.
Patience stored her Sunday Best and bridesmaid dresses for red letter days that never arrived. But one day, she knew they would. Her freezer was jam packed with marmalade and spare ribs – which exceeded their ‘sell-by’ date. Rather like Patience herself, for there was the odd moment when Patience felt that she, herself was in cold storage, sitting on a monument smiling at grief.
Then one day, Patience woke up, not to a kiss but to the mirror. She had had her day. Botox might have given ‘lift off’ but she couldn’t get an appointment with www.doctorfiller.com. She had never had sex five times a night or been scuba diving or got her novel published or had sex at all.
She suddenly – and ‘suddenly’ became a more interesting prospect as her day plodded on – just as her days had plodded in the past – she suddenly realised that she wanted to have a charisma transplant.
And do you know? She did. And when www.doctorlifeskills.com said he was fully booked, Patience didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She had the transplant, booked a hot air balloon flight over Egypt, married the pilot and lived happily for all the rest of the days she finally seized for herself.

Enrolments being taken next week for Creative Ink for Writers’ summer term starting end of April for five weeks.
‘Get that Book Out of You’ day workshop – this Saturday at Iver. Email me.

Blog 81 – Slaving Over Hot Pots and Plots … Ms Paige Turner
I’ve been slaving over both for the past few festive weeks. There are worse places to be. I have 7000 words to get in for my Masters’ assignment next week and I’ve discovered that plots and turkeys are alike.
As long as your turkey is well prepared and has the right ingredients: great stuffing and seasoning, then it will cook itself. Like turkeys, plots cook themselves if the characters are doing their job and that’s because characters, like people, create their own problems. Of course you do need to turn up the temperature now and then.
Plots, it seems to me are so called as they have shape: they start somewhere and they have a finish. They are finite. They are artificially constructed. Think of cemetery plots and garden plots. And gunpowder plots.
We’re still consuming the frozen turkey so let’s hope my plot defrosts okay. Enough of this analogy. I’m in danger of mixing my metaphors.
I wish you all a happy new year. And for the anonymous writer who emailed me after my last mail shot saying I ought to make it easy for people to get to our Creative Ink for Writers’ Facebook page, here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Creative-Ink-for-Writers/499238446841633
Goodness me, just as easy as cooking a turkey. Thanks, Tim Cox for the link!
Creative Ink for Writers’ classes start next week with one place left on Thursdays/Get that Book and full on Tuesdays.
Creative Ink Publishing raised £305 for the local Hearts & Souls charity bringing efforts up to almost £4000 for various charities. ‘A Dozen Promises’ – Creative Ink Publishing’s Ebook will be out shortly with Tim Cox’s amazing IT skills.

Dear Ian,
I never met you. You were my play publisher for ten years and an internet friend. After I had lost hair and a voice getting my first play on to the London Fringe, you picked it up, put the full stops in the right places and moved the photos to the places I wanted on the page. One month before you died you sent me a new cover for one of my plays and assured me that the ‘ampersand’ would replace an ‘and’ in the title. You received no remuneration for your work but had a passion for plays and playwrights.
I’ve observed you on Facebook and I’ve observed zebras. Zebras are kind, gentle, gregarious, family oriented, fun loving, energetic and they have a keen eye for predators. They are, above all, guiding. You are one of the handful of ‘zebras’ I have had the luck to ‘meet’. You were a positive and productive influence in my life. I was the richer for knowing you and I now am diminished by your sudden departure.
I hope, wherever you are, your plays run on, Ian as I am sure they will here. Alison and family, my thoughts are with you. God bless you.
Jan

Now We are Sixty (or Not Quite) by Ms Paige Turner

On Saturday 16th November 2013, twenty ‘Class of 65-72’ met for lunch at the Croydon Park Hotel to celebrate being together and being either 60 or approaching that seventh decade.
I learnt something.
As I leant across our 60th birthday cake I said to a very lovely and blonde Ann (nee Brown) “Excuse me, you were in the same class as me for seven years but I never spoke to you.”
She replied, “I didn’t talk very much. I didn’t talk to you. How could I? You were all drama, words and French. I was all science and hermetically sealed.”
I bit my lip and looked down at my camera. “You don’t know how to work this do you? I’ve got to take a few photos for the Old Croydonians’ magazine.”
Well, Ann did. She told me that working a camera is just a template. Don’t jab at the buttons: work it out. Thanks, Ann.
Thus ensued one of the most interesting conversations I have had in a long time. I wished I had talked to Ann during my seven years at school. I missed out on having a friend who was informed, intelligent and elegant. I’m hoping Facebook and reunions will put pay to all that.
We are a diverse bunch of girls who now no longer need to compete to pass the finishing line and that’s not because we are ‘past it’! It’s because, I think, the empathy of losing parents, losing partners for an assortment of reasons and having lives that don’t always come up to scratch is more important than pretending that we’re first.
And minds work in different ways. Vive la difference.
Which is just as well, really as I’m off for my second residential at Cambridge this weekend for my Masters in Creative Writing and looking forward to seeing all those Liquorice Allsorts of writers once again.
The Gavin Extence author talk at Creative Ink for Writers went splendidly with almost 50 attendees and reading excerpts from The Universe versus Alex Woods just as splendidly, as always was Creative Ink actor Adrian Baker.
The nine writers’ names – whose stories made the coming Epublication A Dozen Promises – are posted on our new Creative Ink for Writers’ Facebook page so do go there and ‘like’. We raised £305 for the Hearts and Souls charity with the Promises Short Story competition.
I have one place left on Creative Ink for Writers’ Tuesday am ‘Get Inspired’ course starting on January 7th and two places left on the Thursday ‘Get that Book out of You’ course starting on January 9th. So email me if you are interested.

Blog 78 – Kennedy’s Children …

Entry in my diary – Saturday 23rd November 1963
President John F Kennedy died yesterday shot from a high building in Dalius Texus three shots were fired but the maker* said that three shots could not be fired at once there must have been more people. President Linden Johnson is America next President
WHAT NEXT.
• probably meaning TV maker of presenter.

This is followed by a reasonably accurate diagram of the building from which the shots were supposed to have been fired. Maybe I should have taken up a career in Art instead. After WHAT NEXT comes …

Composition exam results next week

I ask you. What changes?

• Gavin Extence author talk was attended by almost fifty people and Adrian Baker, the performer of the winning Dear John piece written by Elaine Mulvaney read extracts.
• The names of the finalists in the Creative Ink Publishing ‘Promises’ short story comp are posted on our new Creative Ink for Writers Facebook wall. The Ebook – A Dozen Promises – will be out in the New Year.
• We made £305 for the Hearts & Souls charity through entry fees and ‘Dear John’ DVD sales.
• Enrolments are now being taken for Creative Ink for Writers’ spring term 2014. Email me.

Left Overs by Jan Moran Neil

I’ve got all the bits and bobs
left over from the words I’ve lopped off
this poem and that and stuck them in a doc
the way my mum used to slice and trim
the pastry from the pie’s brim
and roll it into one big doughy bit
and tell me, “We’ll cook and jam it
and make it work hard.”

But never did she say,
“You’ll make a footnote* out of that one day.”

• Just got a Masters’ poetry assignment in and this is what was left over.

We still have a few leftover tickets for the Gavin Extence talk this Thursday if you want to email me. £5 on the door. The Fitzwilliams Centre, Beaconsfield.

Thank you lovely Missenden Abbey writers for a great workshop on Saturday. Although Creative Ink classes are full, enrolment forms for January will be out next week.

Aspiration: Cambridge
Age: 59
About Time

Cambridge Masters First Module and Matric was wonderful. Busy writing poetry.
Creative Ink classes full. Please email me if you want to come to the Gavin Extence/ The Universe versus Alex Woods talk and reading on Thursday 14th November at 10.45 am. Some £5 tickets left.

My best friend’s mother has just died and I am on the way to Cardiff to read the eulogy. Hence the brevity of this bi-monthly blog. God bless you, Marina. You kept life sewn up for so many.

Way Back … The Ulutsha Theatre Company’s Inaugural Production for Heritage Day at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation.
Jan Moran Neil: seasoned swallow www.janmoranneil.co.uk

I flew in for the Cape Spring which grew colder as October crept closer. The Ulutsha Theatre Company’s first production, Way Back was creeping closer also.
I have to confess, at first, in rehearsal, I was about as lost as the storyline’s central character: a young Caucasian white girl whose car had broken down in an Eastern Cape Xhosa village. Gradually I realised through a thicket of language foreign to me that this storyline was a much better vehicle for conveying Xhosa roots than the one the central character had been forced to abandon.
Hungry, in need of some warm clothes and not knowing a word of iSiXhosa, Mira Kremess, a straying tourist is given local food, a traditional costume for the forthcoming Heritage Day Festivities and she certainly learns how to say the word ‘thank you’ in Xhosa: ‘Enkosi’.
Mira’s inability to pronounce iSiXhosa words provides a bucket full of humour and Yonela Msutu who plays the ‘good mother translator’ gives a spirited performance ensuring that English audience speakers would not miss out on what is taking place in the storyline. Shaun Tsheqane plays the part of the wise father combining this with a delightful sense of comedy becoming outraged that Mira (the tourist) is wearing denims and a cap. Thus, she is transformed with appropriate attire and brings a smile to his face and to the faces of the members of the audience.
The whole thing is rounded off by some superlative singing by Anelisa Mahlungulu and group acting, singing and dancing was splendidly provided by Onako Mpongoma, Mandy Mpambani, Ayabulela Matwa and Aphelele Mkhefa,

It was creatively conceived and directed by Khulula Nkatshu who is on work experience at the centre. I witnessed an early rehearsal where the 22 year old director phoned an actress when she hadn’t pitched up for rehearsal. The actress told the Khulula she was ‘on her way’ but sound of a television in the background made the director suspicious. I told Khulula that thus is the way of ‘rehearsal’ life and quite on the sudden and as if plucked from the air Aphelele Mkhefa, took over the role of the 12 year old child who leads the tourist to safety. Aphelele played the part with ease, grace and a sense of awe for all that she was seeing around her.
Khuls, the director told me that the play was called Way Back because there is a constant reference back to Xhosa ancestors, as well as the phrase referring to one of moving forward with the roots we accumulate from our past. Indeed, the lost central character found her ‘way back’ with the help of the Xhosa village and certainly was changed by the experience as I was.
At another rehearsal I wasn’t altogether sure what Sibabale Silo was doing. He seemed to be talking a lot to the actors whilst they sat listening, after which there would be much activity. I soon realised that he was giving the company detailed information about Xhosa customs in iSiXhosa and in effect writing the script as the actors listened and then rehearsed, directed by Khuls. I made one suggestion that Onako as Shaun’s wife should get cross with him being present and hit him with his hat but this idea was swiftly discarded when I was told that a Xhosa wife would never treat her husband in this way. A learning curve for me!
The costumes were made by Dileka Ndileka who makes and sells her clothes and also teaches needlework in the Masiphumelele township. In fact the company are planning to model Dileka’s clothes at a show in the near future.
Entry was free but the start time was African: 1.30pm-4.30pm which means the show will start and end within this time. The set needed some painting before we began. Free traditional food was then served to the audience after the finale.
To think: on my last visit in your autumn, Ulutsha Theatre Company was just an idea. Here’s the reality. When we left the Youth Centre in your snow-capped and soggy spring September we saw a perfectly arced rainbow as we entered Fish Hoek. A perfect end to a perfect day. Enkosi.
Hope I find my ‘way back’ soon.

Contact details: Dileka Ndileka: Email: nbiyo@yahoo.com
Zone Active (Sport & Recreation Department)
The Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Center
Call: 021 785 5186
youth@hiv-research.org.za
CREATIVE INK FOR WRITERS CLASSES ARE NOW FULL. TAKING BOOKINGS FOR THE JANUARY COURSE STARTING SECOND WEEK OF JANUARY. EMAIL ME.
SEATS STILL AVAILABLE FOR THE GAVIN EXTENCE TALK AT 10.45am on THURSDAY 14TH NOVEMBER AT THE FITZWILLIAMS CENTRE, BEACONSFIELD. £5 – EMAIL ME.

Rehearsing ‘Way Back’ with Ulutsha Theatre Company – at the Desmond Tutu HIV
Foundation, Cape Town this week.

One place left on both Creative Ink courses this November. Email me for details.