‘Dialogue with the Queen …’ by Ms Paige Turner

Dialogue with the Queen

Last night I dreamt the Queen said to me,
“Oh Janet, weren’t you in the crowd at Jubilee
in … nineteen seventy seven?
Wasn’t it that little town in Devon?”

“Falmouth,” I replied.

“Ah yes, and in nineteen eighty two
at Regent’s Park, we remember asking you –
‘how has been the weather?’”

I said, “I replied to you, ‘not bad’ but I lied.
In fact the weather could not have been wetter.”

“Janet,” said she,
“you were the invisible voice of Puck’s fairy.
This, I believe, is what you have always been …
a little one doing good deeds unseen.
It’s always so nice to see you
and we are always so interested too
to know how you are in particular.
And so is the Duke of Edinburgh.”

This is called ‘illusions of grandeur’.

1998 (From her collection ‘Serving Bluebird Pie’.)

We were aboard the Queen Victoria ship, sailing from Carthegena, Spain on Thursday 8th September when we received the news. Former Royal correspondent Jenny Bond had delivered her speech ‘What a Woman: the Queen’ only two days before.

The Queen. ‘We shall not see her like again.’ (‘Hamlet’) Long live the King.

‘Blog 300 …’ by Ms Paige Turner
I had my brows dyed this afternoon. The lovely beauty therapist said that when she was training she was told that one isn’t a Mistress of Brows until one has completed 150 treatments.
Malcolm Gladwell who is very hot on numbers says one cannot be a master of any skill until one has practised 10,000 times.
This is my 300 bi-monthly blog. That means I have been posting for 600 weeks which is roughly 12 years – since 2010. Where do the years and blogs go to? Maybe I have a long way to go until 10,000 – but to coin a phrase (which is a cliché in itself) ‘practice makes perfect’. With a ‘c’ for the noun, I believe.
Thank you dearly my three blog readers – to whom I am not related. If you are reading this, please leave a note to say I am not writing to Mars. Which might raise a few eyebrows.
My novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’ is available on Amazon, my publishers Cranthorpe Millner, Foyles and Waterstones.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeares-clock/jan-moran-neil/9781912964635
https://www.cranthorpemillner.com/product/jan-moran-neil-shakespeares-clock/
https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/shakespeares-clock,jan-moran-neil-9781912964635
The pandemic anthology ‘When This is All Over …’ for the Rennie Grove Hospice Care is available on Amazon here. https://amzn.to/3xi8iay
My plays scripts are available from www.stagescripts.co.uk

‘Flying Nannies …’ by Ms Paige Turner
Of late, I have focused on ‘Theatre’. It’s because we were Thespian-starved during the pandemic and we are now seeing as much theatre as we can afford. This trip was primarily to give our five-year-old granddaughter a break from summer club. She has two working parents and is on school holiday.
PL Travers, author of the ‘Mary Poppins’ series of novels had confessed that the story was largely autobiographical. Probably not the flying nanny bit but more the ‘Mr Banks father’. Pamela Travers lost her own father who was also a banker when she was seven. The character Mr Banks has an epiphany … when he refuses a loan to a kind man who later gives each of the visiting Banks’ children a sixpence. The kind man tells the children to spend their sixpences wisely. And Mr Banks has a volte-face.
The umbrella with the parrot head our granddaughter wanted cost a lot more than sixpence. But she was swept up with the magic. And so was I. I had my own epiphany as Mary Poppins – brilliantly executed by Zizi Stallen – soared above the West End audience. What joy that must be, I thought, to be transported above an applauding audience. What a metaphor.
Of course neither Zizi nor Mary Poppins could possibly see their adoring crowd. They would always be blinded by the Fresnals and the spotlights. Theatre does that, of course. It can be both elevating and blinding.
The Banks’ children offer up their sixpences to their father when he is down on his financial luck – because the best way to spend your money is on those you love.
I hope our granddaughter remembers this. ‘Cos the umbrella with the parrot head cost thirty quid. But I hope it helps her soar on rainy days.
My plays are available from www.stagescripts.com
Creative Ink for Actors Reunion – Bun Feast – Saturday 13th May, 2023. Amersham Barn Hall. 20th Anniversary – when we set out to deliver ‘Blackberry Promises’.

‘Knocking on Doors …’ by Ms Paige Turner
In response to my last bi-month’s blog ‘Memory, Misappropriation and Menageries …’ focusing on Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’, my former Creative Writing student Steve Givens from St Louis, Missouri, USA emailed me his story. Steve was visiting Florida as a 19-year-old English student and made a stop at Ernest Hemingway’s house when someone told him where the titanic Tennessee lived. Steve went there. He knocked on the playwright’s door and was invited in. Tennessee signed Steve’s copy of ‘The Glass Menagerie’ which he happened to have on his person and which he was studying at the time.
A couple of days after Steve emailed me his story, a young writer named Mbulelo Ngcubo from Cape Town whom I am guiding on his children’s book emailed me. Mbulelo had been to hear the award-winning novelist Patricia Schonstein (‘Skyline’) speak about her writing journey. Mbulelo approached Patricia after the talk and spoke of his own journey. She invited him to her home in Cape Town and gave him some helpful advice.
There is a touch of synchronicity here (timing is all) and when this happens, Jung might say, ‘Sit up and take notice’. Knocking on doors can be beneficial and I admire both Steve and Mbulelo’s courage. I also know them both to be the most unassuming of individuals. They are grateful, I am sure, for the hospitality of two great writers. I am grateful to have both of these productive writers in my life.
‘When This Is All Over …’ published by Creative ink is available on Amazon for the Rennie Grove Hospice Care.
My novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’ published by Cranthorpe Millner, is available on Amazon and all leading book stores.

‘Memory, Misappropriation and Menageries … ‘by Ms Paige Turner.
‘The Glass Menagerie’ by Tennessee Williams – a play told in flashback by a narrator who is one of the characters. A play about fragility and seeing the past through a triangular prism: the dysfunction of a family unit of three: mother, brother, sister – all abandoned by a father who worked for a telephone company and ‘fell in love with long distances’.
My eyes fought to find the ‘The’ on the poster at the Duke of York’s. Such is this modern passion for paring down language. Mister Justin Case said I should always read the small print. A safari guide once said to me, ‘How you gonna spot a leopard if you can’t spot the butter on the table?’
There also seems to be a current passion for misappropriation. The fourth character in the play is the gentleman caller – a friend of the brother/narrator who is bullied by his mother into inviting ‘any nice friend’ to ‘call on’ his disabled sister. Jeremy Herrin has cast a young actor of colour as the gentleman caller. There is a kind of absurdity in this casting. I think it’s fair enough to cut out all of Amanda’s – the mother’s – N words but she would have been truly horrified to entertain a gentleman caller of colour for her daughter. And this play is so definitely set in thirties St Louis. I find it difficult to re-write history and distort a period play. Amanda is a product of her time and class and hence her ancient distorted thinking.
However. I’ve seen and acted in a mass of theatre in my time. And Victor Alli’s performance is one of the best I have ever had the pleasure to experience. My, does this actor own his space – which is at the root of Jim’s character counteracting Laura’s inability to own an inch of hers.
So we must accept that a dramatic licence was issued and applaud this exemplary performance.
It’s also a play about guilt. Like the brother/narrator – Williams abandoned his family to explore the wider world. Hopefully he was redeemed by giving us such classics and the royalty money for his sister’s care.
Next month: ‘Mary Poppins’.
My plays are available from www.stagescripts.com
Creative Ink for Actors Reunion – Bun Feast – Saturday 13th May, 2023. Amersham Barn Hall. 20th Anniversary – when we set out to deliver ‘Blackberry Promises’.

‘Seeing Behind the Lines …’ by Ms Paige Turner
Mister Double Cream from Uxbridge – one of my three blog readers – aka playwright Phillip Sheahan – has asked me to write this in less than 500 words. Here goes on the hottest UK day on record.
Three years ago I volunteered to organise a reunion for my alma mater The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama alumni at mine, planned for March 2020. March 2020. Say no more. The whole complement (18) were coming. 2021 was a wash out – so working my way round like a Sudoku grid for all 18’s available dates we arrived at Saturday 16th July, 2022.
How we skipped the train strikes is a mystery, but we didn’t skip the BA4 and BA5 Covid variants: one by one, eight bluebottles fell off the wall to mix my metaphors. Add in cancelled plane flights to the mix and we were left with ten.
The day was magic. We are all knocking seventy, give or take a year or two and it had been fifty years since we climbed into a Central leotard. But as is our wont, on second view the years dissipate before our eyes and we do not see furrows. Lines are only made by laughter anyway: memories of Maureen having presumably swallowed a pin and rushed to A and E. (She still swears blind that she did.) Another having lost his white socks (euphemism for virginity) the night before our performance of Wesker’s Roots and me being asked by our Techie Tutor to go and find a left handed screwdriver and I did. We could have been back in the Swiss Cottage pub, high on barley wine: the cheap girl’s scotch. No. Not Covid or wasps or age could wither us. For essence is ever present.
How fortunate was I to follow a course which produced amongst others: a veritable voice bard, a renowned casting director (‘Chariots of Fire’etc), voice over agent and BBC presenter, documentary maker, radio presenter, actresses who have filmed with Elizabeth Taylor and appeared in ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Casualty’ and ‘Harry Potter’, with daughters who have starred in ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Peaky Blinders’, a Guinness World Record holder for ensemble spoons-playing, heads of drama departments in challenging London and Manchester schools who collectively have directed hundreds of shows, creator of a drama company for those with learning disabilities, Central tutor and not least, a discoverer of the ancient tree – the Porlock Pippin and biographer.. unforgottenexmoor.com How cool is all that?

There will be a 20th anniversary reunion for my theatre company Creative Ink for Actors on Saturday 13th May 2023. It will be a bun feast to which all your partners and children are invited at the Amersham Centre where we performed so many of my plays. Diarise it.
Hot holiday reading!
‘When This is All Over …’ a pandemic anthology/Creative Ink
https://amzn.to/3xi8iay
My novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’.
https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeares-clock/jan-moran-neil/9781912964635
https://www.cranthorpemillner.com/product/jan-moran-neil-shakespeares-clock/
https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/shakespeares-clock,jan-moran-neil-9781912964635
That’s 500 words, Mister Double Cream from Uxbridge. Have you melted yet?

Premise and Performance by Ms Paige Turner
Mister Justin Case and I are on a post pandemic Theatre Gorge. We’ve just been to see ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’ at the Gielgud Theatre with Rafe Spall giving a warm and beautiful performance as Atticus Finch, the defence lawyer who takes on Tom Robinson’s case of accused rape. Tom is ‘of colour’ and in a 30s’ Southern American small town, he is as good as guilty and dead.
Harper Lee’s novel won the Pulitzer prize and we then watched the 1962 film in which Gregory Peck gave an equally warm and beautiful performance as the defending lawyer. It’s not my place to re-tell plot here, go and see the play if you can – but the ‘premise’ between book and current staging is different. I read the book twice more than twenty years ago but it seems to me the ‘premise’ of the novel is the learning of when to speak out and when to stay silent. (Ha! The ‘premise’ of my novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’!) For Atticus speaks out in defending the guiltless Tom, but learns, by a later experience that to remain silent is the wiser and better path.
Aaron Sorkin’s play focuses on Atticus’s belief that all men are good and worthy of respect even if they do not feel that black lives matter, which deviates from Lee’s novel. Sorkin also gives Calpurnia – Atticus’s maid ‘of colour’ – fresh lines to say to her ‘master’. ‘When you respect all men whatever their values, think of who you are disrespecting.’ The fact that no Calpurnia would have said these words to her ‘master’ in a 30s’ Southern American state is not, I am sure, the writer’s point. It’s something called dramatic licence. And Sorkin, the writer has used Calpurnia to make a point; to change the ‘premise’ of the work which Lee, the original author had created.
Last month we went to see Jodie Cromer, as a defence lawyer, in ‘Prima Facie’ – a one-woman show which is transferring to Broadway. I won’t go into that premise. See the play if you can. Next month is Tennessee Williams’ ‘The Glass Menagerie’. One of my old favourites – departing from the law but an examination of the notion of memory – for all those out there writing their memoirs!
You can purchase my novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’ here …
https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeares-clock/jan-moran-neil/9781912964635
https://www.cranthorpemillner.com/product/jan-moran-neil-shakespeares-clock/
https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/fiction-poetry/shakespeares-clock,jan-moran-neil-9781912964635
I am also available for readings from the novel if you wish to book me in person or virtually!

‘Gill Hartley – 12th May 1944 – 21st May 2022’
During my lifelong career of teaching Creative Writing, Gill was one of the most talented writers and artists I have had the good fortune to meet. She was a valued and instrumental editor of the 1993 and 1994 ‘Rhyme & Reason’ anthology for the Rennie Grove Hospice Care.
I was privileged to work with Gill on both of her anthologies: ‘My True Son’ and ‘Aspects of Loss’ published by Moorleys, following the unexpected loss of her son Will. Profits went to the Compassionate Friends.
220 writers from across the world contributed to the pandemic anthology ‘When This Is All Over …’for the Rennie Grove Hospice. https://amzn.to/3xi8iay Gill was one of them and her poem was chosen as the final parting note.
As her husband has said, Gill had a wonderful way of expressing emotions in writing. And when I tracked back on our exchange of emails in the past year, she wrote, without ego, but with her excellent editing eye: ‘Yes, ‘Hope’ is perfect for the end poem.
So here it is.

‘Hope’ by Gill Hartley
Like me, the garden is desolate,
the mantle of winter has cast us both down.
Seed heads have replaced the flowers,
the rose arch is a bower of thorns.
The hammock where we swung on sunlit evenings,
stands dormant in the dank, anaemic air.
Everything looks abandoned,
bleak and starved of light.
The garden, like me, is bereaved,
now summer has turned into night.

This morning, I searched the sleeping garden,
trod the sodden, yellowed grass,
knelt amongst the hibernating bushes,
cast aside the crumbling leaves,

‘Dialogue with the Queen’ by Jan Moran Neil

Last night I dreamt the Queen said to me,
“Oh Janet, weren’t you in the crowd at Jubilee
in … nineteen-seventy-seven?
Wasn’t it that little town in Devon?”

“Falmouth,” I replied.

“Ah yes, and in nineteen-eighty-two
at Regent’s Park, we remember asking you –
‘how has been the weather?’”

I said“I replied to you, ‘not bad’ but I lied.
In fact the weather could not have been wetter.”

“Janet,” said she,
“you were the invisible voice of Puck’s fairy.
This, I believe, is what you have always been …
a little one doing good deeds unseen,
It’s always so nice to see you
and we are always so interested too
to know how you are in particular.
And so is the Duke of Edinburgh.”

This is called ‘illusions of grandeur’.

It’s true – I was in the crowd in Falmouth in 1977 when the Queen had been Queen for twenty-five years. Then I did meet her and the Duke of Edinburgh, as I was an invisible First Fairy in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Regent’s Park in 1982. But the dialogue is all fiction as the last line states. In my dreams.

If you are one of the 220 writers from across the world who contributed to the pandemic anthology ‘When This Is All Over …’ for the Rennie Grove Hospice then send me a photo of yourself with the anthology so I can post on social media to boost sales.

‘Arts Festivals and Anthologies …’

Some nice feedback from the Chalfont St Giles and Jordans Arts Festival where I led a ‘Writing Memoirs’ workshop and did a reading from my novel ‘Shakespeare’s Clock’.

‘Thank you for joining us at the Chalfont St Giles and Jordans Literary Festival 2022! Your writing class on “Writing Memoirs” was very well received indeed. I spoke to several people who enjoyed the class immensely. Some said they had learnt so much or had even been reminded of things long forgotten. Others said they appreciated a “different” approach to the subject.’ Kathleen Martin. Chairman.

‘Thanks, Jan and I echo Kathleeen’s words as well.’ Sue Dorman. Organiser.

‘Thank you for a very interesting session, Jan. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot!’ Wendy Nicholls. Student.

And my poem ‘Bird Brains’ which was published in my collection ‘Red Lipstick & Revelations’ (available from me for £7.99 – just a few left now) will be published in Indigo Dreams’ anthology ‘Voices for the Silent’ to support the work for The League Against Cruel Sports. You can pre-order your copy here.

www.indigodreamspublishing.com/voices-for-the-silent

Finally, if you are one of the 220 contributors across the world to the pandemic anthology ‘When This Is All Over …’ send me a photo of yourself with the book as I am posting on social media to boost sales.