I’ve just listened to today’s CBeebies Radio podcast. “Oh that’s a good story today,” I thought. “Did I write that?” YES I DID. I hope that you and your little ones enjoy it too. If you do, you’ll understand why I went and changed my socks and am now wearing purple.
The longer you put something off, the harder it is to do it, right? That’s how I felt in September when I saw that my last bit of news here was in July. I felt it again in November, even though by then I had had a book published, achieved my next canoeing qualification, got a new commission, successfully lobbied Government and I had much to tell. Then December came.
“I’ll send a Festive Newsletter!” I cried. But Christmas was just too merry to think about newsletters.
“I’ll send a New Year Newsletter!” I sang. But New Year was just too happy to think about newsletters.
Now it is January and for the life of me I can’t remember what happened last year. “Oh well done, Jayne.”
And I’m not likely to remember because where I live, it is now the Wassailing Season. Yes it can involve marching round orchards, sticking bits of toast in the trees but more than that, it’s about wishing your neighbours and friends good health for the coming year, “Waes Hael”, and sharing cakes and ale. And singing. And dancing. And, did I mention the cakes and ale? That has nothing to do with me forgetting whatever it was that happened in the latter half of 2016, nothing at all. It’s just that looking backward isn’t always the way forward. As January strokes its double beard, I will stroke mine and look to what’s ahead of me in 2017:
Having mentioned these, it would be unkind not to come back with more information so, by my January beard, I will endeavour to write more frequently and usefully. But in the meantime, Waes Hael!
My first radio interview will be broadcast tomorrow Tuesday 26th July, 1530hrs BBC Radio 4. What’s the aural equivalent of ‘blink and you’ll miss it’? Probably ‘poke your finger in your ear to scoop the wax out’. Although if your ears are fairly clean you won’t miss it all as my bit was going to be about five minutes long.
It came as a big surprise. That tremendous journalist, comic and role model Timandra Harkness got in touch to talk about how incongruous cinematic moments can throw us out of the film’s story world. We’ve all groaned at plot holes and continuity errors but what about when a filmmaker does this sort of thing deliberately? What’s going on and why? And why was the tremendous journalist, comic and role model Timandra Harkness asking me these sorts of questions?
The Human Zoo looks at current events through the lens of psychology. This episode is called News of An Atrocity, the Psychology of Rare Events and looks at why we are more attuned to the dangers of exceptional situations, such as acts of terrorism, than to more everyday threats such as a car crash.
Part of the programme looks at how we use stories to make sense of the world around us. How the patterns, rhythms and themes of a constructed world help us deal with the fears and uncertainties of real life and contribute to our well being. That was where I fitted in although I will have to listen to the programme myself to remember exactly what I said. I know there was talk about Doctor Who, and the importance of getting the right breed of cow in your costume drama and I may even have said “Verfremdungseffekt”. ‘m pretty sure I mentioned Gumball, Ned Stark’s death and David Lynch, although possibly not in that order.
And we came up with the title of my forthcoming Screenwriting manual: “Bury the Wizard.”
Thing is, I didn’t know I had a forthcoming screenwriting manual. Another example of how life is full of plot holes.
“Bufo Bufo” said the lusting toad
“I want some love action, I must cross the road”
“Bufo Bufo” said the toad, full of lust,
“To get to the love pond, cross the road I must.”
You’ve heard of the Great Migration across the plains of Africa? Well this is a little closer to home but no less magnificent given the scale of the creatures involved. Every year common toads come out from under the rocks, mud and compost heaps where they’ve spent the winter and take the long march to the Ancestral Pond. It might be only up the road or across a couple of fields to you and me but then we’re not 2-3 centimetres high.
Then a motorcar sped down the road
Heart full of desire, out stepped the toad
Out stepped the toad, heart full of desire,
“Glitch” went the toad, between tarmac and tyre.
Another toad crossing said “Oh bother and f**k it”
If only someone had a big plastic bucket.
If someone had a big plastic bucket
To the pond I’d go safely, find another toad and…
Thanks to the less than wintry weather here, the toads started moving very early this spring. January. We saw the first squashed one in January. As these animals are declining in numbers, our crack team of patrollers have been out every night to lift them to safety on the pond side of the road. Some nights are just too cold and only the hardiest, lustiest toads make a move. But other nights when the conditions are just right, warm and damp, we’ve been collecting them by the bucketful.
Ever wondered what 40 toads looks like?
The collective noun is a ‘knot’.
I like that.
The sun is just setting, I am waiting for the last blackbird to shut up and go to sleep and then I’m off again, armed with bucket and torch to zigzag my way up and down the lane so that fewer toads look like this:
And more look like this:
And just so’s you know: they don’t croak – frogs croak.
Toads sing.
Well, if your instincts promised a pond full of passion, wouldn’t you?
There is now a Tee and Mo story live on the Cbeebies Storytime app. And I wrote it! Those lovely people at Plug-In Media asked me and I was more than happy to say yes.
If you don’t know Tee and Mo, they are a delightful monkey mother and son combo who get up to all sorts of collaborative fun in the forest. They collaborate together and also with you, the preschool child/care-giver in their Bafta nominated games (also found on the Cbeebies website).
Narrated by BBC6 Music’s Lauren Laverne, Tee and Mo is the brainchild of Plug-In’s creative director Dominic Minns. I love the way he and the other clever people at Plug-in have devised the games to encourage children and their adults to play the games together, to have fun and enjoy each other’s company.
Who Did the Footprints is my first interactive story. I want to say very clever things about extending the reading experience and kinesthetic learning but that would sound terribly dull and I’d much rather you and your Cbeebie went together and gave your Cbeebies Storytime app-watching device a good shake (You’ll understand once you’ve downloaded the story) so I’ll just say that it was enormous fun writing it and I hope that you have enormous fun reading it.
I wish you a Christmas full of joy, love and hope,
With laughter and peace, but no time to mope.
I hope you feel loved and can share that with others,
Like strangers and friends, aunties and brothers.
But the wish I wish most while I have this one chance,
I hope you don’t get pine cones in your pants.
I’m saying nothing about needles.
I’m rather excited and very honoured today because my poem Remembering has been included in the BBC’s commemoration of the start of the first world war. If you click on the link, you will hear it included in a wonderful podcast for children on this occasion. My thanks to Falklands veteran Simon Weston for reading the poem and to Academy Award winning composer Steven Price for the music and to producer John Leagas.
I hope that you enjoy it and if you have young children, that they will too.
No I didn’t go on safari and no I didn’t climb Kilimanjaro.
Well I did sort of….
I had the pleasure and privilege of staying on the border of the Arusha National Park and on the Masai Steppe in Tanzania with Kilimanjaro as my neighbour to research and write a screenplay for a new initiative from Nature For Kids and the Sparkling Elephant Project: an exciting adventure film for children, working title…
GOODWILL AND LIHWA AND THE TREASURE OF THE ELEPHANTS
The African bush is full of dangers, especially if you’re only eleven years old and abandoned. A boy and a young elephant both become victims of poaching. But just who is rescuing whom?
My research included meeting with local children, Masai, rangers, farmers, ranchers, safari guides, tourists, government ministers and elephants and other wildlife. Obviously some I could get closer to than others. It was both wonderful and awful and at times, like when I found these elephant remains, or watched a boy cut down another acacia tree for charcoal, heartbreaking.
I’m not a trained conservationist or zoologist but having read and listened to people from all sides of the arguments, I truly believe that elephants play a more important role in our world wide ecology than we realise. They may seem destructive but they are Africa’s gardeners, maintaining the rainforest (the planet’s lungs) – to be losing them at the unsustainable rate of one every fifteen minutes to ivory poachers is insanity: no elephants means no rainforest means no control over CO2 means no control over climate change means… It is not just rhetoric but science-based knowledge when I say, “in saving the elephants we are saving ourselves”.
The plan is for this film to be the backbone of a conservation initiative throughout Africa and China. Freely available to major conservation and tourism partners, there will be versions in multiple languages, English, Kiswahili, Mandarin for example but of course the beauty of film is that it tells a story visually and can go beyond words and their boundaries. It is hoped that the film will be the catalyst for everyone to rediscover elephants and bring the sparkle back to Africa before we lose them and ourselves forever.
