Once upon a time...

...there was a strange pair who entered the world of the Masters. Quietly they moved into the room filled with inquisitive looks & worried faces, but as the Masters wondered who these people were, the stranger approached and began to tell their story.

While the stranger spoke the Masters sat and stared, fascinated by the tales of stingless bees and the the travelling folk that clung to the mans hair. He was a Storyteller and his companion was training to be a doctor of story telling.

Thinking she would hate the class the girl sat nervously, dreading the moment where she would innevitably be called upon to tell some sort of tall tale. But as day swiftly turned into night and the Storyteller gave the Masters task after task to complete in order to gain the rewarded of another story, the girl realised how much fun she was having and that years of reading old local myths was time well spent.

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Okay so on Monday we had two Storytellers come and do a workshop with us, which I have to admit that I thought was going to be very silly, but it was incredibly fun. Our last task was as pairs so I was put with Gio and we had to tell the group a story together about a Raja who was afraid someone knew what was in his heart & the search for that person.

It was really fun and it actually reminded me of two things, the first that my friend Fiona had based all my work last year on some of the travellers the speakers were talking about & that I have to tell her about the storytelling group that happens at Dundee Rep. And secondly a conversation on DeviantArt with a French woman called Sophie. We'd been talking about local history of our home towns and I'd been telling her about all the old fables & myths surrounding Blairgowrie such as; The Green Lady of Newton Castle; Jean Mercer and the Meiklour Hedge & Lady Lindsay's pennance. These were all stories I was told as a kid by my Primary 6 teacher, Mrs Harvey, from a book called The Ghost o'Mause: And Other Tales and Traditions of East Perthshire by Maurice Flemming.

A few years ago, when I was frequenting the BBC's H2G2 website, I had an article published about Blairgowrie & its mythology which I wrote when I was about seventeen. Now if you search for Blairgowrie Ghost Stories, my article is the first to come up! Which I'd never realised until I was looking back at it this year. I left the site just after it was published & I've just had another pang of wanting to go back. So, as a homage to h2g2 I've added a Douglas Adams Daily Quote to my blog.

Today's is Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so, which is perfect given h2g2 stands for Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy & is one of my favourite books.