magik

I blog about ordinary life.





But that's ok, because it's magic all the same. Ordinary is made extraordinary when you look at things in a certain way.



I like reading to the boys. But what they like even better is when I story tell with no book. I do this in the car on long journeys, usually spin offs from tales we already know and love. I bought Storytelling With Children, a book, ages ago and didn't find it all that inspiring. What I like is to read a child-story myself, an unusual one and then tell it to the boys, embellishing bits I know will appeal to them, changing bits that I know won't. I have been gaining confidence in doing this and am on a roll. I tell stories as I flip pancakes at breakfast time to while away the hungry early morning wait, when I am in the bath with The Beauty and boys come to perch and hear tales. Out walking.... just whenever. When the boys were small they wanted to hear tales about this imaginary homeless dog and I made up so many, over and over. Now they want thrill, anticipation, some darkness and mystery.



I found a story I liked once, years ago in Juno magazine (does it still exist I wonder?) about a boy called Olle who managed to trick a wolf intent upon eating him (and other young children and many goats). I had that one down just right and told it many times. Recently I was fired up to story-tell since reading the book by A.S Byatt The Children's Book. There are children's tales interwoven with the plot that were interesting enough to retell. I like darkness. I don't much like modern day retellings of such tales as The Three Little Pigs where the silly porkers don't get eaten and the foxy wolf doesn't die at the end. We have original old books, a shade darker and more real, more satisfying. Death is so unreal to children (mostly) or so real it is fascinating. Either way it's part of the nature of a good story I think (whether it be an actual death or the personification of). Those in The Children's Book are sly and sharp, interesting, funny. A girl who captures tiny folk from the bottom of her garden and traps them to play in her doll's house who in turn is taken by a giant and entrapped as a plaything for his giant child. A naughty boy named Pig who just can't seem to help being naughty and amazingly imaginative, seeing creatures through a holed stone - one day enrages his mother so that she tells him to go out in to the garden and not to come back. He does so, and slips into the Unseen World with the help of fern seed to make him tiny. His mother doesn't find him and he lives with the little folk.



There are elements of loss and the way words can take on a life of their own once uttered. I am finding that too, mirrored. The boys are looking for signs of The Unseen World. When one's shadow can be taken by a hungry rat and pulled below to elf land, where a person can slip through the cracks in a tree when the moon is full or the clock strikes midnight. Doorways into The Unseen World are everywhere. The world is not the same when you can imagine that the juice of any flower of fruit has the potential to wake a sleeping prisoner or bring back to life a loved magical creature you might meet on an adventure. Is that a stick on the ground or an arrowed signal left by a secret messenger, leading you on to treasure? Did the rabbit in the field have a note tied around it's neck?









All things are possible. Ordinary can be infused with the extraordinary.