Why I Write – Molly Johnson

You ask me why do I write? I do not really know and have often wondered myself when facing an empty screen without a thought in my head. lt was even worse before I had a laptop and when it was necessary to write, by hand, rewrite, and continue rewriting until I reached grammatical perfection? [...]

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My Mother And The Country

Khalid has written this piece about his Mother and her extraordinairy life. This work was shown to the writers group in Pudsey who all agreed that perfect English is not necessarily the main ingredient in telling a powerful story which has been written in another language. Too much attention to grammar and spelling and the [...]

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A Zambian Story – by Roger Barton

This story is about my experience of working in Zambia during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. It is a factual account of what happened to the lives of ordinary people, during a crisis when its major export commodity, copper, declined in price. During these years, the country was a so-called ‘front-line state’ in the [...]

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Giddy Aunts

Molly’s Auntie Rhoda and Uncle Jim
We’ve been focussing on identity in the Relay workshops and looking at our own family photos as a way of tapping into the richness of our personal experiences. I’ve mentioned Molly’s piece of writing before, about her sophisticated Auntie Rhoda who owned the much longed for ornament of a naked [...]

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Ray’s Father

This is a photo of my father standing at the wheel of the Cutty Sark in Greenwich. It was taken in 1984, when I was living in London. It’s a bitterly cold, clear day in January and I am struck, yet again, by how much more comfortable my dad looks when he’s outside. In [...]

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