Well that’s not quite true actually, for the story begins four years ago. A time when I first met Solomon and heard something of his story as a migrant worker in Saudi. Having lived there 12 years he had moved to the UK with his wife three years previously. A humble, tender hearted man, yet someone with a passion to make the most of his life.
He told me about his embryonic pen business, but to be honest I paid little attention. I was drawn by both him and his story however, and when he gave me one of his pens I was strangely touched.
Four years later I find myself in Saudi Arabia with this man; the man in the photo below. A Tamil from Southern India, he was making his first return to Arabia since being granted British Citizenship a few months ago.
So why the photograph? Yes the colourful carving of a pen that we found high in the mountains in the city of Abha, overlooking the frankincense trail not far from the Yemen border? Well, to state the obvious, pens need stories, and stories need pens. The two are inseparable.
Strange isn’t it, for my new friend Solomon could have been manufacturing ball bearings, or milk bottle cartons, or matchsticks or….. but no, pens is his business. And stories are mine.
Sorry if this sounds a little strange, but it was almost as if our two journeys collided at that point. The journey of a migrant worker with a dream to not just better himself in business, but to take a whole bunch of others with him in the process……………….and my story, as I have walked across nations, thrown books into the River Nile and laid awake at night sometimes dreaming of seeing a million stories rising from the nobody’s of life, even out of the dark and dismal secrets of the ancient trade routes of the Middle East.
A pen offered and a story told. What else might rise from this twin journey now four years old?I don’t know is the answer, but I am taking notice of the signs, and marking this strange collision of journeys high on the hills of Arabia.
I would be a fool not to.
I always write with a pen for the first draft. It seems to come out of me that way – heart and mind to hand and page. I only use the computer to tidy it up afterwards. Out of the heart – just like the Birmingham pen trade that supplied pens to the world for 100 years using Stephen’s inks. (Check my facts at the Birmingham Pen
Museum!)
So come on Stories, out of the heart onto the page, street stories, world stories – this is only the first draft of what’s unfolding
Redhead xx