Stories-The Whistling Man, Chris Spriggs

The Whistling Man

Chris Spriggs

I am making my way home, walking up from the bottom of town, past Woolworths. I have made this journey a thousand times and more. But this time it’s different. I can hear something distinctive in the distance. It slices through the moaning traffic and verbal pedestrian jabber and homes in on my consciousness. My twisting thoughts are put on pause and the clamour of my heart is shocked into stillness.

Amid the babbling foreign conversation that engulfs me, the growl of cars and squeak of buses held up in frustration, the footsteps thumping impatiently on the street, amid all this, you whistle. Life is unravelling itself right in front of you and you just stand there, and whistle.

You are not famous. I still don’t know your name although I know someone who does. You seem vulnerable, your body swaying to and fro as if held in your mother’s arms, clutching a white stick that tentatively guards the transparent Tupperware box at your feet in which you collect your reward. In fact, I realise you haven’t ever seen the passing people or the money they throw for you. You can’t. I don’t know for how long you have been blind, but it is not difficult to detect.

I continue to pound up the street aware that my high speed day is being slowly hijacked by a simple tune, being whistled without a metronome or accompaniment.

I see you but it’s not the sight that captures me. It’s that tune. My feet change down gears as I approach and I see that the tub is peppered with brown and silver coins. And for you, I imagine, memories, hope, and confusion.

This is a strange and beautiful narrative for my journey home, a soundtrack supplied free from your lips that has my memory spinning . Then it clicks.

‘Make me a channel of your peace; Where there is hatred let me bring your love

Where there is injury your pardon Lord; And where there’s doubt true faith in you

Oh, Master grant that I may never seek; So much to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love with all my soul.’

I have been caught unguarded. Somehow I want you to know that your tune did not just evaporate into the black hole of passing pedestrians and angry Ford Escorts. Your tune metamorphosed into a prayer, and there in the middle of Wood Street, at the centre of a bustling tourist town, your whistling prayer invaded me. Now, it is engraved on the inside of my history, not in words but written in crotchets and semi-quavers in a key that heaven knows and understands.

Ireland-Images and Stories

The power of journey and story

Our lives are enriched by thousands upon thousands of  images.

Stories told through a photgraph or an image or a painting.

Journeys and stories go together.There is a rhythm to every journey.

What new sounds are to rise from the edge of Europe? What new sounds are to rise form Ireland? Track with us this week as I and some mates begin our walk round this nation.

Thanks Andy Crump for this incredible image. The power of journey and story.

Walking round the World-Rome

St Peters Sq. Imperialism and religion hand in hand

Rome; the city of empires, legions and priests. Also the mystery of the Vatican; a nation state within a city.The place to which hundreds of thousands make their pilgrimage and the place where we finished our walking for 2005. Jumping on and off the walk according to the demands and responsibilities of life back home, we had over the last four months journeyed down from Northern England through to this global city. A completely amazing journey. Now we lingered in this place of ostentatious splendour; a marker to yet another empire that had come and gone in its attempts to lay claim to the world.

The restaurant heaved to the laughter and stories of of the twenty of more of us who crammed in for the final celebration meal of 2005. With winter closing in outside no secrets were left untold as these road hardened travellers gleefully recountered every piece of misfortune that had beset some member of the team since leaving the shores of the UK. There is something most intoxicating about life on the road.

Somehow when you launch out into the unknown you yourself become the journey; an inner journey opens up and a synergy emerges between the rhythm of the walking and the rhythm of life. There is an ancient saying that goes “if you want to work it out then walk it out,” That is what we had found ourselves immersed in; a journey where the edges become blurred  and the most sacred place of the heart blends with the lands you journey through.

We had assumed that Rome would be some place of arrival, but as is often the case, the arriavl point is never what we assume it to be. Sat round those tables that winters afternoon, so conversataion began to turn to lands far beyond and possibilities only dreamt and read in history books on the shelves. By the time we left to make our way to the airport I knew that we would be back, to pick up the walk south through Italy and indeed well beyond. For now though we were glad of the unbreakable bond of fellow adventurers. The warmth of the winter sun and the glow of a few glasses of wine added to the richness of those moments. Wonderful days.

Walking round the World-Loire Valley and Lyon

Walking down the Loire valley was some of the most wonderful walking I have done. Working hard on the road we headed south, with a number of early starts. One early morning session will stay with me for the rest of my life. I will let my good friend Dave describe these moments.

Side by side we ate up the kilometres and sang and shouted at the open fields, impassive woodlands and the curious sunrise. Nature needed to respond and there at one side, thirty metres into the riverside scrubland, appeared a wild boar…then two, three, a dozen, twenty, or more! All rampaging through the bush in startled abandon with four or five little squeakers scurrying behind. I glanced back, then turned to the road with awakening thoughts of coffee and croissants.

What were a couple of lads like us from Northern England doing, walking through the wilds of France? It was as if a doorway had suddenly opened up in our lives. We walked through with total abandon, our own reality TV unfolding before us.

The next stage was up over the Central Massif and down into Lyon, a city with monastic foundations, be they unrecognisable now in the sophisticated city we encountered. Yet for all our sophistication in the West the desire to know and be known by us all is huge. Such was the experience of five men who took part not in a Big Brother equivalent, but actually time in a Benedictine monastery for the BBC. There, without all the comforts of normal life they had to face themselves, look in a mirror and make some decisions with what they discovered. This for us was that sort of journey, a journey of self discovery as well as an incredible adventure. We were, and are, totally wrecked for anything else!

What’s your story?

So what’s your story? What’s your journey or adventure at this moment? If you can put it into less than 350 words then I will post it on the blog. It might be a journey in friendship, love, adventure, through sickness, betrayal or fear. It might be about your town, city or nation. Have a go at writing and email it to me at stephenlowton@googlemail.com

Journeys, people and place. Cities and towns finding a voice, rather than waiting for the latest mish mash of words to come from tomorrows G8 summit gathering in Japan. Who is going to be first?