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Adrienne Silcocks' In-house Workshop

On Friday November 27th, LPWC member, Adrienne Silcock hosted an in-house workshop. She certainly grabbed the attention of the group that night by starting the session with two, fast rounds of word association. These got the thought processes going.

The Workshop itself involved participants writing on a piece of paper, a true event. This piece was passed to the person on the left. Next, participants had to write down on a piece of paper something that they had dreamed, or that was unlikely. This was then passed to the right. Finally, each person was asked to write on a third piece of paper somewhere where they had stayed, along with a description. These were then collected and shuffled before being handed out.

The idea was then to write a short story using the three pieces of paper to help give the story direction and inspiration.

The writers then had about 30 minutes to write their stories before each having a chance to read them out. As ever, the quality of the material was high, and everyone had fun manipulating the three pieces of information into a workable story. Indeed Adrienne had to contend with (i) Someone smoking horse manure (ii) Someone landing a 747 jet on the high street and (iii) Someone staying in a villa in Spain overlooking the sea. This was, to be fair, a tall order but the resulting story was amazing, a very real, and credible exploration of teenage life with drugs. Maybe this story will be developed and appear on the site at a later date. Thank you, Adrienne, for a great evening's workshop!

Adrienne's Story: In It For kicks

I was in it for kicks. Me...my friends...we all were. It was the rebel in us: right then we hated our parents, school, the chattering women at the bus stop, the twitching curtains along the street, the local vicar, even old blind Duncan sitting on the bench every morning, come rain or shine, with nothing better to do.

And us, we had nothing better to do, our parents upbraided us, as we gathered in gangs in the shadows of tall buildings. We were angry and we wanted to shout it out at the world, but all we did was swear loudly at each other and brag about the pills and joints we were inflicting upon our bodies. Skunk, E, downers, uppers, crack, you name it, we did it, enjoyed the danger, enjoyed the thrill, revelled in the unknown...

And then my parents announced the worst. They were selling up, giving up their jobs, escaping what they called the madness of the modern world. To begin with, I admired them - for the first time in ages - they were putting up two fingers to the rest of the world. Then the truth hit home. It would mean leaving my friends, the scene, the action...

Before I knew where I was, I found myself wandering alone, just out of sight of the villa my parents were attempting to renovate on some f---ing hillside in Spain in the middle of f---ing nowhere. I stomped up some broad shallow steps overgrown with weeds, crushing some kind of herb under foot, which released a smell reminding me of the sweetest grass I used to smoke with Lisa, Boydy, Jonno and Sam. ' Course, that memory, that reminder of what I had lost made me feel even worse. I slumped miserably on to a stone seat, vaguely aware that I must be in someone's garden. There was no-one around. Not that I cared anyway. I gazed at the dazzling blue sea in the distance and hated it, hated it, because what was the use of the f---ing sea when I had no friends to swim in it with?

Then I felt in my pocket and found a pack of Rizlas from the old days and looked around on the ground. May be I could smoke some of that herb I had trodden on. A little way off there was a lump of something brown that reminded me of resin, dull and dry. Maybe this garden belongs to some old hippies, I thought to myself, (after all, there were quite a few lived round there) and they've left some behind after a particularly heavy session. I went over and picked some up. It was crumbly and perfect for rolling into a joint. It didn't smell as sweet, but I managed to find some of the herby leaves and a little mushroomy thing growing out of an old tree trunk and rolled it all together. Then I lit it. I took a deep drag on it, and man, I can tell you, it blew my head away: Suddenly I was a seven-feet tall Easter Egg, I was talking with the f---ing Dalai Lama, I was bobsleighing uphill at ninety miles an hour, and then suddenly I was landing a 747 Jet on to the High Street back home for all my friends to see...

I was brought to my senses by the sound of my Mum's voice calling my name.

I could just see her head in the distance peering over our garden wall, and me, I was still on the bench. Only, I now had company. Behind me was a brown horse idly grazing amongst the stones. And suddenly there was the awful dawning that the brown crumbly resin I had smoked was not something left behind by hippies. It had not been resin at all.