We’ve all got stories to tell and they’re all worth telling - Ian McMillan

I get off the bus and scuttle across the bus station to stand 15 to catch the bus to Edlington, where I’m helping to run a workshop for Doncaster Community Arts (otherwise known as Darts) called Creative Directions in the Community; it’s aimed at people who are feeling a bit low or a bit lonely or both and we have an hour of talking and making songs up and having a cup of tea to lift the mood of the people in the room. I remember that I once got on the 15 and after a couple of stops a woman got on carrying a Hoover and so we made up a song about a Hoover on a bus.

Today at the community centre in Edlington I’m working with ace percussionist Gary Hammond who always arrives with a cornucopia of things to hit, shake and rattle and a variety of things to hit them with and we know that by the end of the session at noon we’ll have written, and recorded on a phone, at least one song. People arrive and we chat about our morning; I talk about the windmill being repaired and the woman falling asleep on the bus and the participants in the workshop share their mornings too.

Now, some people would say that this isn’t how art is made; that the Romantic idea of the tortured soul in the lonely room dripping heart-rending verses onto vellum is the only way that poetry can be created and certainly that’s one entirely legitimate approach, but I’ve always believed that the making of poems and songs and art and theatre can also be a communal thing and that art can be made about the apparently small details of so-called ordinary lives like getting on a bus with a Hoover.

Someone notices an exercise bike in the corner of the room and someone else gets on it and starts to pedal; they stop and start and make a kind of shuddering rhythm that Gary joins in with on a tiny drum and encourages us to join in too. Someone tells a story about when they used to ride a bike around Hexthorpe Flatts when they were a child and slowly a song is born, about childhood bike rides and bus rides and roller skates.

Let’s face it; we’ve all got stories to tell and let’s face it, they’re all worth telling. What’s yours?

Support The Yorkshire Post and become a subscriber today.

Your subscription will help us to continue to bring quality news to the people of Yorkshire. In return, you’ll see fewer ads on site, get free access to our app and receive exclusive members-only offers.

So, please - if you can - pay for our work. Just £5 per month is the starting point. If you think that which we are trying to achieve is worth more, you can pay us what you think we are worth. By doing so, you will be investing in something that is becoming increasingly rare. Independent journalism that cares less about right and left and more about right and wrong. Journalism you can trust.

Thank you

James Mitchinson