Day 26 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy

I absolutely love the new Twining's Tea advert with its beautiful animation and the soundtrack of Wherever You Will Go by Charlene Soraia. I don't know about something I listen to when I'm happy, but the song makes me feel happy and uplifted.

There are so many places I could go to get inspiration from this song. I could do a freewrite based on a picture from the advert; the title of the song 'wherever you will go' reminds me of the passage from Ruth in the Bible where she swears to stay with her mother-in-law wherever she goes*, so perhaps I could rewrite that in a different setting; I could use a cup of tea as the prompt; write something about being happy; the list just goes on and on.

* But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”
When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her.

(Ruth 1:16-18, New International Version)

Review - Beyond This Wilderness by John Thomas

Starting out gently, this story of spooky goings-on in a village church by Christian author John Thomas make for a spine-tingling read.

Starting quietly with a series of apparently minor disturbances at a village church, Beyond This Wilderness draws in the reader before launching into its main tale of an evil which was thought long buried.

Set in a tiny village on the Welsh border, the book opens with a series of letters between the parish priest and the bishop of Shrewsbury concerning a strange series of break ins happening in the village church.

This leads into the main part of the book - a 'testament' from a former vicar of the church where he reveals what the curse that lies behind the break ins is, and explains why the teenagers who have been found in the church have been acting so oddly.

The 'testament' is written in very old fashioned language, making it less easy to read than the letters at the beginning, but the Victorian phraseology and language make the story seem more real and pull the reader into the events on the page.

Published by Twin Books in 2011, Beyond This Wilderness has an RRP of £10.55.
ISBN 978-0-9534304-6-8

Day 25 – A song that makes you sad

There are pieces of classical music that will make me cry, and I know there are several songs as well that I've heard as backing in films that have made me cry, but the one that leaps out is from the recent Phantom of the Opera film, when Christine agrees to stay with the Phantom to save Raoul's life.

Pitiful creature of darkness / what kind of life have you known? / God give me courage to show you / you are not alone.

Today's prompt: Being alone.

Day 24 – A song that makes you laugh

This song makes me laugh, smile, want to sing and dance, and makes me think. It's Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) by Baz Luhrman.

The song which uses the text of a column written by Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune in 1997. She wrote it as what she would say if she was to give a graduation speech, and it was then picked up by Luhrman and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today's prompt: What is the best or worst piece of advice you've ever been given? What happened when you followed it? Or if you didn't follow it, what would have happened if you had?

Inspiration from the obituaries

I was reading the obituaries of the local paper and came across this fascinating entry:

Service at Shrewsbury
Crematorium, on Friday,
October 7, 2011, at 12 noon.
Dress code is fancy dress
(Funereal theme).

So many ideas came from this straight away - who was this man and why would his family want a funereal fancy dress cremation? What sort of conversations would the people have at the funeral? What would people say when they saw people dressing up to go to the funeral? Would someone go as the Grim Reaper? The moral of the story is sometimes the most interesting parts of a newspaper can be the classifieds - births, marriages, deaths, wanted adverts and for sale columns. If you're short of an idea try looking for something unusual in the back pages.

After all, the same newspaper that yielded this obituary also turned up

Wanted - one tonne of oats - cash sale

Day 23 – Your least favorite song

The Crazy Frog. I really hate The Crazy Frog. Part of the problem is that he's just plain annoying, and part of it was that he butchered Axel F, which is one of my favourite movie themes of all time.

The faithful Google image search turned up this image of prizes at a funfair. Why anyone would want to win a Crazy Frog is beyond me - unless they want to dismember it sloooowly, or use it at as guy on a bonfire perhaps...

But I digress. Today's prompt: The funfair.

Day 22 – A song that you want to play at your wedding

I love Madonna's Crazy for You, and I think it would make a great 'first dance' song. I don't think it would be quite appropriate in a church wedding, but for the reception it would be perfect.

I'm not married, so you can't see any pictures of my wedding day, but I found this fabulous picture of a bride in the Kremlin gardens. There are so many things to prompt me to write in this picture. Wonderful as the bride's hat is, it's the two ladies in black who intrigue me most - the one looks confused and I have no idea why the other is looking at her dress like that. Imagination, it's time to fill in the gaps!