What You Need To Keep Warm

I have been thinking about the place that writing can have in people’s lives.

I have said before that writing is a human activity. In fact, people are at the core of any writing, whether as writer or reader or subject. That seems to be overlooked by most recent directives about teaching writing. The emphasis on technical accuracy and grammatical knowledge, on textual features and such, has overshadowed what it means to write.

In our writing groups we experience directly the ways that writing transforms us, both individually and as a community.

We reflect on our own lives and those of others. We shape and re-shape thoughts and feelings. We travel into our hearts. We travel across the globe.

During our last Norwich Writing Teachers meeting we wrote in response to a poem written by Neil Gaiman for the UN Refugee Agency UK: What you need to keep warm. The Agency invited people across the world to send in drawings and paintings in response to the words and then created this video.

When we wrote, we thought of both physical and abstract things that warm us. Emily Rowe shared the video with her Year 5/ 6 class who are isolated at the moment and learning at a distance. One wrote about how hearing ‘Well done, that’s great,’ makes you feel warm. And here are more:

The warmth of a smile
Hugs and fire
A snuggle with grandad
Hot chocolate
Cups of tea
My hot water bottle
Friendship and family

Sometimes, even the warmth of a smile is hidden behind a face mask. That is why I would add the unexpected gift of words to my list of things that warm us.

There is a saying that firewood warms twice -once when you saw the logs, and again as it burns in the hearth. Perhaps words can warm three times, once as you write, twice as you give them, a third time as they are read.

A Gift of Words

At our Norwich Teachers’ Writing group this week we wrote about gifts. And we wrote gifts of words. For me, meeting with this group - and with other writing groups – is a gift.

Each time I sit down with teachers to write, I am overwhelmed with the pleasure of it. How good it has been, over the last year of isolations and zooming and lockdowns and remote learning, to sit by a screen and write alongside others on the screen, writing, by their screens.

Of course it is not the same as being side by side - and this year we’ve missed handing round the stollen - but there has been a calm; and an affirmation of our lives, alone and together.

It so happened that our group met this week on the first day of Hanukkah. The Chief Rabbi spoke on Thought for the Day that morning. (You can find it on the Today programme, BBC Radio 4, December 10th 2020, at 7.50am) He spoke about the seven words for ‘gift’ that exist in Hebrew. Each provides us with a different way of thinking about the nature of gifts and giving. A gift can be a blessing, a good wish; it can be an act of appreciative joy, given in the moment, in the present; another word denotes the gift for special occasions, a thoughtful gift; and the fourth word denotes a gift given to a good cause; the fifth is a similar gift, but unsolicited, another example of giving in the moment. Finally, Rabbi Mirvis spoke of a gift that takes time, effort and talent in the making. It draws people together. It is for a greater good. One such gift, this year, he said, has been the development of vaccines designed to prevent the spread of Covid 19.

We thought about John May’s ‘Six Things for Christmas’:

I wish to be given beautiful things this Christmas,
Beautiful but impossible.

It’s a poem that Jill Pirrie mentions in On Common Ground (1987) London: Hodder & Stoughton. She asks us to think of memories so dear to us that they occupy a special place. These can be given, as gifts to those who might share those memories. This year, when we will be sharing festivities with far fewer people, and when some people we know may well be alone, it may be that the words you send them could be the loveliest gift.