Alphaday 4 – Season XI

Posted on by Webalpha

Hi Alphas,

Welcome to Alphaday 4, Season XI.

The season is now in full swing and we’ve no sooner polished off one challenge and marvelled at the variety of takes on what seemed like a simple brief, than another one rolls in demanding attention and inspired, well-crafted writing; add that to our other activities and we are busy!

The great thing about it is the satisfaction we get from writing… and the pleasure of being able to pat ourselves approvingly on our backs. We deserve it!

 

You’ve provided a very nice line-up of treats for this Alphaday‘s agenda – as follows:

This bulletin from me as per usual

  • The LOG which I’ll send out this time
  • The results of challenge 2 (Thinking outside the box) from Chris
  • The collated entries for challenge 3 (an accident) from Olaf
  • The brief for challenge 4 from Rosemary (already in!)
  • And finally: perhaps even a showcase piece sent out by Suzanne

If you look at the agenda and have a little think about how much inspired and creative writing from all our members has gone into putting that together you might feel quite overawed. At least I do, because I think it’s a privilege to have so many brilliant writers sharing their different approaches to the business and pleasure of writing.

In addition to the above… there are the pieces of writing I’m trying (slowly and laboriously) to collect from you all for our Ten Years of Alpha publication. (I had to slip that in somewhere as I’m still waiting for contributions!)

We really enjoy our challenges. There was plenty of constructive feedback for the photo challenge, but further – more personal – anecdotes came out in the weeks that followed. It’s interesting to see how inspirational a simple photo can be.

 ***

In the last bulletin I mentioned the Man Booker Prize.

This time I feel like mentioning a much more modest literary event that caught my eye as I leafed through the December issue of Writers’ News.

 

Waitrose did a survey to find the (UK) nation’s favourite children’s poem. This was in connection with National Poetry Day on the 2nd of October. (We’ll be writing poetry for our next challenge, so I thought you might be interested.)

There were 2,000 participants and they chose the following poems:

  • The Top Ten Poems from Childhood
  1. The Owl & the Pussycat – Edward Lear (1871)
  2. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star – Jane Taylor (1806)
  3. Humpty Dumpty – Anonymous (1797)
  4. Jabberwocky – Lewis Carroll (1872)
  5. Daffodils (I wandered lonely as a cloud) – William Wordsworth (1804)
  6. A visit from St. Nicholas (‘Twas the night before Christmas) – Clement Clarke Moore (1823)
  7. There was an Old Lady who swallowed a fly – Rose Bonne (1953)
  8. The Grand Old Duke of York – Anonymous (1642)
  9. Jack and Jill – Anonymous (1765)
  10. Hickory Dickory Dock – Anonymous (1744)

The first thing that struck me was #5. How did that end up amongst the rest? I started to wonder about what exactly makes you remember a poem fondly that you heard when you were a child. Might it simply be because it was repeated so many times that it stuck in your memory? Could that explain the Daffodils?

Funnily enough those same Daffodils have turned up in our challenges. I’ve even used them myself in a story (as you may find out). It’s definitely not a nursery rhyme, but it’s quoted so frequently that ‘a host of golden daffodils’ have become the poetic reference that we all have in common… even though most people may not have the faintest idea of what comes before or after. In the same way, perhaps, that most people don’t know what comes before or after To be or not to be.

Countering this argument is #4, Jabberwocky. We all know it and most of us love it, but can we quote from it? Rattle it off as we’d do Humpty Dumpty and others?

I’ll confess to not remembering ever coming across #6.

I also wonder whether they were deliberately trying to make a point about favourite nursery rhymes all being well over a century old. Because we all love some fairly modern ones… don’t we?

My own children can still rattle off many lines from Now We Are Six. There was another one about a baby that went down the plughole!

Christine