Fruits Of The Loft Space

So in all of my loftiness and nest building/making adventures, the attic has yielded some interesting fruit.

The most amazing treasure of all has been this …

The House of Bethan

It’s a book that I made years and years ago – before Roo was born and whilst Pix was still a little chick.

Back then I was living in a beautiful Victorian apartment in Ventnor, where the sunshine poured through the windows, danced through the house plants and stencilled jungle leaves onto the dark green living room floor. I think I was about 21 years old …

A particularly creative time for me.

Whole processions of stories would march out of my imagination and onto paper where I captured them like butterflies and put them in this book.

The House of Bethan

When I found the book in the loft, I brought it down to the garden and sat on the sofa to read.

(This is a sofa that was supposed to go to the dump but since the sun came out, its become a very nice nesting patch for someone on the verge of Mum-Of-Threedom).

The House of Bethan

The book didn’t have any illustrations but as I looked through the words, my internal sensory rainforest came alive.

Suddenly I was  transported into a bazillion different locations and spaces and meeting this whole FLOCK of colourful characters.

I couldn’t actually put it down!

The House of Bethan

I visited Madmoiselle Kalinda’s coffee shop, where a woman called Gabriella had brought a message about a war that was crunching through the country. But just as the tanks arrived at the walled city, Gabriella and an unexpected man called Rust helped the people to escape into a wooden forest world …

The House of Bethan

Then there was the monsoon life of Fresco in a world that had been raining for so long that the colour had been washed from everything (a little like the weather we’ve had over the end of the winter).

One day Fresco received a letter on the letter is a stamp with a sunshine that has an Oriental face and glowed warm like a June morning. She goes where the letter tells her to and ends up in an Italian woman’s house (called Saffron Donatella)  where everything is warm and dry and she is presented with some magical pasta that changes her entire world …

The House of Bethan

The next story took me in a strange family of travelling funfair people and for a life time – in two pages – was swooshed along with the Nowhere Place Children, who were blessed with freedom but cursed with being unable to ever put their roots down …

The House of Bethan

I met an Egyptian called Marina whose death-day was the passage for her birthday into her earthly life(based on a dream I’d had) …

I reconnected with my exploring Granny who later became the main character in my published book Eggaporting to the Amazon …

I ambled along with Phillip, Jasmine and Zebedy who began a pensioners festival in their bungalow estate and built a monument called Sconehenge …

I flew through the sky with an alchemist of smell who sprinkled the fragrance of crushed peas and mandarins down on a world ravaged by nuclear war …

I swam through the veins of the earth with a boy called Lyn who was a true water baby …

After I read the stories, I sat on my garden sofa shut my eyes and let the sunshine pour through my eyelids. This collection of stories (quite possibly fed by the Ray Bradbury books that my dad read to me as a young child) are the true gems of my pre-baba nest building.

I would so love to bring them back out of the loft and into the world and put them together in the sort of shape they deserve … perhaps a handmade book sold in local artsy places. Or maybe some crazy publisher with a purple beard who is also drunk on Vitamin D and Sharpie fumes might pop out of the woodwork and say, “Bethan … let us plant a new breed of creativity in this world!!” And that would be another story within itself …

Or I could publish the stories here at the House Of Bethan; literally toss them out there into the world like the alchemist does with his scents and fragrances.

What do you think?

Anyway, I have got the dull ache of Braxton Hicks that have been teasing me for the last three days. I am off back out into the garden to the sofa in the sun for a little musette.

Wishing you a very gorgeous day. xxx

The House of Bethan

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