Month: September 2022

…but my eyes still see” sang Brian Poole and the Tremeloes back in 1967. It’s doubtful that they were alluding to resistance movements all over the world bearing witness to the crimes that empires commit in the name of national self-interest given the theme of the song is more about a lover’s betrayal, but the allure of silence fascinates many other musicians.  

Simona and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”, Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” and “Deafening Silence” by Machine Head would all be perfectly acceptable additions to a playlist which might be constructed before tomorrow, Monday 19 September.

Daniel Barenboim the conductor went several steps further:

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound…. There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle. This whole Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, the whole beginning of the prelude, is built on the use of silence as a means of expression. 

And that, as they say, is enough for today.

On the other hand, to add one final lyric from the McCartney stable:

Her Majesty’s s a pretty nice girl

But she doesn’t have a lot to say

Her Majesty’s s a pretty nice girl

But she changes from day to day

I wanna tell her that I love her a lot

But I gotta get a belly full of wine

Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl

Someday I’m gonna make her mine, oh yeah

Someday I’m gonna make her mine.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

Resistance may be futile; silence may be the inevitable conclusion of assimilation but the human appetite for constructing meaning from any source and refusing to shut up never ends.

Closing Schools for the Future: “It’s just a loss of identity, that’s all…”

Whilst the logic of school closures is argued by Local Authorities as acts of logic, efficiency and rationality, school closure invariably generates stories of incensed parents, irate communities and exhausted teachers. What is frequently lost amongst the sturm und drang of closure however are the tiny stories (Denzin, 1991) of loss: of professional expertise, of collective memory, of shared hopes and fears, of voice.

Some years ago we asked the research question: what is lost from a school community once the programme of closure has been agreed and a school moves inexorably towards its final days? In counterpoint to the Building Schools for the Future programme that was rife at the time, the study begun as an ethnographic study of the closing months of a single primary school, Centenary Primary School on the Wirral which had just celebrated its 100th birthday: with its imminent closure was just months away. A school’s 100 years’ Jubilee celebrations and its death-closure over just a matter of months? You just couldn’t make it up.

Informed by earlier work conducted by Whitefield (1980) Molinero (1988), Schmidt (2007) and Picard (of 2003, not the Picard of Borgian assimilation fame), we used a multi-method research strategy, including an arts based educational research methodology using creative writing as a means of generating ‘tiny stories’ (Denzin, 1991).

Tiny Stories, Noisy Histories: pointing to the silences of intention, action and dialogue

Tiny stories is a technique used within the practice of creative writing workshops and it has many manifestations. 

Nanofiction or microfiction are writing exercises in which the length of a story is arbitrarily determined to perhaps absurd lengths: Stern’s micro-fiction model for example states that micro-stories should be no more than 250 words. 

The World’s Shortest Stories (Moss, 1998) is more stringent: stories should contain no more than 55 words (excluding the title which must be no more than 7 words long) and each story must contain the following four elements: 1) a setting, 2) one or more characters, 3) conflict, and 4) resolution.   

Snellings Clark (2008) offers another set of limits on length (100 words) and directs the writer not to use the same word twice.  She offers a set of aesthetic criteria which describe how the tiny story might most effectively function and how why they resist the instruction to be silent:

• Little stories that are larger on the inside than they appear on the outside.
• Stories that leave an aftertaste, that linger.
• Special nod to stories that include elements of the fantastic.
• Little things with big effects: lost keys, a scrap of paper, a chink in the armour, a missing screw.
• The inexplicable in the definable, the fantasy in the reality, the uncommon in the everyday, that something under the surface.

The secret little things: a microcosm of silence.

The Closing Schools for the Future project was written as a series of tiny stories which conformed to the Snellings Clark model: no more than 100 words in length, in commemoration of the age of the school at its closure.  78 tiny stories were written, each one representing a child who would have been on the school role had it not been shut down at the start of the next academic year.

Whilst this constitutes a small ethnographic project where n=1 and where the characters, narrative, dialogue and critical actions appeared to inhabit a microworld with microscopic movements, the ‘tiny stories’ told of cataclysmic change felt widely, resonating out across the landscape in which the school was based in ways not fully understood or predicted.

The soundscape of the territory was a microcosm of silence. Resistance to the closure had been purposeless, directionless if not completely futile. Questions remained unanswered, under investigated, under challenged: the assumption of logic, efficiency and incontestability was all pervasive.  

In this world of tiny stories, teachers identities were sometimes subtly, sometimes seismically challenged: John, a class teacher of some 15 years in the school had decided he just wanted to continue to teach in any school, despite being offered extra pay for taking on enhanced management duties.  But he just wanted to teach; and unable to play the job interview game refers in an observed class to the on-looking new head in a throwaway aside as an old witch which didn’t enamour him with her. So he failed to win the job in the new school and had to revisit his cv, his approach, his understanding of how he did what he did.  No longer a respected teacher for 15 years who had taught at the school classes across the range – he was now back in the marketplace with a label of as being a bit of a trouble-maker.

These tiny stories were not part of the building schools for the future mega-narrative of secondary schools; no bright new shining vision of educational pods for sophisticated young people who are able to opt for downloading content from their mobile phones over the attendance of a master class by an over-performing Uber-teacher who would be performing ballet steps one minute an entertaining the visiting private sector funders the next.

These stories had no shine, no brighter picture of a future but were stories of a quiet, seeping desperation which was prevented from turning into a collective madness by the efforts of teachers and children who continue from day to day as if nothing was about to happen. 

This was not an indignant narrative about the alleged lack of consultation of the authorities, an ironic parable about administrative dysfunction or a moralistic tale of performative brutalism – although each of those narrative genres emerged in the fabric of this story of school closure as it unravelled in its last few months.  It’s a collection of tiny stories of a tiny school told by tiny narrators.

The desire to silence

Behind these tiny stories, more complex narratives compete for attention and recognition as authoritative voices.  The bigger narratives pull at the microscopic texture of school and community and family relations, and the unravelling of that texture pulls on deep seated threads which pull elsewhere in our civil fabric: echoes and rumours of closure and melt down permeate the rest of the community.  

The loss of a name is mirrored close by with the demolition of a local church and the slow seepage away of local sights, knowledge and identity:  the local Centenary Vic Working Men’s Club had to announce it wasn’t closing in a letter to the press, perhaps indicative of  a microscopic flaking away of community of which the school is part of.  

These microscopic actions had macro effects which were unpredictable, chaotic, complex and still only partially understood: the desire to silence often leads to deafening and unknowable consequences.

More details of the research programme are here. If you’d like a copy of the research paper, please email me: nick@themightycreatives.com.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.

No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.

No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.

No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No No.
No No No No No No O..

K, go on then.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

There. Doesn’t that feel better?

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

The researcher is normally regarded as a source of error and noise, which has to be eliminated or least controlled as much as possible.  Breuer F. and Roth W-M. (2005) What Bang for the Buck? Usefulness of Auto/Biography and Auto/Ethnography to Collective Knowledge.

Whilst there are at least nine tactics that other people can use to get you to shut up, probably the most effective way of you putting a sock it, keeping schtum or buttoning it is when you realise yourself that it’s time to shut that trap of yours and stop letting the cat out of the bag, spilling the beans or just babbling incoherently.

Whether this self-realisation is due to your unconscious assimilation of other people’s desires for you to shut it, or whether it is learned from your own hard fought lived experience is for another blog, but one of the first times I realised that I needed to silence myself was when I was researching the experience of artists and teachers working together.

Interviewing people for a research project seems fairly straightforward on the face of it.  You both turn up at the same place (at the same time, ideally), make the tea, have a set of questions in front of you which are you both going to explore in an open, professional and amiable manner, switch on the tape recorder and off you go. It’s just a case of a directed chat for an hour or so, and if you’re lucky, you’ll agree to go and have a pint afterwards.  How hard can that be?

What have you might not have considered is the myriad of interruptions that destabilise that process.  The phone will ring, there will be perpetual knocking at the door by the teachers, the children, the parents, the caretaker, the gas fitter.  Uncle Tom Cobbley et al don’t even get a look in. 

You soon realise that for all your expectations of an open, professional and amiable conversation, there’s a host of other communications going on which the tape recorder doesn’t have a hope of capturing. 

You also realise that those cursed chairs that children sit on are no use whatsoever in establishing a cosy chat: your back starts complaining loudly, you start fidgeting, you keep adjusting your posture and the head teacher looks alarmingly at you when you wince at one of her answers.  It’s not what she’s said that’s caused you to squirm, just the fact that you’ve developed cramp in your left calf due to those pesky seating arrangements.  

Then the school bell goes. On and on. And on. Any hope of a confessional fireside chat is fast evaporating up the chimney and as she looks at her watch and then out of the window and then back at you, you realise it’s time to get on with it and get on with that list of questions which you have to have completely answered by the time she kicks you out of her office.  

To cap it all, your list of seemingly innocuous questions comes over to her as anything but.  She’s looking below their shiny surface to suss out what their sinister agenda is and to figure out what she thinks you really want to hear.  She wants to impress for maximum impact, she wants to be seen to be saying the right things and the last thing she wants right here right now is a confessional opportunity.  That’s the job of the visiting cleric and she’ll make sure she’s out of the building when he’s visiting. 

So you hurry along, apologetically and inadvertently stray into the taboo status of answering the questions yourself, finishing her sentences and blurting out your appreciation of their responses when it’s least needed. Or as I noted at the time, I am constantly amazed at my inability to read the signs!  She’s giving some insight here into how children are learning and I’ve ignored it and gone straight onto something else!!!  Must learn to listen!

Must learn to listen indeed; or in the terms of this blog, must learn to shut myself up once in a while.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

And thus it goes: the moment you start to listen or look for clues, the more they jump out at you at every turn.  Yesterday was all about 4 ways to spot when someone is trying to shut you up: and  lo and behold after a day of in person meetings and conferring, the tactics proliferate like rabbits and another 5 ways of getting you to shut up appear as if by magic.  They are:

One. We don’t have enough time for this.  This is a useful tactic when you feel you’re losing control of the conversation and you want to hurry someone along or just get plain rid of.

Two. Offer false binaries into the debate and insist that people have to chose between Option A and its polar opposite, Option B.   Don’t tolerate any suggestion that the world is more complicated than the binary and if someone is suggesting that the world is messier than the binaries suggest, just resort to tactic one and tell them you’ve run out of time.

Three. Wheel in the budget.  There’s never enough money to do what’s needed and the budgets usually won’t stretch to do what you need them to do.  This is a difficult one to counter given the shortage of the green stuff these days, but counter it you must if you want to continue the dialogue.

Four.  Claim “It’s Obvious.”  This is equivalent to the ‘No-Brainer’ tactic referred to yesterday but has the benefit of aiming to make your speaker feel stupid, rather than brainless.  The difference is marginal I grant you, but at least they’re allowing you the possibility of having a brain rather than not having one at all.

Five. Filibuster.  In other words, your opposite number just doesn’t stop talking, way beyond what is necessary.  This might be until you run out of time, run out of interest or just run out of the room screaming in silent agony.  This requires a fair degree of rhetorical skill and is not an attribute the average politician possesses. But you can spot a filibusterer when you hear one: it well and truly shuts you up.

So that’s nine rhetorical techniques designed to shut you up in just two days!  If you have any more (and I’m sure you do), it would be great to hear them!

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

John Airs’ approach to structured role play which he used in both his drama in education and live interpretation work had a number of consequences which invariably involved stimulating the voices of young people. The following chatter was always impressive; and at its best it stimulated real dialogue between participants, as opposed to the trading of monologues.

Of course, in many cases, the last thing some people might want to hear is the chatter of young people (or indeed anybody else).  Dialogue has the troublesome habit of upsetting various well held and long established beliefs and stimulating a questioning attitude in those who are generating the chatter.  So, here’s a handy guide to help you to get people to shut TF up.  It’s not made it to having the status of principles yet but give it time.

One. Ignore people.  Although simple, this is perhaps the crudest approach.  Just ignore the irritants in the room and they’ll soon get fed up and leave it, with vague doubts surfacing at the back of their minds as to whether they even actually exist or whether their identity has become a figment of their own fevered imagination.  This approach can be made a tad more sophisticated in conversations on line ie on Zoom if you’re the ‘host’ of the call.  All you have to do is innocuously mute the other speaker and they can rant at you in complete silence with no-one able to listen to their ravings.  It’s a bit like a host at a party who’s decided they’ve had enough of your drink-fulled musings on the state of the monarchy and has decided to park you at the bottom of the yard in the outside toilet and locked the door behind you.

Two. Use rhetorical devices such as ‘naturally’ in your speech.  ‘Naturally’ implies that whatever the content of your speech, it is found in the ‘natural’ world and therefore cannot be contested.  The ‘natural’ world in this scenario can be either fearsome or wholesome, it doesn’t really matter: what matters is that the word ‘naturally’ generates a full stop at the end of the discussion and closes down further dialogue.  That’ll teach them to argue with you.

Three. Another rhetorical device is the use of the word ‘realistically’ or its associates ‘get real’, or ‘you need a dose of reality’ or the real world. All of these suggest the same thing and have the same effect: they point to you being stuck in the world of the imagination with no hold on whatever is going on anywhere else.  The concept of the ‘real world’ is especially prevalent in schools where some teachers will wistfully look out of their windows and point their children to whatever is beyond the school gates uttering, ‘When you’re in the real world….”  Some take this a step further and suggest the world they’re in (teaching, the classroom, the school) has something nothing to do with ‘the real world’, despite them being hugely influential on the futures of the very physical young people in front of them. Whatever phrase is used, the effect is the same: ‘reality’ is used to stop debate and cut out the questioning chatter.

Four. The ‘No-Brainer’ tactic.  Whenever anyone is a little uncertain of their proposition in a debate they might resort to the tactic of using the ‘no-brainer’ argument.  For example, I might say, “The monarchy is vital for a modern democracy, it’s a no brainer”.  This means that if you want to contest this proposition, you either have no brain, have no need to use your brain  or are pointlessly wasting your time and brain energy to contest it. Another crude device for sure: but it can be impressive in its rapid impact. 

There are no doubt several other rhetorical ways to get people to pipe down and stop their irritating chatter; I’d love to hear from you with your suggestions!

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

On Thursday 8 September, whilst limousines were speeding to Balmoral, helicopters being diverted from Aberdeen Airport and corgis probably being shushed for one very last time, some 334.5 miles further south in Liverpool another gathering was about to loudly celebrate the life of one of our quieter heroes, John Airs.

The synchronicity of Madge’s passing with John’s putative ascension would not have been lost on him and many of us remarked on the timing of the gathering.  In times like these, we like to point upstairs and imagine a moment when our dear recently departed encounters a welcoming angel with some words of comfort or irony.  Imagining John verbally accosting St Peter at the gates of heaven helped ease the sorrow of the afternoon and conjure his presence back into the thick of things.

His presence led to many exclamations of delighted surprise:   ‘Fancy seeing you again!’ or ‘Where’ve you been?’ or ‘And you are..?’ Whilst these gatherings can be uncomfortable in reminding us who and what we’ve forgotten, and why, the celebration of John’s life on Thursday stoked my memories of his contribution to the cultural life of Liverpool over what has turned out to be several generations.

I met John in my early days in Liverpool when he and Chris Ball of the Liverpool Education Drama Unit rocked up at the Everyman Theatre one day politely and insistently enquiring about how the Hope St Project was going to address the challenges of Theatre in Education in the city. The Project had had some rocky times from its onset and wasn’t the best of friends with many practitioners in the city who had seen the Everyman acquire a significant amount of funding out of the blue to deliver the project, which they saw, understandably, as being at the expense of their own hard fought projects and vulnerable organisations.

As the new kid on the block, the Hope St Project had its work cut out for itself from the off and whilst John initially approached us with a reasonable degree of scepticism, this was soon replaced with an energy of support and advocacy which enabled us to engage with his knowledge, skills and most importantly wisdom about the impact that drama could have on the lives of young people.

In the following years, I learned a lot from John about politics, theatre and the power of story.  At the first national conference on the use of drama in museums in 1991, entitled ‘What’s the Catch?’, John spoke eloquently about ‘people’s need to learn about the past and repossess it and experience insights which could lead to change and growth’.  Held in the Liverpool Maritime Museum many years before the Liverpool Slavery Museum was opened, John’s words have resonated clearly and loudly ever since: even more so with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in recent years.

John’s work in both drama in education and live interpretation were about placing the child – or the museum visitor – at the centre of the learning experience.  He did this by using structured role play to bring out  the voices of young people (or visitors) and the principles behind this work which he advocated for were: 

• Give clear signals to the visitors / learners
• Establish the rules of the game at once
• Be aware of the use of language: questions allow the visitor / learner to take the next step
• Put the visitor / learner in charge by offering them a role
• Use physically shared props to give the visitor / learner a purpose for continuing the interaction
• The role player’s / teacher’s physical demeanour and body language is significant and  potentially welcoming or threatening
• Status should be shared and rank should not be pulled. The visitor / learner should be made to feel superior
• Generating action leads to movement which helps the visitor / learner to follow the action without having to question, prejudge or negotiate it
• The use of humour helps relax visitors / learners.

Principles worth remembering if they help us to rest in not quite so much peace in our future tellings of our historical pasts.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

Was it destiny that a planned series of blogs on the theme of silence and being silenced would have been overshadowed by the passing away of the Queen this week?  In the name of respect and solemnity we are now shaping our utterances to reflect the passing of one monarch on to the next one. The subtext of that process is there will be things that shall not be spoken now in either private or in public.  We’re all facing those moments of silence and being silenced: for the time being, at least.  And perhaps in the name of decorum, protocol and respect: this is the way things should be.

And the moment we defer to the ways things have been and should continue to be, we place ourselves as complicit conspirators or the act of silencing and being silenced.  If not now, then when? Might be a response to being told to quieten ourselves down, to speak appropriately (such a weasel word) and to reflect the purported national mood (whatever that is) but that would be a question too far for some, right now.

So, my silence today is to the question “Did you ever meet the Queen?”  I’m posed this question when people learn about my own trip to Buckingham Palace in 2012.  The answer to that particular question is a definite ‘no’ as I had the privilege to meet the man who was to become King 10 years later, but that question does open up other questions of whether we ever met, me and Her Madge?

The answer to that follow on question is a more provisional ‘yes’ in as much she passed me and several other colleagues by in a corridor at LIPA when she came to formally open the Institute.  ‘Meeting’ her would be an overstatement as we didn’t exchange words, just looks (and I’m not even sure there was an act of exchange there).  But the events of this week have encouraged other questions to blossom – some which are at risk of being silenced on the vine – such as, how many people have actually ever met her?

The only other moments me and others have experienced the Queen have been through countless forms of mediation: the TV, the film, the photographs, the postage stamps, the banknotes, the tea cups: all have contributed to – or detracted from – an understanding of who this extraordinary woman actually was.   Whether those simulacra have much to do with the multidimensional person who passed me in that corridor is a moot point and don’t offer much help in answering the question: has anyone actually ever met The Queen? And what did they think when they found her?  

Would it be silly to suggest that She’s a figment of our collective imagination? Perhaps, but that imagination has been busy at work over the last couple of days in reinforcing and reconstructing Her images, Her story and Her personality (see how loud those capital letters become in times like these). One thing we can be pretty certain of in future is that questions of whether we – or anyone – has ever actually met her won’t disappear any time soon.  The Mystery of Her Madge is alive and kicking.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.