An Exercise

No, the nice weather hasn't got to my brain - I haven't begun jogging or anything. Yes, the exercise I speak of is a writing one - and one I found surprisingly good - it was one of those "oh this is going to be so lame" in your head before you do it and then you do it, and it's surprisingly interesting. It came from a workshop I attended yesterday, given by the fabulous Afric McGlinchey, and it went something like this...

Spend 90 seconds writing down all the nouns you can think of relating to hospitals.

Then spend 10 minutes writing something that uses as many of those nouns as possible, without referring to illness/ hospitals etc...

11.5 minutes in total. Here's mine

George opened another banana while the children watched. He could have kept a whole corridor of kids entertained with the faces he pulled, magicking thoughts of flowers and balloons just from the way he held his arms. George never spoke, but he never stopped playing. One minute he was reading pretend leaflets or nailing posters to the trees, the next he'd be holding a stethoscope to the earth, listening to its heartbeat.
"Why does George only wear pyjamas?" Tom once asked his mother, when she was towelling him down after bath time, but she only smiled. Adults didn't see George and thought the kids were only joking when they said they needed the thermometer to check George's tea, or when they were playing statues and George was watching for who'd move - adults would always interrupt. George would be sucked up in a tube of sensibleness then, and kids would start to see him only in their glasses of water, or when they took mammy's pills or if they fitted themselves into a bedside locker.
It was getting harder to see him all the time.
He was only apparent from a giggle in the curtains or a drip from the railings on a dry day.


Funny how myself and another guy in the group both had banana's in our story - would you have included banana's in your hospital list?