I live in London.  I went to drama college there have a family there and love its bright lights and history.  I wasn’t raised in London though.  I am from Lancashire and it’s there that my cultural vocabulary was shaped.  It was in the north west that I was inspired to set out on a creative journey which means that when I head north these days I have a small rucksack for my clothes and two suitcases of props, wigs and hats (this week I have been working in libraries and schools in Chorley, Blackburn and Huddersfield).

It was recently pointed out that I have been living outside the north west for longer than it was ever my home.  Still my affection for north grows with every visit.  I am always struck by the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the landscape, the changes and developments in places like Manchester and Liverpool and, as a working storyteller, the wonderful folklore.

In this blog I wanted to reflect not on my favourite stories but on the stories and the moments that have shaped my creative journey from Chorley to London and back again.  Some of the moments I’ll describe weren’t witnessed by many or indeed any people but they are nonetheless significant to me.  Saying this the more I think the more I think I’ve done a lot of stuff and if I were to repeat this exercise next week my list might be entirely different.  I set out to shortlist 5 moments but have settled with six (its my blog and I’ll cry if I want to).  I am going to bypass the various stories I told as an actor and the various books I have read which helped form my views and character and focus on the stories that saw me to where I am today (although To Kill a Mockingbird, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Cooking with Elvis and We need to talk about Kevin all might have been mentioned)

1. The Hobbit – my Dad, my bedroom.  Some of my fondest memories are sitting on my bed with my Dad reading us stories.  Hearing stories like the Hobbit really enlivened my imagination and left me with a lifelong love of fantasy worlds.

2. The Suicide – Bolton Octagon.  I must have been in my mid teens when we went to The Bolton Octagon to see Nicolai Erdman’s The Suicide.  The entire experience blew me away.  The Octagon is an incredible space and the play was like nothing I had ever seen before (although having seen it again recently at the National perhaps it was the stage design rather than the story that truly grabbed me).  By this stage I wasn’t reading a lot on my own so it was at the theatre that I was exposed to stories.

3. History GCSE – school.  The way I have always viewed history, rightly or wrongly, is as an enormous story.  Like any good story if you like it you remember it and I loved hearing about the Great War.  Like any story though a good storyteller makes all the difference and our history teacher was very good at telling the story of the war.  When I first started writing history workshops it was these lessons which I thought about.  To date it’s this inspiration that has seen me write history workshops for several of London’s local heritage museums.

4. Of Mice and Men – Chorley Little Theatre.  Whilst at sixth form college I got to know Hywel Evans.  Hywel is phenomenon.  He has had a massive bearing on my life – I probably wouldn’t have gone to Drama College if it hadn’t been for him.  He was and still is a creative dynamo and has gone on to be successful in everything he has chosen to do.  Together with Ben Hilton we established Low Fat Productions and put on shows for money including Of Mice and Men.  We got the local theatre and people paid to come and see us.  I remember that I was supposed to be the producer but I was completely hopeless at it.  The experience of working with Hywel and Ben taught me that sometimes to be creative you had to be proactive and if you are proactive enough you could make money.  When I think back about what we did as 16 and 17 year olds I find it incredible.

5. Solo story – Rose Bruford College.  During the Brecht term at college we were divided into groups and prepared plays by Bertolt Brecht for in-house presentation.  Our group were doing St Joan of the Stockyards (which looking back was probably the high point of my entire acting career) but at the same time we had other classes; voice, movement and a thing called solo story.  The idea of solo story was to tell a story to an audience.  It was a massive challenge because to this point we had always worked on ensemble pieces of theatre.  We were essentially left to our own devices as we developed a script and made up a short presentation of a story.  I told a story about watching my beloved Wimbledon Football Club play an FA Cup tie at Old Trafford.  It was probably the first time I had ever told a story solo in front of an audience.  It was nerve wracking but some of the techniques I used in that project I still use to this day.

6. The Unlucky Mummy – all over the place.  In 2012 I was approached about delivering a story in a museum setting about Egypt and when I found the legend of the Unlucky Mummy the project turned out to be a gift.  I created an interactive slapstick piece which could be enjoyed by family audiences.  After the initial delivery I offered it for free to the libraries in north east London.  Impressed by what they saw I was invited back to do Dracula and recommended to the CityRead 2014 for Private Peaceful.  One thing lead to another and The Twits, #Shakespeare400 and The Hundred Mile an Hour Dog have followed it all started though with a newspaper mummy wrapped in toilet roll in a spray painted show box.

So you see you can take the boy out of Lancashire but the north runs in his blood.  I hope that as Verity grows up I’ll be able to share some of the best bits of the north of england with her so whilst she maybe a Londoner her father’s roots will be part of her identity too.