Bloggers! What are you going to write about today?

Blogging, as any self-respecting blogger can tell you, is not that easy. OK, you’ve got the desire to write, you create your blog page and you start to write about your chosen subject or theme or whatever and at first you will have plenty of ideas and you’ll find yourself going strong. But, after a while, even the best writers will start to flag. You’ll find yourself thinking, ‘I haven’t done a blog for a week, what can I write about?’ It can be hard but you have to train yourself to create, to start looking at the world with a view to writing something about it whether it’s a blog about the crazy things that come into your inbox or the nutty people you find yourself sitting next to on the bus to work.

I was looking at a site the other day that gave writers prompts or themes to write about. Today, write 400 words about your garden! You get the idea. Nothing really got me going until I read further down, ‘write 400 words about a sound!’ Now that sounded a little crazy. A sound? What kind of sound could I possibly write about but then, a sound from my past came to me. It was a clicketty-click sound. The clicketty-click whirring sound of Mr Todd’s projector.

Who was Mr Todd? Well he was a teacher at my junior school, Crossacres Junior School in Manchester and every Christmas Mr Todd set up his projector and we filed into the hall, sat down cross legged on the floor while the curtains were closed, the lights switched out and Mr Todd’s projector took us into another world, the world of films. They were mostly cartoons, things like Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny and sometime he showed a few Walt Disney animal documentaries. Those Christmas film shows were just wonderful for us children, sitting in the dark watching those slapstick antics on the screen. I used to like to sit near to Mr Todd and marvel at the projector. He would open up little doors in the workings and make adjustments, and little shafts of light would escape until he closed the small doors again, and the whirring of the reels and the clicketty-click sound was a sound I loved.

One day, and I think it must have been my last year at junior school Mr Todd retired but not only did he retire, he took his projector and films with him and the last Christmas at Crossacres was empty without him. I remember sitting in the hall listening to the choir or some play or other and hoping that eventually someone would give the signal to close the curtains and the projector would be wheeled in and the fun would begin. Mr Todd and his projector however, never returned and Christmases were never the same. Still, whenever I hear the sound of that projector the memory of that Christmas film show returns to me. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Hitchcock movie ‘Rebecca’, but there’s a sequence in the film where Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier start watching their home movies and we hear that clicketty click projector sound again.

I’ve always liked that movie, maybe that’s why!

If you liked this post then why not try my book, Floating in Space? Click the links at the top of the page for more information or click the image below to go straight to amazon.