Valerie Gillies

I wasn't sure, they were such a varied group of people, I wasn't sure what they would like or what they would...

feel any resonance, you know, for themselves.

And I went for Charles Cosley because his ear is so good for poetry and for rhyme and things that can chime with people.

And this is just a little extract from a long ballad that he wrote called John Paul Ruddon, a Cornish poem, I think.

John Paul Rudden all of a sudden went out of his house one night when a privateer came sailing near under his window light.

They saw his jugs, his plates and mugs, his hearth as bright as brass, his gewes and gaws and kicks and shaws all through their spying glass.

They saw his wine

his silver shine, they heard his fiddlers play.

Tonight, they said, out of his bed, Paul Rudden will take away.

So it goes on for a number of stanzas.

And when I finished where he's been kidnapped by the privateer, the group as one said, that's what's happened to me.

That's why I'm here, in here.

I can remember it happening.

That's what happened to me.

It was a lovely moment.

So that's a little example.

And I had an artist friend

in with me from Artlink Scotland, who'd brought paper and paints and clay.

The next moment from when people had said, that's what happened to me, they were saying, can I have the clay?

Can I have the paints?