Things that stoked the fire.

I am attempting to bring you forward to the present tense so please bare me a little longer. First I just have to explain how this Puppetry lark got into my head and under my skin.
Last autumn, for the first time in my life, I was living close enough to London to be able to stretch the possibilities of what one could get up to there in a day. I began to realise that, rather than being a mighty, fearsome ugly machine, London held tiny pockets of enchantment, and it was an exciting process beginning to seek these pockets out.
One day at the computer, I had a daydream - about a puppet theatre on a canal barge. I thought it would make a wonderful idea for a story, but I doubted that such a thing already existed. When I typed "puppet theatre barge" into the internet search engine I discovered The Puppet Barge. Possibly the most life-affirming discovery I have ever made on Google.

www.puppetbarge.com/

The present location of the barge was Richmond in Surrey - a refined, elegant, candles-in-windows style town surrounded by the green countryside and intersected by a river. The nights were drawing in, England was becoming chilly, pumpkins were selling well in the supermarkets....and around this time myself, my boyfriend and two close friends also searching for a similar kind of fairytale undertook the journey to Richmond for an evening performance of The Ancient Mariner at the Puppet Barge.
There it was, we could see it - the long boat covered in its mysterious dark tarp, the little steps leading over the water to reach it. Light fading from the riverside. We drank locally-made cherry beer in a riverside pub, and then approached the Barge.
Down the steps, into the hatch, and into a miniscule submarine world of wooden walls and ceiling, the smell of coffee coming from a little percolator on a stand, a pile of marionette books and postcards on the side and old, dusty puppets hanging in corners, staring.
Into the theatre - about the total size of a schoolbus - the lights dim, the play starts. A disembodied voice verberates through a speaker, an old man narrates the tale....in it there are fishermen, billowing sails, an albatross...moments of silence, moments of wind, moments of water rippling deep down under water. Sometimes all there is to be seen is the great white sail of the ship against the black night, moving in the wind. Or of the depths of the ocean, with scatterings of dust falling through it like miniscule sea creatures.
At the interval we stood out on the deck, as a blanket of mist settled on the river and a slice of white waxing moon hung above us. It was freezing. And at that point we knew that there was something impossible to explain about this new world we had just uncovered.