The Storyteller

Dave Grohl named his recent book The Storyteller. I loved that.

Stories are my quite possibly my greatest joy in the human condition. The limitless nature of them. The escape, the shapes, sizes, and styles. The tears, laughter, and rage they can stir in us despite absolutely nothing else changing around us.

I grew up on them. My dad, who grew up in a breadline poor family, and his brothers learned to use them to get their adventures. They have great imaginations, and take so much pleasure from stories.

Stories become our binding culture. Humans, it is said, cannot truly know more than somewhere around 150 people. After that you need a myth, a narrative, a binding mantra. Hence religion. Hence football fans referring to their collective club entity as ‘us.’

It’s why bigger businesses – agencies – have buzzwords like ‘disruption’ to bind their staff and unite them in common cause.

I found myself waiting for a coaching client on Oxford Street, outside Primark. Instead of going on my phone, I decide to people watch, look up and around. There’s a bus stop on the other side of the road, the building behind it boarded up and covered in graffiti and fly posters. For a minute or two I watch how people interact with the Donald Trump illustration (It’s not complimentary) Then the several floors above catch my eye. These windows, while not church old, are of another era. Maybe the 1970s. I wouldn’t know. But they are clouded with dirt and dust, which obscures whatever might have once been going on inside. There’s nothing in there now – no lights, no people moving around, no obvious contemporary use – and it gets me thinking. Could artists stage a takeover? A theatre troupe who might put on late night performances for intimate audiences of friends and peers? Homeless people?

Then there’s an assassin, Jason Bourne, The Day of the Jackal style. And just like those dreamy church imaginings of sleepovers by candlelight, I’m in there again. My client arrives and I’m yoinked back into 2025 Oxford Street and my challenge to help realign her creativity, passions, and personality, but an idea has hatched. A storytelling workshop idea, putting this storyteller nature of mine to good use to help businesses and people. Ah, beautiful active boredom….