Fridays always seem to be a good day to update the blog. There’s teaching to be done, of course, and admin and all manner of other tasks, but there’s something very satisfying, too, about being able to just post something or other on the blog. And today, it’s particularly pleasing to have an article by one of our French at Stirling team, Brigitte Depret, with tales of lockdown life over the past months:
“This tragic Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on everyday life, our emotions, our economy, our health, not only for the individual but, indeed, for humankind. However catastrophic its effects, it has also unleashed many positive aspects of our inherent capacity to adjust and adapt, to survive and to fight back and overcome adversity, each in our own way, individually or collectively.
Lots of us, lucky to be healthy and not to have to fight too many battles, have felt this urge to create, to research, to discover, to do more things, to bake, to grow vegetables, to learn new skills, to exercise, or like me, to write.
Flash back to my younger years… Before entering university where, like everybody else, I faced the daunting task of typing essays and dissertations (often not so pleasurable but satisfying when they’re done!), I have continued to hone my writing skills for other purposes. As far back as I can remember, from the moment I was able to write a few words and make sentences, I’ve loved playing with words. Hearing their music, their rhythm, juggling with sounds, meanings, homonyms, homophones, spoonerisms, palindromes and what-not, fascinated me. Later on, when trying to get my tongue around something, I’ve found it easier to express it in writing with some linguistic twists and turns. To me, the world of the spoken word is fleeting, the world of writing is lasting and liberating.
Since my childhood, I’ve written stories, poems, funny nursery rhymes, short stories and also a novel. I was a schoolteacher in Africa when I again immersed myself in writing, first, for a weekly local newspaper and then for my pupils. During that time, I had very few teaching materials and resources available for my work and I had to resort to my imagination and creativity. For my pupils, I wrote a whole Christmas show, lots of stories, nursery rhymes and poems.
Unfortunately, when I came back to France, I Ieft everything behind in Senegal on stencil papers for my successor. We didn’t have any computers at the time! I still remember some of them, though. I was very surprised when I recently found some of my nursery rhymes on the internet. They must have been shared and travelled out of Africa!
Even if I now use my laptop more as a medium, grabbing a pen and paper is often what triggers an idea and then I let it flow. It’s part of my writing process. Writing has brought me an invaluable freedom. It’s like breathing words out, creating a new story inside your life story.
It’s been almost a year now that our life stories have been put through the test (and all sorts of other tests, I mean French tests too!) With the pandemic limiting our freedom, and bringing all sorts of uncertainties and challenges, it has been difficult to find joy within this chaos. No wonder I needed to get back to finding a new sense of freedom for which, like all of us, I’ve been longing. Many times, last year, I asked myself, what can I do best? Once I decided to focus on the things I had and not the things I didn’t have anymore, I thought I should dive right back into writing. There’s no better time than now to celebrate my creative side!
This time, however, I decided to write picture books for children in English (my ‘adoptive tongue’). Since Christmas, I have already written two stories and I’ve had so much fun writing them. I have another 13 (hilarious) titles ready to give birth to their stories (who knows? They may see the light of the day via a publisher!). Having fun with the twists of the tongues, the tongue-in-cheeks, a plethora of rhymes, and other puns, writing for children has started as a wonderful sensory adventure. I have a third book in the making which involves a French frog and a British toad. The toad travels via a tunnel (the Chunnel) to find refuge, warmth and also food that has become a scarcity in his country. At the other end of the tunnel, when he ‘’exits’’, he meets a French frog… (Any similarity with real events is purely coincidental!) The story won’t tell if they lived happily ever after but there will be lots of linguistic fun along the way!
Living on a roller lockdown coaster, overwhelmed by the flow of information or by the news inundating us and fasting on socialising, writing has helped me to keep my sanity and get my freedom back during the pandemic. Everybody has their own motivational tools, but I believe, reading and/or writing can change us, change our perspective – the one we have of the world and of the people around us right now.”
Many, many thanks to Brigitte for having found the time to write this post, and for the photos, and good luck with the rest of those stories! And for those of you reading this from somewhere other than Stirling and its environs, a little reminder, by way of these photos, of what Scotland looks like in the snow.
French at Stirling 
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