Irish Examiner 20/02/2023 - Story time.

Today it’s time to say thanks to Rebecca Sheir and Kim Normanton. Two women on either side of the Atlantic who our children know by name.

Children’s story podcasts. The latest and most welcome stage of in-car entertainment for children on long journeys. I can’t remember what I did in the car as a 5 or 7-year-old. Cork to Dublin used to be a voyage where you were waylaid by bandits aka traffic, silage and double parking in the intervening towns. We passed the timefighting with siblings and looking out the back window trying to convince the car behind that they had a puncture.

The nanny-state intervened then and dictated that children couldn’t be projectiles so now they sit strapped in.

In a few years they’ll graduate to many hour audio books about children plucked from obscurity repeatedly save the world from the dark lord Zelgeroth. And after that I don’t know. Maybe we’re really just putting off, one car journey at a time, the stage when they will be silent in the back. Cocooned from us and each other with ear buds. Hunched over screens, trapped in cryptocurrency pyramid schemes and in thrall to whichever awful Tik-Tok personality succeeds Andrew Tate.

Now though, we are in the sweet spot, the only doubt being which of the two women will guide us along the motorway.

Rebecca Sheir presents Circle Round. Her stories are little plays, voiced by a staggering range of actors. The giant from the story it turns out is  “Seargant Someone from the critically acclaimed HBO series Blah the Blah” Meanwhile the plucky young farmgirl is played by Tony Award winning actress So and So who is currently on Broadway with Cats.

Kim’s Super-Great Kids Stories are different. Told by one storyteller but no less magical. And sometimes completely mad folktales that you just know originated a thousand years ago when a shaman wolfed down a load of particularly strong mushrooms.  

The sign for the M8 service station at Cashel drifts by but there are no shouts from the back for McDonalds. There is a story about a Ghanaian trickster spider to be listened to. And not just by them. I’m hooked too.  Lost in the landscapes. I think it’s because fairy stories have none of the anxiety-causing pinpricks of the modern world. Yes there are ogres but there are no meetings or calendar reminders. No phones, no cars. When you want to go somewhere you walk  or are on horseback. People eat bread, fruit and meat, as well as enchanted and poisoned stuff obvs.

On the road they pass workmen or someone just leaning against a tree. As you zoom past the Urlingford exit you don’t casually nod to a workman.

There is just ordinary hard work. No deadlines – unless it’s spinning a roomful of straw into gold by dawn. No spreadsheets, no health and safety documents. Just dark forests and clearings. Town squares and bakers and failed harvests and mountains whose children are rivers.

I’m not calling for the replacement of all roads with twisty paths and automated toll-booths with imp-guarded stiles but all I know is listening in the dark to simple tales of an imaginary time before notifications and alerts is good for the blood pressure when some gobshite is up your hole on the road.

The tales are often morality ones. My children are being taught that rich people are vain and will get their comeuppance. I haven’t the heart to tell them about tax shelters and legal loopholes. That’s another story.

What will they learn from this? I hope they will have memories that are as vivid as the first time I saw a Ladybird book with it’s lush illustrations of foot-stamping Rumpelstiltskins. And I hope they don’t forget Rebecca and Kim.