Why Bristol?
Liz Milner
This story wasn’t made during a workshop but was a research project: as a facilitator with the Bristol Stories network, I needed to learn how to make digital stories using PCs and their specific software, in contrast to the more familiar (to me) Apple Mac platform used for many of Bristol Stories workshops. This was made using Photo Story 3 (free Microsoft software) with Photoshop for image manipulation and Audacity for editing sound.
Transcript
It was a shared decision – me, my partner, a pin and a map.
Well I suppose there was a bit more consideration than that, but not much. We didn’t want to go North – too cold and wet, or so we’d heard; couldn’t face going back to the London conurbation where we were both born and raised but, the time had come to move on, so a decision had to be made.
At this point we were just emerging from a kind of Dreamtime. We’d fallen in love with some puffins and their wild coast and the gentle hills of west Wales some years previously, on our first visit there, and came back… to do what? To follow a dream? Pursue a bit of an ideal? – not quite hippies, though there were plenty around - we’d been working for a few years, but needed something more from our lives.
So, we both went back to college, art schools in Wales – and wanted to settle into this landscape. Almost bought a house, split up, left Wales, got back together and came to Wales again. This was the Dreamtime – folded into the winding valleys, immersed in some suspended sense of time where the rivers and sea, the hills and the castles, farms and markets all made sense of the place.
But, we finished our college courses, and had to eat – no work in our dream land. It was hard to leave but, with the map, pin and one contact in Bristol to guide us, we hoped the city could offer some creative breaks. Still here, 28 years, and one fully-fledged-family later, and, still creating in one form or another, it seems to have been a sound decision.
