A group night out for our little church group, for a birthday. We went to see “Bridge to Terebithia“, admittedly a children’s film, but actually pretty moving.
I’ll try to keep the plotline, in case you do want to go to see it, but it has lots to say about how kids deal with difficult things in life, including bullying and parental expectation. Â Like many good films, there’s a book behind it.
Why the impact for me? The main characters, a boy and a girl, are each outsiders in their primary school. She has words. He has pictures. Together, they encourage each other in imaginative responses to their environment, and to issues at school.
Given that I loved writing, and Dan loved drawing, it seemed like a familiar tale. You could equally say that we’ve managed to continue these things into our current careers. But it can be easy to continue the activity, and forget the passion, the excitement that it used to have.
Perhaps the main impact of the film was to encourage me again to continue writing, whether it’s sensible or whimsical, useful or perhaps just indulgent.
It’s good to live in the real world, but it doesn’t mean that the worlds in our minds are necessarily to be abandoned.