Sophia the Sphere by Steve Way

Generally, most ideas come when actually writing though I don’t know about you but for me many can pop up at unexpected, usually inconvenient moments. In my case, it’s often just as I’ve crawled into bed and got comfortable (particularly on a cold evening) or first thing in the morning when I’m just beginning to wake up and could justifiably spend up to another half an hour warm and cosy under the covers. I’ve learned from cruel experience though that if I try to persuade myself that I will easily remember the uninvited ideas at a more convenient time that I’m deceiving myself. When the convenient time finally arrives, the idea has sneaked away irretrievably, into the ether. So, I have to decide to crawl out of bed if I want to preserve the idea. I suppose on reflection it demands that I make a harsh editorial decision… the comfort of my bed or the preservation of an idea…

The genesis of my latest idea was even more mundane. As a friend of mine once pointed out, shaving is pretty boring and becomes mechanical and automatic, allowing the mind to wander. In my case while carrying out this riveting activity, I was thinking about some of my visits to schools where I’d told my story about ‘King Cube’ becoming overweight and turning into a sphere.

The story has a curious history. While studying my PGCE (junior) course, my fellow students and I were asked to prepare a maths lesson about solid shapes. My studious classmates produced – as reflected in many of them receiving excellent grades – a variety of lesson plans and resources. In my case I wrote the above-mentioned story. Our tutor clearly made a deliberate beeline for me as our marked efforts were returned and gently informed me, clearly intending to head off disappointment, that, ‘we couldn’t give you a good grade because it was too original’.

Well, it served me right I suppose…

Sometime later an editor who was considering the story became convinced that the infant children the story was mainly targeted at, wouldn’t be able to cope with the idea of a cube transforming into a sphere. Despite me pointing out that by this time I had told the story to several hundred, possibly a few thousand, children and that none of them appeared to have found this concept beyond them my appeal fell on deaf ears. I appreciate my bias in this situation but the children seemed to enjoy the story, particularly when I kept deliberately-on-purpose dropping King Cube, now in the form of a tennis ball sphere and then ineptly trying to retrieve him as he bounced towards them.

The one consistent difficulty I did notice that the children commonly experienced however, was that many of them found it difficult to pronounce the word ‘sphere’. The most common mispronunciation sounded like the girl’s name ‘Sophia’, though a few pronounced it as ‘spear’ (causing me to duck down in fear of attack – any excuse for getting a laugh!) and occasionally as ‘fear’.

This is where my revelation in front of the mirror comes in – it finally occurred to me that I ought to write a story about Sophia the Sphere, possibly a warrior who wields a spear – and if she’s got any sense does so with fear. In the meantime, I realised I needed an ‘aide-memoire’ and came up with the following attempt at a limerick.

 

There once was a sphere called Sophia,

Who guarded her riches with fear,

But the cube was no fool,

So, he made her a tool,

Now Sophia the Sphere guards her hoard with a spear.

 

For some reason, while I was in limerick mood, the following pair of verses popped up.

 

There was a mad man from Dundee,

Who foolishly married a bee,

They honeymooned in a boat,

Rowed by a pig and a goat,

That mad married man from Dundee.*

*And his wife of course

**I wonder if he ever called her ‘Honey’.

 

There was a mad man from Dundee,

Who decided to marry a bee,

But a keen legal eagle,

Declared the marriage illegal,

For his not yet divorcing a flea.

 

I’m sure some of you are wishing I’d grown a beard!

~~~~~~~~~~

I was once asked to do an extended visit to a school in Preston where they were engaged in a school project about dragons. For the visit I wrote one and a half stories (I still have to finish the second one). However, the first one, which I read to the school in an assembly, is about a girl called Jasmine who turns up at school on pet ‘show and tell’ day with what she claims to be a dragon’s egg

The Egg

By Steve Way

Illustration by Brian Way

 

 

 

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