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Martin Day

Martin Day was born in Woking in South-East England in the 1960s. Following education to A-level standard he pursued careers as diverse as virus research, glassblowing, information technology and youth work. He currently works as part-time as Christian worker, teacher and coach linked to Brookwood Community Church (www.bcc.shallowdeep.com) in the UK. He also runs a sumo wrestling party business as a side-line (www.SumoExperience.co.uk). He specialises in producing creative multimedia presentations. During the 80’s and 90’s Martin fronted Christian rock band ‘Salt Solution’ (https://bcc.shallowdeep.com/saltsolution.htm & https://shallowdeep.com/music_salt_solution.htm) whose recordings continue to be available on the internet (iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc). More recently Martin published "The Animal Parables", a collection of short stories. Latterly, he has been working at his long-running musical project, more parables and has developed a prototype board game. Martin still lives in Woking with his wife Jill.

The story behind the story: The Wildebeest

Back in the early 70s, there was a trend for collecting weekly magazines that would bind into book volumes by threading strips of metal through the staples. The publisher would give the hardback covers away for free. It was a clever way to sell encyclopaedic volumes, in instalments, that you would never buy outright. They tended to be educational too, which appealed to my parents. My choice was the World of Wildlife series, which built into twelve volumes (with a thirteenth index volume given as a reward for staying the course).

I loved animals and devoured each magazine as it arrived. The first three volumes were about African creatures. I had a poster of a young cheetah on the wall at the foot of my bed. And this was where I first learned about the great migration of the Wildebeests. Vast herds of these animals galloped through my imagination, plunging into the crocodile-infested waters of the Mara River.

Read More »The story behind the story: The Wildebeest

The story behind the story: The Cat

Some people like change, and some like to keep things the way they are. How do you feel when you are faced with a new phone, laptop or computer system you have to work with? Do you dive straight into all the new features and functionality, or do you first just set things up the way you’ve been used to? I know which I think is more common.

When I worked in IT, I was tasked with delivering a document imaging project. It was going to make a big difference to the managers in the company, but for the invoicing department in Glasgow, well, there was no win for them, just one extra thing for them to do. So they dug their heels in.

“All you have to do is peel the sticker off this reel and stick it on the invoice,” I told them.

“How’s the one-armed man going to do that?” they replied. And they were serious; there was indeed a one-armed man.

Read More »The story behind the story: The Cat

The story behind the story: The Horse

The Horse

I grew up as an only child living in a village unromantically called West End. One year, for my birthday, I asked for a map, because I wanted to know everything about where I lived. What I got was a detailed Ordnance Survey map, and on it I found that my road was smack in the middle of an area called Donkey Town. I had never heard anyone in the village use the name, but this instantly seemed a more interesting and mysterious place to be.

My next-door neighbour was the closest thing I had to a sister, and she was mad about horses. We must have been maybe 7 or 8 when we started horse riding lessons. This involved climbing on top of these enormous beasts and being led through the woods at walking pace. Things didn’t move quickly enough for me. They wouldn’t let me gallop and jump over things, so I gave up lessons and left my neighbour to it.

Read More »The story behind the story: The Horse

The story behind the story: The Wasp

The Wasp

Have you ever noticed how often pairs of similar creatures get seen as good or bad, as nice or nasty? Think of the grasshopper and the locust, the mouse and the rat, the sheep and the goat, the frog and the toad, the butterfly and the moth. Of course, you may have your personal preferences or even like neither of these pairs, but one twosome that is almost universally agreed on is the bee and the wasp.

Bees are adorable, aren’t they? They work together to make us honey. They rarely bother us, spending all their time going from flower to flower, pollinating as they go. Whereas wasps are loathsome creatures attacking us for our food and threatening to sting us at any opportunity. Even though bees can sting too, we know that, unlike a wasp sting, a single sting is fatal for a bee, and that somehow makes them seem selfless, heroic even.

Read More »The story behind the story: The Wasp

The story behind the story: The Frog

The Frog

You need a large jam jar to keep tadpoles captive. I found out the hard way, or more to the point, my tadpoles did. I now know that, although it’s fascinating to watch frogspawn or tadpoles grow for a week or so, it’s worth returning them to the wild before too long. It’s all too easy to poison the water.

I have a distinct childhood memory of having a jam jar full of frogspawn that, to my delight, hatched into tadpoles. One was bigger than the rest, dappled grey instead of the standard black blob. My dad called him Spotty Muldoon (an early Peter Cook reference that went over my small head back then). It was clearly different from the others, and I wondered what it might grow into. Maybe he would become a toad or a newt. I loved Spotty Muldoon the most. But one morning, I awoke to a stomach-churning sight. The tadpoles were motionless, floating on the surface, or sunken to the bottom, Spotty amongst them. I learnt a hard lesson about the challenges of animal husbandry that day. I cried inconsolably.

Read More »The story behind the story: The Frog

The story behind the story: The Caterpillar

The Caterpillar

Like me, you have probably heard a lot about the obesity epidemic. Some of the latest research puts much of this down to the fact that, in the last half-century, we have been sold ever more ultra-processed food. Various additives have been used to enhance flavour, colour, or shelf life, or simply to bulk out products with cheap ingredients. This means that a proportion of what we eat, we wouldn’t consider food at all! And, when we eat food that isn’t what the body expects, our bodies are inclined to eat more of it to try and get what we need. That’s the theory anyway.

Read More »The story behind the story: The Caterpillar

The story behind the story: The Chick

I live a stone’s throw from the Basingstoke Canal, a sleepy waterway that rarely even gets to see a passing narrowboat. Sometimes, if I am walking the dog after dark, I will hear the ducks all start quacking at the same time. It sounds just like they have all burst out laughing together, as if one of them had just whispered something really funny. I wondered what they might be laughing at. This was what started me thinking about a story that became the parable of The Chick who was raised by ducks.

Read More »The story behind the story: The Chick

The story behind the story: The Mackerel

The Mackerel

Elmer is a village on the south coast of England. My family have been fortunate enough to know three families who have either lived, or had holiday homes, there and who have been kind enough to lend us their properties. So we have been able to spend several holidays and retreats by the sea. Beach-wise, it is something of a secret location. On what would otherwise be a monotonous coastline, the council have dumped barrows of rocks in the sea to protect the coast from wave erosion. Where the sea does get through, a series of charming sandy crescent bays has been created.

Read More »The story behind the story: The Mackerel

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