Credo / Mark Oliver

A dying breed

At the end of April, I did my first audio slideshow project for work using the soundslides software.

I got up very early and hauled myself to Trafalgar Square and interviewed a retired lady called Shelagh Moorhouse who is part of a group who take turns to do early morning feedings of the pigeons.

The group are warring with mayor Ken Livingstone who has introduced a ban on feeding in the square (the group found a loophole, which Westminster council is about to close). The days of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square do look numbered.

Shelagh was kind of sweet. She said that the birds recognised faces and once got excited when she was there later in the day with a friend, without feed.

It was fun being there during the feedings - I was taking photos like crazy and trying to do the interviews at more or less the same time.

This crazy mass of birds. Thirty minutes later they were virtually all gone.

Write to Life

This is Mark Hill. He was an officer in the Iranian army during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). He spent years trying to escape; at one stage he was double-crossed by a contact whom he had paid thousands of pounds to smuggle him into Turkey. Mark, who more recently anglicised his name, spent months in solitary confinement in a camp in Iraq where he could hear people being tortured. For up to five days he was kept in a tiny space where he could not sit down or stand fully.

A couple of weeks ago in north London I met him and other torture survivors who take part in a creative writing course as part of the therapy provided to them by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Torture, which I visited a couple of years ago when it moved to a new building.

I wrote a story about meeting the group and a new website, Lots of Big Ideas, which is seeking to be a platform for their work and a hub for similar voices from around the world. I hope it is a great success and that some of them can develop their writing and perhaps write political comment articles about the regimes they have such terrible experiences of.

I was a bit of a one man media band (a sign of the future) when I met the Write for Life people, and did a report on GU's Newsdesk podcast, which you can listen to here (it is about 17 mins in). I also took photographs of Mark and a couple of the other writers; I'm quite proud of the one of Mark - I was fortunate to have such interesting people to take photographs of. I read a pamphlet of their work and some of it was very good and invariably powerful. Mark has written two novels and a screenplay and I was really moved by his ambition and sense of purpose; and the other two writers I spoke to, Faraidon and Hassan, also seemed really talented.