One day in the clouds, Pixie looked at her calendar and found it was her dolphin friend’s birthday. Pixie got ready, brushed her teeth with a bubblegum lollipop, turned into a narwal and dived into the sea...
When lockdown began, psychotherapist Esther Perel called on adults to take note of their children. “Look at what they do,” she wrote. “They don’t need to leave the house to become the captain of a ship, or the officer of a fortress.”
At InCommon we loved the idea of finding ways for all our Buddies, young and old, to explore with their imaginations even while they were physically limited by lockdown. Each week on our intergenerational calls between children and older people, we were delighted to get creative, from imaginary inventions to hearing about the dens children had built, the secret languages they’d created and the classroom of teddy bears they taught each morning in the absence of school.
We wanted to go even further into these imaginary adventures, so we decided to structure our last three Buddies calls around storytelling. During these conversations, we invited children and older people to co-write stories from the safety of their homes. They worked together over Zoom to devise characters, obstacles and heroic adventures. At a time when we were faced, day after day, with the same views from the same windows, our Buddies escaped on their calls to faraway places and magical lands.
This month, we publish Buddies’ Adventures - a collection of short stories told by young and old. Featuring dragons, robots, wizards and blobs, these tales are testament to the enduring imagination of their authors during difficult times. These little works of fiction have tickled us, charmed us and moved us, and we hope that friends of InCommon will enjoy them too.
If you know children or older people who would like to have a go at writing their own story together then feel free to share our activities, available for anyone to use here. Do send us their stories to add to our growing archive of intergenerational lockdown fiction!