Background
Geospin's Diary
The plan for the children's song was to generate a way of enabling sick and healthy children to meet online and find a space where sick children could connect readily with a community outside the hospital and healthy children could better understand the lives and hopes and aspirations of children living with serious illnesses. We wanted to create songs that would change the way children thought about what was possible in and out of hospital.
We set up a simple message board to enable children from the hospital wards and from the primary school in Brixton to communicate with each other and to generate song lyrics online. This website was the structure that enabled a friendship to grow between a group of boys that would become a strength of Geospin's song.
We planned the project in December 2004 but did not finally start running workshops until February 2005. I ran the workshops with actress, writer and lyricist Jo Unwin. Intelligent, sharp and fiercely honest, I was looking forward to working with her.
My baby girl, Lily Grace, was scarcely one month old when we ran our first workshop. My partner valiantly volunteered to come with us, drop us at the hospital gates at 1030 and drive her round Holborn in the car while I ran the workshops. The aim was to keep her asleep until I re-appeared at the front gates at midday. The plan was that I would then feed her, have lunch and arrive at Sudbourne Primary School to run an afternoon workshop with Class 5. The unpredictability of nappy changing/ feeding times/ waking and sleeping times and the increasing levels of personal exhaustion meant that during the entire four months that the project ran I don't remember once arriving at any point of any itinerary on time!