Let’s tell our stories

“There he was on a blood-stained road, in the freezing cold, 16 years old, his name was ben, he was just a boy walking home.” was the line that finally broke me, and seemingly the whole audience.   

A crowd of 200, watching an artist more used to playing to 1000’s already felt intensely intimate, but watching a man talk about the moment his best friend had died in his arms as teenager was about as emotional a moment as you could imagine.  

I have wanted to see Louis Dunford for years, so when I stumbled across him playing an album launch gig in Nottingham, a city that graced me with its presence for a decade, I bought a ticket and took the day off, to tick a bucket list moment for me and to support an artist who tells stories that have resonated with me throughout my life.  

I almost hate myself for writing this piece and worry that if I don’t get it right, it will read akin to one of those “what we can learn from Gareth Southgate as England manager” posts that we collectively roll our eyes at, so here goes my attempt to steer clear of that whilst trying to rail for the value of authentic story telling...  

Sometimes those stories can be tragedies, like that one Louis tells of the death of his friend, Ben Kinsella, but both Louis through his song and the Ben Kinsella Trust have used that grief to tell the story so it doesn't have to repeat and which is why, when presented with the chance to co-fund the Ben Kinsella Trust (The aforementioned Ben’s incredible sister) bringing an interactive knife crime exhibition to Nottingham in 2018, working alongside Victoria Reeves and the National Justice Musem in Nottingham, we did.  

In a city not short of routes for people down dangerous life paths and stories of easy money to be made, we were able to support an exhibition and workshops that showed, bluntly the consequences and outcomes of choosing them not just on them but on the whole community.  

Fast forward to last week and a member of our My Local Bobby team took the time out to go and meet with one of our prolific shoplifters and his social worker to just try and explain where this was all heading, to try and intervene before this kids story is dictated wholly by his interactions with the criminal justice system, for the rest of the day, he worked tirelessly as he does every day to ensure we minimise the impact of shoplifting and ASB on the town, but it struck me, someone that could so easily be desensitised to this, took a moment to try and help, that might just be the difference that kid needs and it might just save our members a lot of time down the line.  

The Ballad of Benjamin was by far the most tender moment of the whole gig but the rest of the evening was a collection of songs reflecting on moments, they were tales of people and of places, of experiences good and bad and like all great story tellers, he makes you think the stories are yours as much as they are his, often reflecting on characters who by any mainstream view are outside the norm and fallible, though truthfully, isn't that all of us? And it is certainly all of our places? Isn’t our job really, to tell the true stories of our places, to amplify the uniqueness but in a way that is true, real and authentic.  

If we authentically tell our stories, learning from the very best of our creatives, we can start to fight back, we can start to build a picture of a yes different but maybe even better version of our towns and our cities, fragile, fallible, human places rooted in the one thing amazon can't replace, genuine human interaction from tragedy to farce and all the emotion that sits between; building places that are human and that are for humans, will be the key to any places success.