Telling Tales - Telling Places: by Kathleen Jones
Ever wondered where our fascination with, and addiction to, stories comes from? They are as much a part of us as our DNA. Children tell them quite naturally, but our need for them is mysterious. ‘At any given moment,’ Christopher Booker writes, ‘all over the world, hundreds of millions of people will . . . have their attention focused on one of those strange sequences of mental images which we call a story.’ It is, he states, ‘one of the most important mysteries’.* We are surrounded by stories – everyone has their own story and we are all part of other people’s stories, as well as being part of the bigger historical story of the human race – the whole world is a web of interlocking narrative. We are all part of each other's stories Which is exactly how our ancestors saw it. Not just human history and interaction, but the landscape as well. Those weren’t hills on the horizon, they were the bones of some ancient god fallen in battle or the breasts o...