One of the very best things about being a teacher is revitalising my creative spirit. It goes through cycles, so you could say my life has been semi-creative – in the 1980s it was all about designing unique clothing out of all sorts of strange fabrics to save me from the banality of 80s padded shoulders, shell suits and legwarmers. I couldn’t find the things I wanted to wear in the high street so I spent hours and hours hunched over my sewing machine making all sorts of exotic outfits. I once even made an outfit for a genuine, bona fide rock star (and he wore it on stage at the Marquee) :-) but that is another story.

In the noughties it was revived, largely through David’s influence, in the form of this rather strange photo blog, not that I was aware that’s what it was at the time. Back in those days, I spent hours and hours while I was stuck in traffic on the M25 thinking up ideas for creative and sometimes downright bizarre photographs. When I got home from work, I’d spend more hours trying to create in the camera what I’d seen in my mind’s eye and frequently failing to come anywhere close. Oh but when it worked, there was no better, more exhilarating feeling. Back in the day, I’d post my picture then spend another hour or more writing something to go with it. I’m back at work next week and it remains to be seen whether I can keep up that level of enthusiasm for this once my nose is back on the grindstone of marking, planning and delivering.

For now though, this is a semi-creative thing. We are about to start reading and dissecting “The Butterfly Lion” by the amazing, wonderful children’s author, Michael Morpurgo. I must confess that although I have read and loved several of his books, I was not looking forward to this one because its cover didn’t in any way reach out to me as a reader but when I finally forced myself to read it on Monday, I found it to be really endearing. OK, so not as good (in my view) as “Cool” or “The Kites are Flying” but certainly good enough to keep my children entertained for the foreseeable future. I thought about my display that’ll form the heart of the working wall and decided on a butterfly lion of our own. I’ve made the white lion and the children will make the blue butterflies to stick all over it.

Now I’m not a good enough artist to hand draw a lion myself so what to do? My mind suddenly sprang back to a telly show I saw last week, a rerun of an old episode of Hustle where one of the heroes was doing a fake of a WW2 wall painted ad by projecting the image onto the wall and then painting what was projected. Ha – I can do that! I have computer, whiteboard and projector as well as access to huge sheets of white paper. I found an image, projected it onto my white paper and simply drew around the outline. I cut it out, stuck it on the wall and if I say so myself I rather like it. You can’t really say I created it in the sense that I used someone else’s source material but I did create the display and the children’s blue butterflies will be created too so hopefully the final effect with be rather lovely. At least, that’s the plan – as with all of these things it remains to be seen whether the outcome matches what’s in my mind’s eye.