THE TEAM

Nathan Davies

Hazel Marshall

Stuart MacDonald

Oliver Moor

Jim Johnson

James Skinner

Jess Wynn

Sam North

• 2001 Hackwriters
• Hazel Marshall - Hackwriters Features and Reviews

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Being born in the 69th year of any century is always an auspicious beginning. So I had been told from a very early age by my great aunt. It doesn’t matter which century, she insisted - it was the year that was important. And since I was destined to jump about the centuries anyway, it mattered even less.
I began my life in the early centuries where I learnt little of the great philosophical truths but much about things which would remain with me throughout my life - how to hold a knife and fork, how to walk, to talk and, most importantly, to listen. Because listening was to be important to me in my work.

I was taught more in the middle years but most of it now escapes me. I built things and worked out how to get from A to B in the shortest possible time and with the least possible expense. I found out what it meant to be constrained and to be taught only what other people thought was important. They tried to tell me that everyone is the same but this I never understood. Surely our greatest gift is ourselves.

But then came the Renaissance and some freedom was allowed me and this was followed a while later by the Enlightenment. Machines were built which could carry us across the world and I boarded them and went to strange and exotic lands where people had new things to teach me. And still I listened.
I travelled both to the old world and the new. The old world was rich with smells and spices and had a deep rhythm reflected in its red earth and the heaviness of its darkness. It moved me in ways I could not understand. The new world screamed at me and tried to influence me into a different way of living, one where to possess was all.

And then I returned to my own land for I could tell that stories were brewing there. And I travelled across the whole country, talking to people of all generations, and I listened to their stories. And although they were all different, so they were all the same. Technology had changed, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. But the basis of the stories remained the same. Love, hate, fear, laughter, tears, bad times, good times, times of change and times which seemed to stay the same for ever.

And when I had finished listening to them I listened to myself.
And now my true work begins.

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