I failed miserably with the one-word poem idea. It was so hard to come up with that one word, the right word for the way I was feeling in that moment. But it did make me think and got me rolling some old favourites and some new discoveries around on my tongue.

I also had the slight excuse that it was the half-term holidays and Tom's three gorgeous girls came to stay with us. Last Monday, we went to the library to listen to Shonaleigh, a Drut'syla or storyteller from the Yiddish tradition.

For Shonaleigh, story-telling is: 'a way of making the unbearable bearable, it's a way of dealing with life' and something which the Jewish culture has always valued and kept alive.

She told us a wonder tale about the time before each one of us is born, when we each know everything there is to know in the world: why the wind blows and how the earth was made and how to understand the languages of all creatures... And then, just before we are born, an angel presses his finger to our lips: Ssssshhh! He tells us that we must never whisper a word of this knowledge to anyone. And, once we are born into the world, we begin to forget everything that we knew. But we have two lines between our nose and our mouth, where the angel left the imprint of his finger.

But storytellers, being natural chatterboxes, are not so easily hushed. The angel has to press his finger very hard over the lips of a storyteller and that is why you can always spot them - because they have much deeper lines above their mouth than other people.

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