On Christmas Day BBC Radio 4 listeners heard a story of friendship and recovery built around a series of letters. Now Alison Hitchcock and Brian Greenley tell DUNCAN HALL why others should put pen to paper
ALISON Hitchcock still doesn’t know why she said she would write to Brian Greenley after he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. But four years after he got the all clear the pair were inspired to tell their story when BBC Radio 4’s The Listening Project came to Crawley. And it has launched not only a live show which is coming to Brighton at the end of March, but also a national campaign.
“I had met Brian in 2009 on a yoga holiday,” says Alison, fresh from visiting her 20-yearold stepson Alfie, currently a student at the University of Brighton. “I thought we didn’t have much in common. I was working in the City and very career focused, I had gone on holiday to de-stress. Brian had just taken voluntary redundancy and was thinking of setting up a gardening business. We met up with other people a couple of times but there was no great friendship there.” It was six months later that Brian revealed he had bowel cancer – and Alison made her promise to write him a letter every other week. “I said the letters were going to cheer him up – so they had to be funny,” she says. “I spent weeks hunting for something absurd or eccentric scenarios that I could turn into something funny for the letter.” Every other week she sat down to write up to 1,500 words on her laptop. And she found she really enjoyed the process. “I would say things you would never say to people in conversation,” she says. “I would embellish things that had happened to me. It was like having a diary that you share. I was opening my eyes to things I wouldn’t normally notice to collect anecdotes. After writing the letters I would read them back and have a chuckle – I was delighting myself!”
This story is from the April 2017 edition of Sussex Life.
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This story is from the April 2017 edition of Sussex Life.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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