How Far Are You Throwing Your Words?

 

Down here, below the equator, schools are blasting through their summer term which is the beginning of their school year, heading for autumn.  The leaves aren’t turning quite yet, but as I walked through the playing fields of Rondebosch Boys High School, I could see that things have changed.

The fields have been marked out for sports and Wednesday afternoons are now a riot of cheering, amid the chaos of multiple games of cricket, tennis and hockey (it doesn’t appear to be seasonally dependent here) while rugby coaching continues and some equivalent of cycling proficiency goes on.  The middle field has been marked out in white as an athletics track and I watched grandparents and grandchildren engage in mock ‘races’ there at the weekend.

Most fascinating to me is the space for the shot-put.  I originally thought they must be coaching hammer throwing, but the lack of safety net suggests that’s not the case.  I’m sure the locals are heaving a sigh of relief as it’s a public thoroughfare too.   (What could possibly go wrong?). The set up is not dissimilar though.  There’s the cement circle with an acute angled triangle indicating the space from which the shot-put can be thrown.  It continues onto the grass in two widening lines redolent of a crocodile’s jaws (set at 34.92º, Google tells me).  Every five metres another line has been painted joining the two and serving as a distance measurement.

Perhaps you enjoyed chucking huge weights around your own playing field back in the day but I somehow think that even if you did (and frankly, I’m dubious), health and safety would be all over it by now.

However, intrigued as I was by the inclusion of this event in the South African sporting curriculum, it prompted me to wonder firstly how far I could throw such a contraption – shot-put or hammer – (probably not far) – and, secondly, how far our words are reaching.

Whatever you’re writing, I assume you are ‘getting it out there’ somehow.  Unlike the athletes, we carry our words close to our hearts rather than under our chins, cosseting them until we deem them ready for launch.  There are no prizes for hurling them further into the ether than anyone else, but it’s a fascinating thought.

Many of you write your own blogs and/or newsletter which are distributed pretty widely via various online platforms.  That means they probably travel further than hard copy books, though I know that they also make it around the globe whether as holiday reading, requested by friends or ordered online.  If you write for a local or national newspaper (we do have a wide variety of writers within ACW so it wouldn’t surprise me), then you have a potential readership of thousands.

Perhaps we’ll never know how far our words are travelling.  It would certainly be a lot harder to measure than that hammer or shot-put on the local sports field, but it would be fun to find out, as well as encouraging for those who penned/typed them.  We don’t want to be chucking them around willy-nilly, into a void or knocking out unwary bystanders by inadvertent clumsiness.

How far your words have reached, so far?  Let me know.

Jenny Sanders has spent the last fourteen years living between the UK and South Africa. She writes faith-inspired non-fiction: Spiritual Feasting (2020) asks how we can ‘feast’ when life serves unpalatable menus; Polished Arrows (2024), explores the allegory of God shaping us to be fired effectively into our culture and contexts.                 

Jenny also has two published collections of humorous short stories for Key Stage 2 children: The Magnificent Moustache and other stories, and, Charlie Peach’s Pumpkins and other stories. She is available for author visits and creative writing sessions in primary schools.  She loves walking in nature, preferably by a river, and has a visceral loathing for offal, pineapple and incorrect use of car indicators on roundabouts.