02-04 July 2004: The Great Slush Sleepover

Venue: Peter M’s ‘Treehouse’

The Treehouse

To mark four years together, the members of Slush gathered at Peter M’s country estate ‘The Treehouse’ for an intensive writing workshop interspersed with some serious eating, drinking and relaxing. Everyone save Karen and Peter G arrived on Friday night, the others joining in on Saturday afternoon just in time to enjoy a big lunch cooked by Simon.

The workshop began with a warm-up exercise for the brain provided by Pil and NASA, splitting Slush into two groups to take fifteen items and list them in the order of their importance should you find yourself crash landed on the Moon with a 200 mile hike to base. We followed this up with the time-honoured ‘quick story writing technique’ as Pil cooked a delicious fish dinner.

After dinner came the reading of our stories (homework for the meeting was to begin a story with the phrase “sometimes one has no choice but to give up”), along with some red wine, and later, the traditional absinthe. A brief outing to look at the moon through Peter M’s telescope was thwarted by gathering clouds.

The next morning, after breakfast from Peter G (with scrambled eggs from Pil) we worked for an hour writing a story in the form of a letter, an exercise which proved extremely successful.

All our thanks go to Peter M, who has been officially declared a National Living Treasure by the other Slush members.