It’s a Bank Holiday, and that can mean only one thing. Ray Harryhausen. Growing up, the association between flying carpets, animated skeletons and minotaurs was cemented by the Harryhausen films that would be shown on tv a few times a year.

Stories about Sinbad and crew have a deep resonance with me, tapping as they do into the many hours I spent reading about the mythologies of different cultures in my early years. My principal source was a set of brown bound encyclopedias with embossed covers that had been given to my father as a child, and even then they were second hand and out of date. So by the time they got to me, I was a good fifty years behind the curve, reading about the British Empire and its great engineering and exploration feats without irony.

Some things never go out of date though, and those books are where my love of mythology kicked off. There were different sections for Norse, Greek, and Roman myth, and maybe some other cultures were included too. It’s hard to be sure because once this interest in myth was cemented, I followed it up by getting books that rounded out my collection of tales from other times and places. Usually that took me to sensible sources such as Henry Treece’s anthologies for children, but I was also led to buy a Jorge Luis Borges collection of tales about imaginary beings, pretty whacked-out for an 8 year old, but still a book I relished.

Anyway, the Ray Harryhausen films - how many movies are associated indelibly with the name of the man who provided their special effects? - only confirmed my love of all things fantastic. Better yet, they’re still films that are thoroughly enjoyable to a modern eye: this isn’t like going back to Blake’s 7; these really were great and well-executed stories.

In turn, that depiction of legend led me back to the source material, in this case the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights, an anthology which I now have several editions of, and which for a while I was besotted with. I wrote a play consisting of nested stories that was my own take on those tales, and have fond memories of it being performed in a local community centre, complete with Middle Eastern buffet, DJ, singer, and lights, as well as three actors and two dancers. And I went on to adapt the central tale in that piece for a childrens’ story with an illustrator friend, only to discover that despite a noted editor loving my words and her pictures, they weren’t inclined to put the two together and publish the result. Hey ho. Another day…

One of my dream projects would be to write some new take on the Thousand and One Nights: the tales are rich, tell a lot about human nature, are full of magic, and sometimes very funny. It couldn’t, on the surface, be further away from my interest in social drama, another important strand of my writing, but I’m someone whose passions are pretty broad, and would like to spend some time on scripts related to all of them in the years ahead.