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Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

14 October 2025

Posted by Harley Truslove

Stupid Deaths...

Ali is back and, in a gruesome start to the session, we began with a game of murderous heads-up. Our writers were put in pairs and the way that they died was stuck to their forehead on a sticky-note. Setting the scene in a queue to the afterlife, the pairs had to write a script where they gently let each other know how the other met their end in order to jog their memory of the event.


Some examples were:


A person who was trapped in a well comforted a trespasser by gently telling them that they weren’t eaten by a lion, but merely mauled to death in Longleat Safari Park. They were not reassured in turn by the fact that they were one of only 21 people to meet a well-based demise.


Someone who had ingested a deadly toadstool was horrified to find that they had fallen on it open-mouthed during a nature walk. Their enthusiastic new friend afterlife was “a little bit overconfident” in her gymnastics, and fell off the parapet of a bridge after attempting a handstand.


Ali then told us she had come up with the idea because, on this day in 1066, King Harold II supposedly died from an arrow to the eye. Ali challenged our writers to come up with an even weirder death than that, and our writers revelled in the grisly task…


One writer gave us a spy thriller about an agent trying to track down a sniper but unfortunately got hit by a car instead. When they awoke from their injuries they found themselves in the sniper’s apartment, where the sniper subsequently shoved six rolls of tinfoil into the microwave and blew the main character up.


Another writer had King Harold II himself have a literal wardrobe malfunction when his servant misheard where to place his clothes, and he was unfortunately crushed to death by the weight of his own outfits. We also had poor Harold choking to death on a strawberry as a mid-battle snack.


Our writer of the week was Amelia, whose in-depth and gruesome script saw a detective faced with the murder of three men who had been tied to a tandem bicycle and had party equipment shoved down their throats.


Also, shout out to Chloe, our writer of the week last week, for her incredible piece about an hour-by-hour watch of the live moon landing!

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