Hannah's Challenge Results

It has been a quiet busy week here in at Chez Hannah. No, not quite a busy week. A quiet busy week. One where none of us had too much on individually, but together, it added up to a lot. On Monday, July commenced, marking the end of Hannah's challenge, quite before I was ready to take action to judge it, because on Tuesday, after working day was over, my daughter returned to school to give guided tours into the evening on their open day, and on Wednesday, we all got up at half past four to pack my son onto the school minibus to travel 160 miles up the country and 160 miles back down to represent his school in a Warhammer tournament. On Thursday, the UK went to the voting booths in near record breaking numbers, with only one lower turnout since 1885, and on Friday my parents, who live an hour away, phoned to say they thought they would come to visit for the weekend. "That's lovely," I said, "what time will I expect you?" It was 10.16 in the morning of my day off, and in the spirit of mutual accountability, my partner and I had not long sat down side by side, he to do an urgent piece of administrative work for his paid employment, and I to read a couple of dozen pieces of uplifting writing.

"About 10.2o" said my mum. I performed a quick appraisal of the likelihood of getting the toilet cleaned in four minutes and decided my time would be better spent putting the kettle on for a cup of tea, closed my laptop, and attempted a quick change on the mental attitude front. My parents are... unpredictable. My children were maybe 8 and 6 the first time we asked them to babysit so that we could go out together. They agreed. We booked theatre tickets, several months in advance, a dinner reservation, planned a museum trip alongside, and the week before the big date they found a good deal on a holiday and buggered off. On the other hand, my dad is, as I write, down the bottom of my garden working himself into the ground to turn half my large garden shed into a comfortable garden room. As a daughter I can neither rely on them or rest on a single "they do nothing for me" laurel. Sometimes we must learn to take it as it comes.

Back to the purpose. Today I returned to the task of judging my challenge and I believe I have my initial rankings. Supporting L.C. Schäfer in judging her recent juicy challenge transpired to be incredibly helpful in thinking about how to approach judging my own, and I came at it armed with an excel spreadsheet and a brief "marking scheme". However, perhaps because it was election results day, or perhaps because he's a smart arse, my partner threw a spanner in the writing works beyond the usual terrible affront of asking me what I might like him to make for our dinner. Awful man, really, don't know how I live with him.

"Oh," he said, looking over my shoulder on Friday morning, before our weekend took a different turn. "Are you weighting those criteria all equally then?" He sounded so disappointed that I was instantly transported back to the time my brother and I were caught with our friends climbing on the roof of my parent's business premises after my dad had explicitly told us not to climb on the roof of their business premises. As per my previous comment, it was not entirely clear to me that this was forbidden because my dad frequently encouraged us to enjoy climbing on rooves. Indeed in one of my early photographs I am perched, bare bar a terry towelling nappy (which, to give him credit, was an incredibly anchoring garment), on the apex of a tiled roof while he knocked something with a hammer for some reason that I am certain seemed legitimate at the time. I am often astonished that my naturally risk averse mother survived my childhood without a heart attack.

I meander once more. He was right. I was looking for a particular type of story, and fulfilling the call to uplift was evidently more important to me than whether a participant had made a typing error for example. "It's easy," he said, "you can do it with a formula". Well, I like a good excel formula as much as the next person, but that does not automatically equate to being as competent at creating one as the next person. And so now here we are. I am almost ready to role, but he is down the bottom of the garden screwing plasterboard sheets to the ceiling of the shed with my dad. Absolute bastards the pair of them.

And so while I await their exhaustion - for my father, at 73, is gravely afflicted by inertia, finding it both difficult to start, and once started, impossible to stop until exhaustion renders him useless - I thought I would take this opportunity to check that I have everyone's entries.

Below, I have linked to all 21 of these gems, and I strongly suggest you give them your time. I have been soothed, I have been inspired. I have been amused, invigorated, reassured and made to feel the proud. I have felt the prick of tears (in a positive way!) numerous times. And yes, I have felt uplifted, I have been gifted hope. The stories are many and varied, like lives, and I want to say a massive, MASSIVE thank you for sharing them with me. There are stories here I already treasure, and I am so grateful for their writers' bravery in giving them to me.

If you wrote me a story, and its not here, please please tell me. The weekend has been bitty and disrupted and I am fearful of having missed one out. Later, I will add my results to the bottom of this piece, and stump up some well deserved prizes. This will also necessitate the tolerance of a good dose of guilt as the "winners" will so very much not be the only "winners" in terms of the quality of the pieces submitted. However, kind of should have seen that coming, eh?

Here is the original challenge, and below, the wonderful entries:

And now, brought to you by a woman feeling somewhat stupid now she has realised how simple a weighting formula was to do, the final results. My scoring transpired to be rather close throughout, the bell curve would have been somewhat steep sided had we plotted it, but in joint third place, we have Paul Stewart, with In Her Eyes I See Hope, with it's acknowledgement that the ongoing will to keep up the fight is the only route to a better life, The Way You Haunt Me by Poppy, again, highlighting persistence, growth, movement from pain into something better, and Look by Sonia Heidi Unruh, remembering to notice the wonderful when it is easier to notice the grim.

In second place, again, jointly, we have KP's Coming Out Story, with echoes of Mesh Tokrar's Making Space, which missed placing by a whisper. In both there is strength is learning that there are people in the world, if we are lucky enough to have them, who will come through for us. People we can count on when things get hard. And we, of course, can be those people for others too. Rachel Deeming's The Board was a wonderful fictionalisation of a fundamental message of hope - raw survival, against the odds. And Stephen A Rodderwig encourages us to join him in Facing a New Day, where he explores the power of persistence, acceptance, and picking ourselves up again and again in the face of long term illness. Narrowly missing out on a place again, Mike Singleton also explored the role of mental attitude and gratitude for living in I'm Still Here, and I'm sure we are all glad he is!

And finally, in first place, we have Christy Munson's Homecoming, which reflects on our relationship with ourselves, our perception of ourselves at different points in our life, and the joy of coming not just to accept, but to admire and enjoy our own selves. Not only was this a beautifully hopeful story, but it was impeccably written too.

Thank you so much to everyone who entered the challenge, I loved reading every one of these stories!