“Storytelling is eye to eye, mind to mind, heart to heart. Everyone’s a storyteller and everyone has a story to tell.”
- Tim Porteus
Engaging audiences with tales of mythology, folklore and history; Tim Porteus is a natural storyteller. Minutes into the interview and I am genuinely spellbound. Every sentence Tim utters is sincerely poetic and profound. Scribbling sentence after sentence as possible quotes I find this man’s company enthralling and captivating. He is the real deal. There are no clichés in Tim’s tales. Well-crafted and rich, each word appears carefully selected, yet they flow naturally and without affectation.
Enchanted with story telling from his youngest years, Tim quite literally studied the rich oral tradition of Scottish storytelling on his grandmother’s knee. Son of a minister, stories were at the centre of his childhood. The past matters to Tim and it is no surprise to learn that history was his subject of choice at University.
“I have passed down many stories about my family to my children and I think that is so important. That’s an inheritance.”
Tim’s audiences cover toddlers in nursery to the elderly in care homes. Rhyme and rhythm connect us in language and fragments of memories are the essence of a story. Based in Prestonpans, Tim tells animatedly how during power cuts his own 5 children are encouraged to tell tales and in turn they are entertained with family tales carried down over the generations.
As well as a degree in history, Tim is also qualified in Community Education and has used storytelling as a valuable tool with marginalised groups to encourage self-confidence and self-belief. Emphatically he says, “Telling stories is a mindset and seeing stories in lots of things, is a magic!”
Listening to Tim, I cannot help but think any audience lucky enough to have this master teller of a tale before them is indeed blessed. Tim muses that some storytellers travel the world sharing their craft and he has certainly taken his trade a fair distance. Cultural programmes have enabled him to take his storytelling to the Czech Republic and Portugal as well as school and cultural events in Spain, Germany and Slovakia. “I quite often read about storytellers going all over the world but I have just been at a school with kids who are really struggling with life and for me, that’s as big as it gets”.
Unassuming and down to earth, Tim is well known across East Lothian thanks to his weekly column in the East Lothian Courier. As well as an accomplished storyteller he is a published author, having written a collection of stories, East Lothian Folk Tales, published by The History Press as well as East Lothian Folk Tales for Children.“Everyone loves a story”, says Tim and from the son of the Manse comes another gem.
“It’s an inheritance. If someone tells a story about you, you’re never truly dead.” Somehow I leave Tim’s company enlightened, the better for being in his company and sharing, if only for a brief period, his insight.