ON Monday, I had the privilege and the pain of attending the funeral of a very special woman who was a dear friend of my parents.

Her name is Jean, and she was the greatest storyteller I have ever known.

Jean’s stories were never about dragons, spaceships or feats of derring-do – they were always about the people around her, the places she went (mostly in Greenock, but sometimes Blackpool), and the everyday situations she encountered. Yet there was nothing ‘everyday’ about Jean’s stories.

Many times I’ve been sitting on the edge of my seat, awaiting the next instalment of a story that’s already been an hour in the telling, and the best I’ve ever heard, about the visiting patterns of the woman next to Jean in the hospital one time, or filling a shuttle for one of the looms in the network where she met my mum 66 years ago.

I’ll miss her stories incredibly, and I grieve the loss of such a wonderful, tangible link to my past. Heritage matters. Stories matter.

I unashamedly support investment in arts, culture and heritage. I believe this is most successful when rooted in public engagement, but our museums, theatres, libraries and archives are important in the way that our roads, our schools and our health services are. In very different ways they’re all fundamental to who we are and how we thrive and connect.

This week, at our education and communities committee, we discussed the future of the story we tell about slavery and its history in Inverclyde. There’s a growing acceptance that we can no longer accept the story that’s been told about our trading past up to now, and we seek to balance that. Much of this change, this expansion of our perspective on slavery, will be communicated through our heritage and cultural assets. Heritage matters. Stories matter.

Last week we held a civic reception for some of the workers who lived the experience of the Lee Jeans sit-in, pictured. Hearing the stories of the women, their fight against multiple injustices and the response of our community to this; hearing about letters of support for the women from garment workers in Sri Lanka – letters that I don’t think they had heard of before last week – was again such a privilege. When I went home, I actually sat my children down to tell them everything I had heard that night, while it was still fresh in my mind. The stories of the women had floored me, and I wanted to share this with five teenagers who will never look at a fish supper the same way ever again.

I’m hoping we can do some work with the play that’s been written about our Lee Jeans women so that even more people can hear this incredible chapter of Inverclyde’s history and be as inspired as I was last week. Heritage matters. Stories matter.

Our schools, libraries, museum and community hubs have facilitated so many intergenerational projects where living experience can be passed on as the imaginations of young people are sparked by the memories of the older generations. I also love the idea of the ‘human library’: a developing concept that started in Copenhagen, where people can borrow other people, to hear the open book of their lives and have conversations with people they might not usually meet.

On Tuesday night we met to remember those within our community or families who have died due to overdose. As we tied ribbons to the trees on Clyde Square, and cast flowers into the Clyde at Custom House Quay, it was evident that each person had their own stories and memories represented in these emblems. Daryl McLeister, from Scottish Families Affected by Alcohol and Drugs, emphasised that, for anyone who needed, there would be someone to listen to them. This was such a comfort, to know that stories will be heard.

The strapline of the human library movement is ‘unjudge someone’. When we know we have work to do to remove stigma from ourselves and our community around disability, mental health, addiction, it’s through having spaces where we can share our stories that we can start to ‘unjudge’.

Stories matter.