Journal Entries
Epilogue for 7 November
Posted Nov 7, 2004
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one that has seen me laid low with the first really foul bug of 2004. The firebricks in the stove have partially collapsed, which means that a) we have to let it go out again and b) another trip to the Batley Braless Fire Company. No one has yet broken it to Nigel, Kitty, Dusty, Russell, or Tig that we will have to do with the ineffectual central heating until the firebricks can once more be screwed into place.
Work continues on books, on publicising books, and when we aren't doing either of the former, adding up the books - though not, yet, so far, cooking them. No stove anyway.
I managed to make it to the "office" office on Friday morning despite already feeling wretched. With the accent on the retch. My trouble is that simultaneously I hate being ill and will literally try to go on until I drop in my tracks, but at the same time, I am a terrific hypocondriac. I have had to stop watching medical programmes on TV because I immediately assume that I have got whatever it is that they are showcasing - from conjoined twins to ectopic pregnancy.
By mid afternoon Friday, I knew there was something seriously amiss in the alimentary dept, and bogarted some Kaolin and Morphine mixture off Phil - this got me to the stage where I felt able to drive home, and I staggered in at 4pm and settled myself by what was left of the stove (we'd already decided to let it go out) and dozed fitfully for two more hours before dragging myself bedwards.
Whatever it was peaked during Friday night, my temperature shot up, I was alternatively boiling and shivering, and somehow started thinking about what would happen to the business if I died. What would the succession be. Moose Face would be OK, because the extremely expensive Keyman insurance we pay Barclays for would kick in, and pay off any debts. She might have to go and get a real job once the ashes were settled and the dust was scattered, but that wouldn't hurt her. Then I started thinking (remember I was semi delerious at this time) about Guy Fawkes and his attempts to alter the succession, and about Yasser Arafat, and what it must have been like for him, lying there ill and hearing bangs going off all around him, just like I was, only his bangs were RPGs and tank shells. Then I started thinking about George Bush, and how unlikely it seemed that we had to suffer four more years of bangs going off all round, then back to Guy Fawkes, then back to Arafat, I tell you, that Kaolin and Morphine is strong stuff, man. I didn't see any giant pink spiders though.
At this point Deb put her head round the door to check on me.
"What do you think will happen when Arafat dies?" I croaked, weakly.
"His wife will finally be able to do the drying up". So much for the compassion of the caring professions.
Anyway, having slept (on and off) for 24 hours or more, and risen finally briefly last night, I seem to have burnt it out of me, whatever it was, and I feel much better. We have reached Sunday. St Willibrod's day, apparently, according to my dictionary of Saints. I need to go and look him up properly because all I really know about him at the moment is that he had a very silly name. Sunday: as Stanford would say, and Katherine Ferrier is currently singing about on the CD as I type this - "A soft day, at last, thank God"
While I was lying ill, Tig and Nigel both joined me on the bed, so every time I came out of my reverie I saw two glittering gold eyes and two sad brown ones anxiously fixed on me, no doubt wondering if I would survive ever to open another tin. Russell studiously ignored me, but he's got illness problems of his own, so I will let him off.
Anyway, last night the only thing I had the intellectual chutzpah for was watching the John Peel tribute on the Beeb. Lots of clips of groups (Medicine Head) that I had forgotten I had ever heard, let alone liked. It almost made me want to pick up a guitar again, or get my old Banjo out.
In the years when I lived alone in Barnsley, I used to play the banjo a great deal more than I do today. It's not a social instrument: in fact I once got rid of some double glazing salesmen by getting out the banjo and starting to double thumb frail "Little Birdie" in a lilting appalachian yodel. Nigel, who never shows any reaction to human music, (apart from for some strange reason best known only to him, Tanita Tikaram - perhaps she hits notes only cats can hear) was always strangely enervated by the banjo and tried to get between me and it, either because he thought I was having sex with it and wanted to join in, or he thought I was fighting it and he was trying to save me, or he recognised some of his relatives in the strings and wanted to effect a reunion beyond the grave.
I don't know what will happen about John Peel's succession, but here's an idea from the Slightly Foxed Bank of Good Ideas (the people who brought you cockney assonance slang: apples and pears = fears) that the BBC should institute John Peel memorial sessions for new bands.
They are all going, this year, all the old touchstones - John Peel, Alistair Cooke, and even Fred Dibnah. I will miss Fred Dibnah, especially because he tried to reconstruct a fully working Victorian mine-shaft in his garden in Bolton. Well, someone's got to do something about property prices rising out of control.
John Peel actually called us once on the phone, in person. It was when he was in The Archers, as a walk-on part, playing himself. I wrote a stupid little letter to the Guardian saying that the credibility of the real characters in the Archers was being undermined by imaginary people like John Peel appearing in it. It must have been a slow news day because the Guardian printed it, and in those days, the Guardian had a policy of printing the full name and address under letters and Peel must've looked up our number in directory enquiries, he rang to berate us - albeit in a friendly way - for referring to him as "imaginary".
I was pretty overawed - after all, this was the bloke I had listened to on a whistly transistor as a 15 year old in Hull, trying to be blacker, older, and more like Howlin' Wolf than any of my contemporaries.
Looking at him on the TV programme last night, I was very jealous of his lifestyle - nice house, garden, cats and dogs wandering about, big farmhouse kitchen, big table to sit around having breakfast, or dinner, red wine a-plenty. The only downside - for me at any rate - would be the bin-bags of stuff which arrived every day, containing tapes and CDs from aspiring musicians. As a recipient of unsolicited manuscripts, I can sympathise. I was a free man in Paris, nobody calling me up for favours, no one's future to decide.
I am not one of those people who goes all "Candle in the Wind" whenever a celebrity dies, and I don't think that John Peel was God.
I do, however, think that God, if he exists as a sentient force or being, is probably a lot like John Peel. Bumbling, curmudgeonly, occasionally forgetful, loving of his family, occasionally disappointed, but always willing to give something new a try, and speaking directly to people who are tuned in. Sifting through the bin bags of our offerings and alternately smiling and crying at their contents, as he takes upon himself all the sins of the world.
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Latest reply: Nov 7, 2004
Epilogue for 31 October
Posted Nov 2, 2004
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. With the two new children's books now out and in the world, and only seven weeks to Christmas, the publicity campaign has been stepped up even further. If possible.
Nigel, Dusty and Kitty have been their usual catty selves and are all well. Kitty still keeps up her unique dialogue with me every time I feed her.
"Hello, Kitty, what was the name of that revolutionary leader again?"
"Mao!"
"Do you want feeding later, Kitty, or now?"
"Nao!"
And so it goes on. A small idiocy, but mine own. Little things please little minds. I ought to get it on tape one day, then I could cheer myself up by playing the exchange in bleaker moments.
Tig has been reluctant to go out in the garden especially as the mornings have been getting darker. I hold the conservatory door open for her and she stands there sniffing the rain and looking at me with her head on one side as much as to say "if you think for one minute that I am going out there in that rain and dark and cold, you must be out of your tiny little Chinese mind!"
Russell has not been so good this week, he has been off his food and what my late mother would have called "wowy", an adjective which she probably invented and which was always reserved exclusively in our household and in her vocabulary for the specific description of poorly cats. So, I don't know. He spends a lot of time curled up in the chair nearest the stove, maybe the warmth helps him, I don't know. In her book, The Cat Whisperer, Claire Besant says that older cats like warmth. Next week he goes back to be re-weighed and we will know if he is gaining or losing ground.
His tablet-taking has now entered a new dimension, with "Bernard Maffews" American fried chicken now currently being used as the medium of choice.
With Christmas so close, we've started already working towards books which are due early in 2005, including the delayed "Hampshire at War 1939-45, an Oral History". Pat, the author, and her husband John, very kindly drove up to Huddersfield and we spent the weekend in a Travelodge in Mirfield going through the manuscript on a lap top computer. Having spent two days closeted in a Travelodge, I now I know what it feels like to be a terrorist. Anyway, came Sunday and the task was, at last, if not finished, as near finished as makes no difference. With Pat and John safely ensconced back at the Travelodge watching "Foyles War" (enough war, already!) Debbie and I decided that the only solution to our hunger was a takeaway.
We toasted "Hampshire at War" with a dry red Portuguese table wine, which tasted as if it had been made from dry red Portuguese tables, or at least used to strip the varnish off them. Fortunately, the secret mix of oriental herbs and spices in the takeaway from The Balooshai was powerful enough to numb the palate as a local anaesthetic, and save it from the full effect of the vino collapso.
It is a strange coincidence that I have been working on Hampshire at War in the weeks running up to Armistice Day. I am quite a believer in synchronicity, the way in which sometimes disparate things come together to form strange yet meaningful patterns in our lives. Again, like the theory of multiple dimensions, it’s another facet of the universe being bigger, stranger and wackier than anyone – with the possible exception of Big G himself – could possibly imagine. Like the sign over the male grooming products counter in Superdrug, it is all a case of “Mens Deo”. Who can know the mind of God. I guess it is just one of those unanswerable questions like “what do occasional tables do the rest of the time?” and “why can you never find your camouflage net?”
One of the things that has struck me about this book, where the people of Hampshire tell of their experiences of wartime, in their own words, is just how much heroism there was in ordinary, everyday life. Take, for instance, the story of the Wren whose father sent her his favourite rosary, in the post, with no explanation: she assumed the worst when she received it and phoned her home, asking her mother "Is father dead?"
With commendable sang froid, the mother replied "I don't think so dear, I have just cooked his breakfast, but I will check" returning later to the phone to say "no, he is not dead, he's just finished his egg". Ah, the unflappable nature of the British stiff upper lip.
At this time of year, as we move up to Rememberance Sunday, and hear news of the Queen also laying a wreath at the German equivalent of the Cenotaph during her state visit there, war and its effects seem to be everywhere around me. In the second world war, about 55 million people died. Roughly equivalent to the population of the British Isles. The statistics of war are quite startling, when you view them like that. A whole country-worth of people, many in their teens or early twenties, scattered like leaves on the wind, all those unfulfilled hopes and dreams, all those unkept promises. In 55 million people there would undoubtedly have been some villains, some who we wouldn’t miss – Hitler for one – but who knows but that just one of those people whose life was tragically cut short, might not have, in other circumstances, had events ran differently, been the person to discover the cure for cancer, or some other dread disease. All that waste.
This week, it has been reported that 100,000 Iraquis have died under the current misguided attempt to bring “democracy” to Iraq. If this is true, it is a crushing blow to both George Bush and Tony Blair. No one knows for sure how many people Hussein killed, of course, and any attempt to get to the bottom of the figures founders on the rock that the idea of “responsibility” in a totalitarian state, is a very complex one. If someone murders a prisoner because they think that is what the dictator wanted, is the dictator responsible, even if he had no idea it was going on?
This week, America, currently still bitterly engaged in a massive undeclared war in Iraq, will probably make one final attempt to raze Fallujah to the ground, at the same time as George Bush makes one final attempt to cling to power. George Bush is of course, supported in his idea of a never-ending, unwinnable (in pure military terms) war against “terror” by various people in the US and elsewhere who refer to themselves as Christians, and who specifically see their mission as being to evangelise.
I love America and many of the things it stands for, but I am unable in my heart to reconcile these paradoxes: people who purport to represent religion urging on a destructive conflict on what many believe to be the wrong target, led in the name of democracy by someone who may not even have been democratically elected.
As Joni Mitchell wrote, about a different war, Vietnam, in 1969,
And so once again
Oh, America my friend
And so once again
You are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall
Oh, my friend
How did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum
Would Jesus recognise the idea of a just war? Who has the power, the moral authority, to claim they have God on their side? The Christians I most admire from the last war are people like Bishop Bell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who are both about as far away from Billy Graham as you can get without actually leaving the planet. We are back to those unanswerable questions again.
I recommend a detailed study – especially for people like George W Bush and Tony Blair, of a seminal religious tract – Bob Dylan’s “With God on our Side”. The whole song exposes the fallacy of the concept of politicians manipulating the concept of “the just war” but I can only squeeze in the last verse.
“So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.”
God of course only works through man, or so we are told. Let’s hope he moves the hearts of many Americans to turn their country away from the road that leads to four more years of carnage. It is time to take the fiddle from the wall, dust it off, and play the tunes of liberty and freedom once again.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Nov 2, 2004
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley
Posted Nov 2, 2004
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. With the two new children's books now out and in the world, and only seven weeks to Christmas, the publicity campaign has been stepped up even further. If possible.
Nigel, Dusty and Kitty have been their usual catty selves and are all well. Kitty still keeps up her unique dialogue with me every time I feed her.
"Hello, Kitty, what was the name of that revolutionary leader again?"
"Mao!"
"Do you want feeding later, Kitty, or now?"
"Nao!"
And so it goes on. A small idiocy, but mine own. Little things please little minds. I ought to get it on tape one day, then I could cheer myself up by playing the exchange in bleaker moments.
Tig has been reluctant to go out in the garden especially as the mornings have been getting darker. I hold the conservatory door open for her and she stands there sniffing the rain and looking at me with her head on one side as much as to say "if you think for one minute that I am going out there in that rain and dark and cold, you must be out of your tiny little Chinese mind!"
Russell has not been so good this week, he has been off his food and what my late mother would have called "wowy", an adjective which she probably invented and which was always reserved exclusively in our household and in her vocabulary for the specific description of poorly cats. So, I don't know. He spends a lot of time curled up in the chair nearest the stove, maybe the warmth helps him, I don't know. In her book, The Cat Whisperer, Claire Besant says that older cats like warmth. Next week he goes back to be re-weighed and we will know if he is gaining or losing ground.
His tablet-taking has now entered a new dimension, with "Bernard Maffews" American fried chicken now currently being used as the medium of choice.
With Christmas so close, we've started already working towards books which are due early in 2005, including the delayed "Hampshire at War 1939-45, an Oral History". Pat, the author, and her husband John, very kindly drove up to Huddersfield and we spent the weekend in a Travelodge in Mirfield going through the manuscript on a lap top computer. Having spent two days closeted in a Travelodge, I now I know what it feels like to be a terrorist. Anyway, came Sunday and the task was, at last, if not finished, as near finished as makes no difference. With Pat and John safely ensconced back at the Travelodge watching "Foyles War" (enough war, already!) Debbie and I decided that the only solution to our hunger was a takeaway.
We toasted "Hampshire at War" with a dry red Portuguese table wine, which tasted as if it had been made from dry red Portuguese tables, or at least used to strip the varnish off them. Fortunately, the secret mix of oriental herbs and spices in the takeaway from The Balooshai was powerful enough to numb the palate as a local anaesthetic, and save it from the full effect of the vino collapso.
It is a strange coincidence that I have been working on Hampshire at War in the weeks running up to Armistice Day. I am quite a believer in synchronicity, the way in which sometimes disparate things come together to form strange yet meaningful patterns in our lives. Again, like the theory of multiple dimensions, it’s another facet of the universe being bigger, stranger and wackier than anyone – with the possible exception of Big G himself – could possibly imagine. Like the sign over the male grooming products counter in Superdrug, it is all a case of “Mens Deo”. Who can know the mind of God. I guess it is just one of those unanswerable questions like “what do occasional tables do the rest of the time?” and “why can you never find your camouflage net?”
One of the things that has struck me about this book, where the people of Hampshire tell of their experiences of wartime, in their own words, is just how much heroism there was in ordinary, everyday life. Take, for instance, the story of the Wren whose father sent her his favourite rosary, in the post, with no explanation: she assumed the worst when she received it and phoned her home, asking her mother "Is father dead?"
With commendable sang froid, the mother replied "I don't think so dear, I have just cooked his breakfast, but I will check" returning later to the phone to say "no, he is not dead, he's just finished his egg". Ah, the unflappable nature of the British stiff upper lip.
At this time of year, as we move up to Rememberance Sunday, and hear news of the Queen also laying a wreath at the German equivalent of the Cenotaph during her state visit there, war and its effects seem to be everywhere around me. In the second world war, about 55 million people died. Roughly equivalent to the population of the British Isles. The statistics of war are quite startling, when you view them like that. A whole country-worth of people, many in their teens or early twenties, scattered like leaves on the wind, all those unfulfilled hopes and dreams, all those unkept promises. In 55 million people there would undoubtedly have been some villains, some who we wouldn’t miss – Hitler for one – but who knows but that just one of those people whose life was tragically cut short, might not have, in other circumstances, had events ran differently, been the person to discover the cure for cancer, or some other dread disease. All that waste.
This week, it has been reported that 100,000 Iraquis have died under the current misguided attempt to bring “democracy” to Iraq. If this is true, it is a crushing blow to both George Bush and Tony Blair. No one knows for sure how many people Hussein killed, of course, and any attempt to get to the bottom of the figures founders on the rock that the idea of “responsibility” in a totalitarian state, is a very complex one. If someone murders a prisoner because they think that is what the dictator wanted, is the dictator responsible, even if he had no idea it was going on?
This week, America, currently still bitterly engaged in a massive undeclared war in Iraq, will probably make one final attempt to raze Fallujah to the ground, at the same time as George Bush makes one final attempt to cling to power. George Bush is of course, supported in his idea of a never-ending, unwinnable (in pure military terms) war against “terror” by various people in the US and elsewhere who refer to themselves as Christians, and who specifically see their mission as being to evangelise.
I love America and many of the things it stands for, but I am unable in my heart to reconcile these paradoxes: people who purport to represent religion urging on a destructive conflict on what many believe to be the wrong target, led in the name of democracy by someone who may not even have been democratically elected.
As Joni Mitchell wrote, about a different war, Vietnam, in 1969,
And so once again
Oh, America my friend
And so once again
You are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall
Oh, my friend
How did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum
Would Jesus recognise the idea of a just war? Who has the power, the moral authority, to claim they have God on their side? The Christians I most admire from the last war are people like Bishop Bell and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who are both about as far away from Billy Graham as you can get without actually leaving the planet. We are back to those unanswerable questions again.
I recommend a detailed study – especially for people like George W Bush and Tony Blair, of a seminal religious tract – Bob Dylan’s “With God on our Side”. The whole song exposes the fallacy of the concept of politicians manipulating the concept of “the just war” but I can only squeeze in the last verse.
“So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.”
God of course only works through man, or so we are told. Let’s hope he moves the hearts of many Americans to turn their country away from the road that leads to four more years of carnage. It is time to take the fiddle from the wall, dust it off, and play the tunes of liberty and freedom once again.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Nov 2, 2004
Epilogue for 24 October
Posted Oct 24, 2004
It has been a busy week here in the Holme Valley. Still time to glimpse the sun, perhaps, but no time to stop and sniff the flowers. Work, as usual, predominates.
We are still arguing, as well, about holidays: Elk watching (rational and irrational) is now on the back burner. Last night, the admirable Bettany Hughes presented a very interesting TV programme on the ancient customs of the Minoans. I ventured an opinion to Deb:
"I would like to go to Crete, it's full of ancient ruins."
"Send me a postcard, I am married to one."
Subject closed. For now.
Last night we had a really "winter" meal: baked potatoes. In my case, this was accompanied by some white Port, which I had procured of Messrs Sainsbury after reading about it in A. N. Wilson's book on Hilaire Belloc. It was, apparently, his favourite tipple (Belloc, not A. N. Wilson, I have no idea what he drinks!) It's always amused me the way some drinks are associated with certain writers: Hock-and-seltzer with Byron. Grappa with Hemingway. Anything with alcohol in it, with Dylan Thomas. Having drunk Grappa myself, I now understand why Hemingway only ever wrote in short sentences. And having drunk white Port, I can understand why some of Hilaire's output was Bellocs.
Talking of back burners, Russell, Nigel, Dusty and Kitty all had their comfortable domestic arrangements disrupted by a major fault with the stove, this week which meant we had to let the fire go out in order to fix it. Cue for much yowling, and a tablet-taking strike on the part of Russell which was only broken when I quartered his Fortekor pill and stuck it in some extremely pongy Shropshire Blue cheese. Tig accepted the creeping chill which settled over the house more philosophically, curling up as always with her nose in her tail, on her favourite settee.
Anyway, a quick visit to the people who sold us the stove, the improbably-named "Batley Barless Fire Company" (forever known to us, in honour of Charlie Dimmock, as the Batley Bra-less Fire Company) soon secured the bits we needed, and a half hour or so with a rat-tail file widening the hole on one of them, followed by a similar length of time grovelling on the kitchen floor with my arm up the ash pan aperture, this meant that we were able to adapt it to fit on the end of the bit where the previous pan had burnt completely away, then re-assemble all the parts we had disassembled, and re-light it. Peace, warmth and harmony were restored.
In a bizarre twist of events, the office nearly "caught fire" the day after. This is the "office" office, not my "home" office where I am typing this. I was sitting working away when the fire alarm started going off. After telling everyone to get out, I went to investigate, only to meet Terry coming the other way who said it was a false alarm. Because it is on a "redcare" system, they automatically send the Fire Brigade unless you phone the alarm company's "central station" and tell them it's not for real. Terry did just that, only to be connected, instead of to the usual live operator, to their call centre queueing system. I looked out of the window to see two fire engines pulling in to the courtyard, and went to put the kettle on for fourteen cups of tea.
We spent the rest of the day making up bogus call centre recorded messages on behalf of the alarm company: if you are dying of smoke inhalation, press 1; if you are being fried to a crisp, press 2, please continue to burn, your call is important to us, and so on. There's not that much to do in South Yorkshire.
Actually, that line about putting the kettle on for fourteen cups of tea used to be one of my mother's favourites whenever my dad was trying to light their fire by holding up a news paper in front of it. Always a perilous exercise if you were a child of nervous disposition, as I was.
This week is the run-up to Halloween, a festival now almost completely taken over by Hollywood-inspired dross, and rampant children-targeting commercialism second only to Christmas. The true meaning of All Souls Day, of which the precursor is Halloween, of course, is to remember the dead. People sometimes get the idea that remembering the dead is morbid, but scarcely a day goes by without me thinking of the voices of my parents, as above, and the comments they would have made, as I go about my daily tasks. This week would have been my dad's eighty-third birthday. In the end, we are all going to live only in other people's memories of us. As Larkin says at the end of "An Arundel Tomb"
"What will survive of us, is love."
Originally, All Souls Day was the day when Christians remembered the dead. Those endless ranks of people who had gone on ahead, as Vaughan puts it, into the "World of Light", and left us "lingering here". A time when the unknown and unknowable membrane that separates this world from the next dimension might be stretched so thin that you might be able to glimpse, tantalisingly, a shadowy figure or two. Maybe heaven itself could be glimpsed, as a bright warm light, like the glow of a welcoming fire seen through a held-up sheet of newspaper. Mind you, that might be a bit theologically unsound: perhaps flames are better kept for t'other place. Either way, I'd like to think there would be a cosy celestial fireside waiting in heaven, and a cup of tea for me while I catch up on the gossip and stroke, for the first time in many years, Ginger, Silvo, and Halibut, who have all gone before.
Sometimes, when I am driving to the office in a ruminative mood, I ask for a sign that heaven exists. Dangerous territory, really: you shouldn't provoke God, assuming you believe in him of course. Last week, on Wednesday morning, I rounded the penultimate bend before my destination and there, hanging in the sky ahead, were two perfect contrails, in the shape of a cross. If only I had asked for a sign that morning. Or is it that the signs only come when you stop asking, like remembering where your keys are, when you have finally, exhausted, and exasperated, given up looking? Perhaps the souls of heaven operate to a different timescale to the rest of us down here, it being eternal and everything.
My Grandma, who was the oldest inhabitant of Welton at the time when she died in 1980, could remember the children skipping down the lanes when she was young, the urchins and ragamuffins of Edwardian England, singing the "souling" songs:
"A soul, a soul, a soul-cake
Please good missus a soul-cake
An apple a pear a plum a cherry
Or any good thing to make us merry
One for Peter, one for Paul
One for Him that made us all"
I am not sure if I believe in ghosts. Certainly not the clanking, head carrying, spectres which feature in horror stories. Why should ghosts mean us harm, if they exist? And presumably, if a ghost thumped you, its arm would go straight through you, or vice versa. So the worst you might get is a nasty chill.
If ghosts do exist, maybe there is cause for sadness about some hauntings. I can appreciate the theory that some cataclysmic events do leave some sort of psychic impression of terror or another strong emotion on their surroundings, which in some way replays itself to people who can see it, but even then, we should, perhaps, rejoice, and seize on this as further proof of an existence outside of our three solid dimensions.
We should be embracing ghosts. Except of course, our arms would meet in the middle if we did. Why should ghosts be a source of terror? Wonder should be nearer the mark. Seeing an apparition should be not a trick, but a treat.
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Latest reply: Oct 24, 2004
It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley
Posted Oct 22, 2004
But I hope to post an Epilogue here on Sunday
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Oct 22, 2004
Slightly-Foxed of that Elk (rational or irrational) Laird of Phelps (one foot over) and Keeper of the Privy Seal
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