Round the Herne

 I gave this talk at a college event in December 2024, recording it now on the off-chance that it might eb of interest to some followers on YouTube or this Blog. The talk interprets some of the ghost stories written by E F Benson, Saki, M R James, and Forrest Reid in the light of sexuality and social isolation. If nothing else, I rather hope that this talk will inspire listeners to want to read the works of the respective authors.

  My reading of the prologue and first chapter of Kenneth Grahame's children's book "The Golden Age" (1895). Grahame is, of course, most famous for the fabulous "Wind in the Willows" - which I would love to record when time and the world allows. This reflective work shares much with Willows, particularly the love of the natural world and the sense of a simplistic age lost to modern readers. It is a mix of Grahame's own boyhood recollections of larks and games fused with fictional imaginings of what a group of orphans get up to on their holidays. The children are looked after by aunts and uncles who seem on a par with the ones that Saki describes in his works - vaguely well-meaning bores and domestic tyrants. The children, doubtless benefitting from an expensive classical education, refer to them as the Olympians because they are as distant and arbitrary as the Gods themselves. The children's lives are much more taken up with the kinds of rustic deiti...

 This is my reading of Saki's short story, 'The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh' (1919). Aside from being an amusing diversion it is a reminder that some people bring great joy by their arrival in our lives whilst others bring great joy only when they depart our lives. It is never a great idea to be one of the latter. Apologies for the rubbish accents, I really must try and acquire some better silly voices.

As it is my birthday today I thought I would record a story from one of my favourite authors, the inimitable Saki. This one is "The Story of St Vespaluus", a mildly comic tale about a young prince whose country is caught at the juncture between Paganism and Christianity - whilst the country is an imaginary one, ancient Lithuania had a tradition of sacred serpents, the zaltys (and the revived Romuvan religion still does revere the grass snake and has a holy day devoted to them). I wonder how often the kind of strange accommodation described at the end of the short story happened in real life?

Passing the time with a reading of Saki's short story "The She-Wolf" in which a windbag gets hoist on his own petard by one of Saki's recurrent characters, the man-about-town Clovis Sangrail (a surname that will amuse Arthurian enthusiasts).