Round the Herne

  My Halloween reading of R Chetwynd-Hayes' 1975 short story "The Humgoo" (featured in his anthology "The Monster Club"). The book, including this segment, was made into a low budget but enjoyable film starring the wonderful Vincent Price as a vampire who narrated the short stories for a character played by John Carradine. The Humgoo segment was the most effective part of the movie. There are some villages in Suffolk that could as easily be renamed Loughville......

  The Australian political theorist Kenneth Minogue coined the term St George in Retirement Syndrome (a more  pagan equivalent might be Beowulf in Retirement Syndrome!)  to describe the plight of old campaigners who, having gained prominence in their younger days by fighting against some draconian enemy find themselves yearning for the sense of purpose it once gave them. The Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne spoke about difficult life scripts that people get stuck acting out, becoming ever more unhappy as they do so. One of the negative scripts he links to the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon, a sweet old couple who are transformed into interlinked trees as a reward for their hospitality. Whilst such a fate might sound lovely, retiring too early to a peaceful, placid existence can become utterly tedious for many and they yearn for challenge and difficulty. Retirement can leave a lot of people wondering what on earth to do with themselves. Hankering for the “good old days”...

 Thought I would record at least one spooky story for Halloween. If I can think of an original idea, I will add that later. For now, here is my reading of R B Russell's short story "Loup-garou" about a strange French horror film. Unlike most of the things I record, this is quite subtle and it is not wholly obvious what is happening. In some respects this reflects the philosophical ideas of Jean Baudrillard around hyper-reality, where fiction and fact bleed into one another and become increasingly hard to distinguish. Many, he argued, come to prefer the cinematic fantasy to the mundane reality - which has a raft of dystopian horrors all of its own.

  My reading of several poems inspired by Paganism that were (mostly - some were kept as additional ones in case the turn out had been low and time needed to be filled) read out at an Interfaith event yesterday. Poems are by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, Oscar Wilde, Percy Shelley, Tom Hirons, and myself. Not only was there sharing of poetry and song between the people present, but much discussion about ideas revealed in those poems - it was a nice afternoon and a good way to inspire some creative discussions and build bridges.

 Rathe a belated contribution to World Poetry Day 2022, the choice is partly inspired by a conversation with my adoptive nephew Tom who has acquired a copy of Sir John Betjeman's collected works. So here are four poems by Betjeman and a little waffle to accompany each: The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel Felixstowe, or the Last of Her Order Monody on the Death of a Platonist Bank Clerk Death in Leamington