Round the Herne

 My reading of the fifth chapter of "Puck of Pook's Hill" by Rudyard Kipling (1906). The children encounter the shade of a Roman centurion who tells them about life in his era and how he came to join the army. No attempt at song this time but, if you would like to hear a musical version of the poem " Cities and Thrones and Powers " at the beginning of the chapter, then Peter Bellamy created one. I cannot find a musical rendition for "A British-Roman Song" that ends the chapter.

On the evening of Thursday 17th August, my two elderly dogs and I were walking on Broom Hill, Ipswich (the side close to Valley Road & Westwood Avenue). Two large off-leash rottweilers appeared out of nowhere and attacked both my dogs and me, as I fought to kick the damned things off. The owners were way behind and were clearly not rushing even though they must have heard these monsters baying, my dogs screaming in pain, and me bellowing at the things to fuck off. By some miracle the little Jack Russell was bruised but not otherwise wounded. My husky was badly bitten on his head, stomach, flank and rear, and had to be taken to the vet for stitches - costing £370. The damage to his belly was seconds away from disembowelling him. My leg and hand were bitten (blood everywhere by the time we got home) and I was given a tetanus booster and antibiotics. The irresponsible buggers made no effort to apologise or ask if either I or my dogs were harmed. What makes this matter worse, for m...

" The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon ." G. K. Chesterton Professor Dawkins has been in the news yet again, this time suggesting that telling fairy tales to children might be pernicious and encourage them to believe in the sorts of things which he has made a lucrative second career out of loudly disapproving of. I find anyone who rides their hobby horse with such interminable vigour gets a trifle wearing after a while, but that aside I am quite convinced that he is wrong upon this matter. Admittedly I must declare my own deep rooted bias. The world is a magical and wondrous place, and human society would be a great deal happier if we could all allow each other the freedom to experience that sense of awe in their own way (rather than railing because they too unscientific, or insufficiently Christian, or followers of the wrong brand of Islam etc.) Aside from his...

I was recently party to a conversation between several people, one of whom has a serious illness and was given some advice by another person. It was the sort of advice I've seen endlessly floated around Facebook as a twee meme, and been on the receiving end of myself from a number of sources. The advice in question was that the person would receive healing "when the time was right", and was accompanied by the general sentiment that all things would come to people when the time was right (delivered with that saccharine look of cod-wisdom that makes me want to retch). According to the World Hunger website it is estimated that 870 000 000 people are living with daily malnourishment, most of them in that state because of chronic poverty. The same website estimates that over 7 500 000 people die of starvation each year ~ I'm not sure how they reached this number, but let's assume it's roughly correct. These are people who have lived through horrendous circumstance...

Returning on the train from Norwich's Pagan convention today (at which I was speaking, and more of which shortly) I had the opportunity to be sat across from a middle aged man and someone whom I presumed to have been a niece or possibly a future daughter-in-law. Their conversation was mostly insipid, but took a turn which distracted me from the spectral realms of Montague Rhodes James. For some reason they were talking about schools and the behaviour of some adolescent relative, when the fat man (let's call him McCabe, because I'm not feeling very imaginative tonight) started recollecting his own salad days. The salad presumably being a bit of limp lettuce in his greasy burger. With consider relish on that burger, he told various exploits involving reducing one teacher to tears, being part of a gang that drove another teacher into a nervous breakdown, locking another in a tool shed etc. Now lots of kids do grotty things and eventually grow out of it when they achieve some...