Round the Herne

  My reading of a short story - Bull's Winter House - from the children's anthology "A Book of Magic Animals" by Ruth Manning-Sanders (1974). This is the tenth story in the collection. It is a Russian tale, I am not sure of the vintage but feel it reflects a certain Communist sentiment about selfish freeloaders not pulling together to help the worthy bull - an appropriate animal for a culture fixated on the image of the noble peasant labourer. The ending though does not seem to carry the sanctimonious schadenfreude I would expect of a Communist country so perhaps the outcome reflects the views of Manning-Sanders herself or whoever she initially heard the story from.

  My reading of the fifth story from Ruth Manning-Sanders children's anthology "A Book of Magic Animals" (1974) - a curious Russian tale called "Eh, Eh, Tralala!" about a magical cat, a gormless chicken, and a cunning fox. I think I deserve some sort of award for managing to say Little Cock so many times without sniggering. If anyone is wondering what Dracula is doing in a Russian story, I can only assume that he had stopped off for a rest after a long flight.

 The second story from Ruth Manning-Sanders (1974) anthology "A Book of Magic Animals". This one is a Russian tale (although the names of the main characters do seem especially Russian) in which the youngest of three brothers encounters magical horses, firebirds, a rotten Tsar, talking whales, and magical beings of strange sorts.

I recently celebrated my 50th birthday (with a trip to the Eastern Angles theatre to see their excellent spoof of Enid Blyton, "Four and a Half go Wild in Thetford Forest" - if you have yet to see it, book a ticket... lots of new acting talent performing who will doubtless become much better known in future. Drama schools obviously train their graduates well. Edward Kaye playing the clueless posh boy in snug shorts was worth the price of admission alone. Loved seeing Queen Boudicca trundling around in her battle wagon demanding an exit from the Roman Empire and promising millions of sestertii for the NHS. There was even a visit from an eerily accurate version of Ed Sheeran). The prospect of Thetford ending up half under water in two decades' time might not distress too many people, but we may all have to get used to a lot of changes as the environment alters around us. I wanted to record a story for my birthday, but other things got in the way - so here is my belated ...

My husky's ashes came back from the crematorium yesterday and will be interred after a suitable plant has been found to the garden centre today. This story is mostly therapy for me (the research into it has also kept my mind occupied), but also might prove off interest to other canophilists. The Chukchi people are an ancient tribal group living in the far north-east of what is now Russia, and one of their claims to fame is having bred huskies for some 3000 years now - hence my decision to record one of their dog stories. Unfortunately I have found it nigh on impossible to dig up such a story, just anecdotal scraps about their mythology and how certain themes recur in many different cultures - Yuri Berezkin's research was very helpful in this regard, along with a book by Yuri Rytkheu. Quite a lot of tribes have stories of otherworldy rivers composed of curious substances, with a number of references to seven rivers (though I could not dig up a reliable account of what all se...

I posted a written version of the Grandfather Frost poem last December, but hadn't performed it anywhere till Pooka's Pageant a few weeks ago in Ipswich. This poem is in a metre of my own devising and acts as a whimsical response to the familiar Night Before Christmas-style poems that are popular at this time of year. It combines elements from Russian and Slavic paganism (where Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost, is a prominent archaic figure who brings in the winter snows) with a nod or two to William Joyce's children's fiction. I seldom write poems or tell stories for children (all the adverts on TV keep telling me to keep away from children, so I do), but this is one of the rare occasions when I've produced something vaguely suitable.

A Russian folktale about a silly man who, unable to follow good advice, reads out the contents of the Black Book. A tale suitable for a chill winter's night when one has a log fire, a glass of ginger wine, and some strong cheese.

This poem has been rather slow in the writing (it's taken  me about three years to finish it off, and many might not think it worth the time!) I'm not wholly happy with the final verse, but it seems quite long enough as it is - but maybe I'll rewrite that verse in time. The poem is offered as a sort of pagan alternative to The Night Before Christmas, with a nod to Hans Christian Anderson on the way, and fuses Russian myth with British folk figures. You can regard it as a Frankenstein mess, or as reflective of the near-global pagan practice of syncretism. Or just class it as a daft kid's poem! The sled pack will eventually appear in another poem of their own, as they do not wish to be thought of as a one trick husky team. The metre, whilst similar to some Irish forms, is a random one I made up for the purposes of the poem - call it robinian metre if you fancy using it in a work of your own! Grandfather Frost “Sleep my son, sleep, on this darkest eve, Outs...

A little light froth for the winter season with a Russian story. Last day of lecturing before the Christmas holidays for me (a productive conference on the ethics of substance misuse - which has stimulated a lot of thought for me, hearing what the other speakers had to say). I may write more on that later, thinking of an animist ethos in drug use (which was largely the angle that I spoke on). It was lovely catching up with people that I used to work with a decade back. This story is one version (there are several) of the Snow Maiden Snegurochka, and her adventures with Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost. This version is the one that Ostrovsky worked into a play and Rimsky-Korsakov later converted into a popular opera. Love sometimes comes at a high cost, as this take indicates. Old Moroz strikes me as a far more interesting figure than the western Santa Claus.

The longest night holds sway as we are once again halfway out of the darkness. I have been working on a Yuletide poem for several years, in dribs and drabs - usually adding a verse and then getting sidetracked and forgetting about it again for another year. I thought I would post it here as a work in progress, in the hope that it will help to keep it in focus for me and I might actually finish it! It's a narrative poem inspired by Russian folklore of Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) but with elements of Irish lore worked in, for no more sensible reason than that the story is flowing in that direction. Grandfather Frost “Sleep my son, sleep, on this darkest eve, Outside the White Maidens flakes do weave; Warps of ice, wefts of snow; Let silence flow, unto midnight cleave”. “Rest has flown, the night is far too deep Tell me a story to help me sleep - Yarns of frost, chords of rime To freeze time whilst nightmares outside creep.” Snow-heaped rafters c...