Wiccecraeft

My friend Sinead has just had her first book published. Wiccecraeft is an exploration of Dark Age English folklore, medicine and magic and contains, among other wonders, translations of Anglo-Saxon cures for menstrual pains, infertility, excessive lust, depression and water-elf sickness, as well as protection from nightwalkers and witchcraft. It is also a very personal account of her own experience of the Otherworld. Sinead gave me a copy when I saw her on Monday and I feel every bit the proud aunt.

Sinead and I became friends at secondary school. Someone told me we should meet, as she like me was into witchcraft, though she'd gone a step further and every night slept in a coffin. I tracked her down to the music department, where she hung out, playing the flute in tie-dye and tassels. We sat on the stairs and talked about the paranormal. I discovered that she didn't sleep in a coffin, but she did have a book of spells, which I borrowed. It was called Winning with Witchcraft. I used one of the spells to try, unsuccessfully, to make sixth-former Daniel Mackeldon love me. Later we discovered psychic questing and spent many days together tuning into the atmospheres of Kent and Sussex churches, channelling spirits, having visions and baffling the locals with our questions on black magic practices and witchcraft trials.

Sinead has toughened since those fey teenage years. Her interest in mysticism, particularly the Western tradition, has matured enormously and has been informed by her study of psychology and European philosophy. She is smart and intuitive, and able to hold the balance between mind and heart. Time with Sinead is always time spent learning, laughing, being inspired, excited, challenged. And she listens, picks up ideas and makes connections. She is one of the bravest, wisest and most hard-working people I have met and I am proud to have her for a soul-sibling.

You can buy Wiccecraeft from Amazon and read more about Sinead on her website.

Street Photograph V in Twenty-One Syllables

Between the automatic doors
of the Museum and the Mall
I moved in Nothing.

Street Photographs III & IV in Twenty-One Syllables

ere are two further street photographs in twenty-one syllables.

The first instruction, over Christmas, was to 'Look closer to home'. This is my response:

At your parents' too hot house
your mum worries as
your dad forks soft sprouts.
His hands are bruised.

And this week's is, 'Show us the aftermath':

After the Christmas tree
I vacuum pine needles,
tinsel, solstice night,
expectation.

Advent Calendars

December has galloped by and I've said almost nothing here. I've been in the grip of what I can only (but rather pretentiously) describe as an experience of gnosis. For most of this month I haven't known who I was, how to relate to the world around me, or what on earth to say here.

Fortunately the spiritual dust is settling now, and so, full of seasonal bonhomie, I thought I'd tell you about my advent calendars.

I have two calendars, which I've owned since I was a child. The first came from a National Trust shop in, I think, 1980. Here it is:




It's very battered and the tabs that held its roof together are floppy and largely useless. There's some dry, flaking Sellotape where once I stuck the roof together. Some of the doors are ripped and there's brown card and scratches on the pictures inside from the year I decided to glue the windows flat:




Much of 24 is torn and Joseph is almost entirely erased, poor man, except for his rhubarb pink face and custard yellow hair:



The calendar has a lovely seventies psychedelic look about it that reminds me of my mother's book on astrology from around the same period. Even Father Christmas looks like he's been taking fly agaric:




Perhaps most of all I love the pink and red fish scales on the roof and the curtains at the windows:




The second calendar comes from my mother's Woman and Home magazine in 1981. Every year for some years the December issue included an advent calendar that children could cut out, stick on to a cereal packet and get excited about thereafter:




The pictures inside were ink drawings only, so they could be coloured in. I'm still impressed with the care my brother (then eleven) and I (nine) took to do this: we've barely gone over the edges:




There are a few oddities, however, such as the spring-green antlers on the reindeer:




and the pink berries on the mistletoe:




but by and large it's a delicate beast with an unusual twenty-five doors:




The calendars are a link to my younger self. I feel the same excitement when I open their doors and I have the same favourites each year. I always buy a new one too, but it's never as magical as these two.

One day I suppose the doors will fall off, or the calendars will be damaged beyond repair and I'll have to let them go. There's a chance that they might survive me, in which case I'll have to find an appreciative/unfortunate young'un to leave them to.

Any one interested in applying to inherit them can write to me care of the World Tree, where I'll be hanging upside-down with a kitten in each arm, hoping for further gnosis.

Happy Christmas!

Mountains by Alice Oswald

Something is in the line and air along edges,
which is in woods when the leaf changes
and in the leaf-pattern's gives and gauges,
the water's tension upon ledges.
Something is taken up with entrances,
which turns the issue under bridges.
The moon is between places.
And outlet fills the space between two horses.

Look through a holey stone. Now put it down.
Something is twice as different. Something gone
accumulates a queerness. Be alone.
Something is side by side with anyone.

And certain evenings, something in the balance
falls to the dewpoint where our minds condense
and then inslides itself between moments
and spills the heart from its circumference;
and this is when the moon matchessly opens
and you can feel by instinct in the distance
the bigger mountains hidden by the mountains,
like intentions among suggestions.



***I don't know how Alice Oswald manages to be so good, to 'go so far, so fast,' as Plath puts it. This piece comes from her collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile. Read it and squeak.

Street Photographs I & II in Twenty-One Syllables

or the past couple of months my friend Caroline has belonged to Street Photography Now, a project for amateur photographers which each week instructs its members to go outside and either photograph a particular scene or use their cameras in a particular way.

I have decided to take part too and write a twenty-one syllable response to the instructions. Each week I want to create a poem that has a strong visual, perhaps Imagist quality, what Barthes calls 'an explosion [which] makes a little star on the pane of the text' (Camera Lucida).

Last week's instructions were to get 'On your knees please... Take a picture from ground level.' This was my (slightly cheating) response:

This is the path the leaf took:
from bud, down,
stripped to vertebrae
and the push of my brush.

And this week the Street Photography chiefs said, 'Play photographic poker. Look for a pair, two pairs, or three of a kind.' Today I came up with this:

On the snow-slowed road
a car slushes past,
its headlights form yellow cones
flecked with shadows.

I'm enjoying myself hugely and hope post a few more small poetic explosions over the coming weeks.


***Today's initial began as a lightning flash, but a furry frost beast appeared instead, no doubt born of the snow.

Poetry at the Lewes Arms

After some weeks without attending any live poetry events, I spent an inspiring evening on Wednesday with Sandy, a couple of dozen other poets and poetry fans and the brilliant Andy Brown, as part of the University of Sussex's New Metaphysical Poets series. Then last night Rebecca and I went to Lewes Poetry at the Lewes Arms.

Olly, Lewes Poetry's compere and resident poet, used to run a comedy club that A A Gill once described as 'the worst comedy club in London'. He is rightly proud of Gill's review.

Olly and his wife have made their own decoration for the poetry events by creating a backdrop of purple velvet (apparently made from their bedroom curtains) with the word, 'Poems', in applique letters at the top. Flaps of further, flowery psychedelic fabric hang beneath, half obscuring another word: 'Pi...'. Rebecca and I were told this was 'Pints', but Rebecca reckoned it was more likely 'Pimps'; I went for 'Pineapples'.

It turned out Rebecca and I were the only poets who wrote primarily serious work. I don't think I have ever laughed so much or so joyously at a poetry reading before, though perhaps our whiskys with ginger ale increased the sense of carnival.

During the break (and while we were serenaded by Andy Williams on a portable stereo that had to be played upside-down or the CD lid would flip open) Olly said we were all to write limericks for that evening's competition, the prize for which was a bottle of white wine. We were told to write on a certain engagement that's been in the British news this week. Unwilling to write limericks, Rebecca and I each wrote two haikus (or seventeen syllable jabs, in my case) instead.

Mine won, largely due to Olly's vitriolic reading and the company's desire to let a mock-haiku (a fake-u?) win a limerick competition.

On our way home and full of drunken chutzpah, I told Rebecca I would publish my pieces; so, ruining forever my chances of becoming laureate, here's the stronger of the two:

He's stupid, balding, buck-toothed, an arse.
I really couldn't give a toss.

And, with great pride, here's my bottle of wine: