Thin places, by Peter Morford

I had never heard of thin places so, on my walk home from the meeting I thought it was about slimming clinics’ flab-fighting clubs. Of course Google soon put me right with the definition: Thin spaces are those rare locales where the distance between Heaven and Earth collapses.

The article helpfully lists old churches in saintly Cornwall, Iona and of course, Stonehenge. Go there, they say, and you will feel a special contentment and peace as you cross the line between Heaven and Earth; from our mundane world to what may be the mythical or mystical. We too enjoy a sense of peace. Conversely, we may feel uneasy when the place reminds us of things we would rather forget.

Let’s say we’re friends walking in some beautiful place. Cardingmill Valley will do. We have the scenery, the peace, the good company and the prospect of a nice bowls of soup at the end of the walk. We’re in a haze of happiness and, if we’re wise, we tell each other how much we’re enjoying ourselves.

Or, you are relaxed in your armchair, dozing over a book. You’re brought to life by the first bars of a favourite symphony or a line of poetry, It works magic on you and, as your eyes close, you are out of this world into happy memories and imaginings.

Buildings have their own atmosphere. Ancient churches or deserted theatres encourage sombre or respectful thoughts which may or may not be religious. Faced with a work of art can, and should, make us wonder about the artist and the world he lived in.

Descend to a dungeon and think about what it represents. Sixty feet above us in the Great Hall are the carousing gentry. Down here are the tortured and starving. The very stones are a record of the past.

We ask who were the people who built this monument, painted this picture, wrote this music? Who lived in this ancient ruin when it was intact? What was here in this barren desert a million years ago? If there were sentient beings around when this mighty mountain was jacked up to 10,000 metres, what did they think was happening?

Astronauts seeing Earth from space feel a spiritual force. Their emotions are a mixture of pride over Man’s achievement tempered with modesty at our insignificance to the whole.

Meanwhile there are those who follow Aldous Huxley’s advice to enjoy the false delights of mescalin.

Religions attribute all the good things to their god or gods. Agnostics think they are being realistic as they say that theists accept what they are told because it saves them the effort of thinking for themselves. If they did exercise their minds they might find that rather than “God created Man,” it was the other way round. Religions and deities are a human invention; indications of our natural curiosity, ingenuity and inventiveness as we try to understand the Universe and our place in it.

Like our ancestors I gaze at the firmament and doubt that is anything to do with religion. I just wonder..

Banishing, by Sharanya Manivannan

Never forget that once invoked

a goddess cannot go away

until asked to.

Leave your door open to me three

nights in a row and the circle will

come complete with me within it,

and in your rooms the smell of

sweet burning things.

Cover your mirrors, you who

cannot bear to look at yourself.

Rub sugar and spice over your doorway.

Bury your precious stones in ash.

Prepare for poltergeists.

Wash your body of the salt of

my fire eater’s tongue, black as

prophecy. Exorcise from your memory

the distant thunder of my voice.

Night bleeding into light,

the last crow before the sacrifice.

Make your offerings. Wood to oil, oil to flame.

I am more benevolent than most. Draw me

the outline of a door and I will withdraw, quietly.

I will not walk backwards. In your house,

not a shudder, no trace for days

but a relieved exhalation.

It is not what I will take;

it is what I will leave behind.

Gerry's journey, by Peter Shilston

(This is a vivid dream I had, which ended at this point. I don't know what might have happened next) 

..................................................................................................

The little group of travellers made their way along the mountain track, following their leaders, the old greybearded wizard and the tall, beautiful Elven lady. They were Gerry and these two, whom he regarded as his close companions (though in truth he had only met them at the start of the journey), three other characters whom I somehow could never see clearly, and a strange young man who had joined them later. He was most inappropriately dressed, in a suit and tie, and clutched obsessively at a briefcase, which he refused to put down even when they stopped for a rest.

   They crossed the mountains and came to a wide valley, where there was a farm. They laid down in a field. It was a dry and warm night and they soon fell asleep.
   Gerry awoke before the others. The wizard and the lady went to consult the farmer, and Gerry explored behind a barn, where he found water to wash himself. When he rejoined the others, he looked through his bag and was astonished at the random collection of objects he had packed for the journey. Why on earth had he brought a wineglass? "And I only have one clean shirt!" he exclaimed. "What will I do when I meet the King?"
   "You'll have to wash it!" replied one of the others, and laughed.

   The wizard and the lady returned. "It seems the Wolf isn't far away", he told them. "We will have to overcome it - or tame it".
   The lady turned to him. "The success of our mission will depend on my death." she announced quietly. The wizard said nothing, for he knew that she could discern far into the future.
   After a long silence, she repeated, "My death", but then added, fiercely, "But I will not be bound by fate!"
   The strange young man with the briefcase now approched the wizard. "I must go back!" he said.
   "You cannot go back", he was told, "When we crossed the mountains, we entered another world. There can be no return".
   The young man said, "I was carrying drugs to be delivered. But when I looked in my case, there were no drugs: just twists of newspaper containing only sand!"
   "That too is fate", the wizard told him.

When I'm old, by Izzy Ullmann

When I'm old, and not grey, nor full of sleep

I'll be dyeing my hair and watching films late at night,

And getting up mid morning, like a teenager.

I shall refuse to wear big knickers from M and S, and shudder at slip-on shoes,

And make a Yule Log instead of Christmas pudding.

I shall enjoy my bus pass, and get off at places I've never been before,

And sit alone in the pub, drinking a pint.

I'll play pianos in public train stations, with arthritic hands,

And read all of À la recherche du temps perdu.

My corpus, although ranting with pills,

Will delight in long, deep baths , if I can get in them.

I will frown at huddles of old folks

Enthusiastically expatiating about their maladies.

My dreams will be in the beech woods,

Picking mushrooms, or riding my bike,

Or walking the flint-sharp paths, listening to the blackbird's minims from Chiltern paths.

Charles Huntingdon, by Peter Shilston

 This is the foreword of my online historical novel. The complete novel can be read at pgvshil.blogspot.com

...............................................................................................................................................

 Charles Huntingdon was never a politician of the first rank, and even the great Sir Lewis Namier, in his famous surveys of Parliament in the 1760s, could find little to say about him. I knew scarcely more than just his name before the document I am publishing here came into my hands. 

   I was doing the rounds of the Cambridge colleges and the university library, conducting research into eighteenth century politics, when a young trainee assistant librarian, Ms. Whitmore, produced for me something she had found gathering the dust of centuries in the depths of what is euphemistically known as the “reserve collection”. It was a large wooden box, catalogued as having been deposited in 1775 by “Charles Huntingdon, M.P.”, with instructions that it should not be opened until after his death and that of his wife; but as far as Ms. Whitmore was able to ascertain, it had never in fact been opened since it came into the college’s possession. The box proved to contain the memoirs of the said Charles Huntingdon.

   Although Huntingdon was an obscure politician, he met many of the most important people of that period. He has left us descriptions of them, and he also casts a fresh light on the daily lives of the landed classes of his day. The most startling aspect of his memoirs, however, is that he reveals details of some extraordinary adventures in which he took part; and after reading these I can well understand why he did not want them to become widely known until much later.   

  It is for this reason that I am bringing his memoirs to the attention of the public for the first time. Some episodes, which appear to be unrelated to the main story, have been relegated to an appendix at the conclusion. With the aim of attracting a wider readership, I have modernised the spelling and punctuation and broken up the narrative into short chapters, for which the titles are entirely my own. The illustrations, which show various eighteenth century scenes, are also my choice.

  My thanks are due above all to Ms. Abigail Whitmore, without whose encouragement and advice my task would have been impossible. 

                                                       P.G.S.

Christmas 2024

 Happy Christmas! To celebrate here are some of the 6th-century mosaics in the basilica of St. Vitale, Ravenna

For those who enjoy grammar!

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.