Fiction: The Night Visitor

An excerpt from something untitled that I started a long time ago and never finished.

'From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night,

Good Lord, deliver us!' - Traditional Scottish prayer

Wynford Little sat up in the middle of a wet November night, entwined in his bed sheets and drenched in sweat. He rubbed a hand over his face and fumbled on his bedside table for his glasses. The digital clock showed three a.m. in garish green numerals.

Wyn put on his glasses and untangled himself from the sheets. His head was pounding, his brain still in a muddle, as he crossed the chilly floorboards in his bare feet. Without switching on the light, he retrieved a battered box of Marlboros - the emergency box - and a Pound Shop lighter from his underwear drawer. Blotting sweat from his forehead with his pyjama sleeve, he pushed open the window. Wind howled in, sharp and feral, and the curtains billowed. Rain spat and splattered against the glass .

Clouds swirled across the sky, and in the garden the oak tree lashed back and forth, casting strange, twisted shadows across the walls of the room. Wyn leaned his elbows against the windowsill, cupped a protective hand around the lighter flame, and took that first deep drag. It had been years since he'd last smoked a cigarette. Right then, with the echoes of that nightmare scuttling back and forth across his subconscious like a mad wife in an attic room, he didn't care.

He exhaled smoke like dragon breath. His narrow face was very calm, almost placid, beneath a three-day growth of beard stubble, but his dark eyes, under startlingly long lashes and heavy brows, were bright and watchful. He was a tall, thin, angular man hurtling towards middle age, with a puff of wild dark hair, silver-threaded, that stood out around his head like a dandelion clock. 

The tip of his cigarette glowed orange. He closed his eyes, resting his forehead in his palm. He was still tired, somehow, bone tired, but sleep had never felt like such a distant memory. 

He drew on the cigarette again and let another curl of smoke trail from his lips. The front of his pyjama shirt was getting damp with rain. The windowsill was dripping. He still stayed, staring and thinking, in front of the open window for another few long moments before he pushed himself upright, stubbed the cigarette out almost viciously on the sill, and yanked the window closed. He could still hear, faintly, the wind moaning through the branches of the old oak. He remembered a fragment of dreaming, thought of sharp, sharp teeth and long, thin fingers, and reached out to switch on the desk lamp so quickly that he nearly knocked it over. A warm golden glow flooded the room.

It was a beautiful room at the top of a tall, grand house. Or, more accurately, a tall house which had once been grand. It was very old. Its bricks were a deep, autumnal orangey-red, and it had details picked out in white stone around the windows and under the eaves. Its chimneys were high and spindly, its windows long and narrow. The windows themselves were old, too, and when the wind came screaming down from the mountains in the north they sometimes jumped and rattled in their frames.

Most of the rooms in the house were little used. The bin in the kitchen overflowed with takeaway boxes. The living room, although spacious and welcoming, sat under a layer of dust that glistened with a soft pearl lustre when the sun shone in. Wyn used the bathroom, his bedroom, and his study, which had a large oak desk that was polished until glossy and upon which sat his notepads and typewriter (he still used a typewriter; not out of any pretentious disdain for modern technology, but because it was old and comfortable and familiar, and the clacking of the keys felt right under his fingertips. His laptop sat sullenly in the top drawer of the desk), and a forest of bookshelves taking up two entire walls.

Wyn sat down heavily on the edge of his bed. He had lived comfortably in this house for more than twenty years, but in that moment, with the nightmare still hanging over him like a shadow, he hated the house, and the town, deeply and fiercely, with every bone and every sinew in his body.

From somewhere down the hallway, there came a dull whump.

Wyn immediately recognised the sound. It was a book, falling to the floor. Probably in the study. The books on the shelves were stacked two or three deep, with more piled on top, and it was not unusual for one of the haphazard piles to slump this way or that, and let something fall. But in the bleak silence that settled over the house at three a.m., it was a startling sound, and ominous. The hairs on the back of Wyn's neck prickled. He got to his feet with some reluctance. The old tree rattled its branches again outside the window, and he glared at it through the glass. He was fully intending to go to the study and retrieve whichever book had fallen, but he found himself strangely hesitant. There was a heaviness in the air; that sort of electric tingle that precedes a thunderstorm. It had settled over the house, and Wyn's nerves, already frayed from the terror of his dream, were thrumming like guitar strings.

And then, from the study, there came another soft whump.

Wyn's bladder briefly threatened to do something alarming. For a moment he was ten years old again, and the obvious solution to the problem he was facing was to get back into bed and pull the covers over his head until he resembled a burrito rather than a boy. Unfortunately, Wyn was forty-six years old, and had the horrible suspicion - faint, but growing - that he was not alone in the house any longer, and that if he were to put a blanket over his head, he might find that it would become his shroud.

He stayed frozen in the centre of the room for a few moments, his toes just touching the pool of ragged, wind-whipped moonlight upon the floor. The third whump, no less gentle than the first but somehow much more horrifying, decided him. He picked up a crystal whisky decanter from the dresser. It was empty, only a faint amber residue left at the bottom, but it was heavy, and the weight of it in his hands reassured him as he opened the bedroom door and slipped into the hallway. He left the door ajar, allowing a trickle of warm light to bring life to the gloomy corridor beyond.

All was quiet. Wyn's heartbeat seemed loud, obtrusive. He edged towards the study, holding the decanter high like a club. It sparkled in the dim light, sending gold ripples skating over the landing walls. The floorboards, worn soft with age, were cold. The air smelt of dust and pine forests and electricity.

The study door was closed. Wyn regarded the brass doorknob for several long moments, his pulse throbbing in his ears. He did not consider himself to be in bad shape, but faced with the possibility of an intruder in his home, he suddenly felt very old, eighty if he was a day, and made out of twigs.

The quiet stretched out. Rain drummed down on the roof.

And then, so faintly that he wasn't convinced that it was not the overactive imagination of a writer still in the grip of tenebrous dreams, he heard another sound, from the other side of the study door. A soft rustling, a susurrus of paper on paper, as though someone were standing beside his bookshelf and rifling through the pages of his books.

Wyn took a step back from the door, chewing his lower lip. A floorboard creaked gently and he froze mid-step. The weight of the decanter was dragging on him now, and he lowered it. His arms wanted to tremble. For a split second, he made as if to raise one hand, to knock on the door of his own study, but quickly he caught himself, curled his fingers around the doorknob and flung the door open.

The first thing he noticed was that the window was open. The curtains were drenched, billowing in the early-morning breeze. Outside he could see that the sky was slowly lightening to moody indigo, but this was the north, and it was winter, and it would not be sunrise for some time yet. The mountains clung to the horizon, hunched black shapes like crouching dragons, and brooded.

The study seemed empty. But it was cold, very cold, and Wyn could feel that static in the air once again, stronger here, as though he was standing at its nucleus. Goosebumps rose and prickled on his arms as he inched forward into the room and flicked on the light.

It came on slowly, turning the grim darkness to dismal beige. A sound, a movement, just over his head, made Wyn jump and swing the decanter wildly, sending shards of light skipping around the room and over the bookshelves, but it was only a moth, albeit a large one, lazily circumnavigating the room before homing in, manically, on the light bulb.

Wyn advanced into the study. The rug, patterned like a magic carpet, or so he had fancied when he bought it, grew damp under his feet as he approached the window. He set the decanter down upon the sill, and dragged the window closed, not without effort. The curtains fell back against the walls with a wet slap. Wyn rested his back against the window and sighed, pushing a few strands of damp hair - whether sweat or rainwater, he didn't know - off his forehead.

The moth detached itself from where it had been bouncing erratically from the light bulb and descended in a dreamy spiral towards the bookshelf. Wyn watched it but paid it no particular mind. It settled on the edge of a shelf; stretched its wings. It was a huge thing, the size of his palm at least, mottled brown and grey, its body coated in thick white fur.

One minute it was there, and the next, it was gone.

Wyn started, pushing himself bolt upright. His forearm caught the lip of the decanter and knocked it to the floor. He bent to pick it up, and froze there, half-kneeling, almost afraid to blink, as the books upon the bookshelf began to move.

A ripple spread through them, and then a murmur, as though they had just awoken from a long sleep and were leisurely stretching their pages as the moth had stretched its wings. Wyn's jaw went slack as their spines flexed and moved. Several paperbacks tumbled from the higher shelves as the books jostled, shifting, rearranging, until his disbelieving eyes registered the shape of a man, at least as tall as he if not taller, being formed out of spines and covers and pages, and then there was a man standing there, in the bookshelf, and Wyn half-wondered how he had ever thought he could see books there at all.

His fingers closed tightly around the neck of the decanter, throttling it, but he did not get to his feet. Instead he watched, and waited, and listened to the roaring in his ears.

The man in the bookshelf looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers. At first there was a sound like the spine of a book breaking, and then his knuckles popped and cracked, louder than gunfire in the hush, and anything at all booklike about him was gone. 

She Might Be A Faerie: Three Strange and Curious Style Concepts

So, I wrote a few short pieces some years ago as 'style concepts', an idea I picked up.from Gala Darling's blog, and when I came across them recently I couldn't help but laugh - I thought I had put ideas like these aside, but the third one in particular is - well, not far off the mark, if incredibly idealised. (Confession: originally the author of choice in the first vignette was Neil Gaiman, but oh my goodness, Katherine Genet, I want to leap into your books and live there forever.) Although I have updated them a bit for modern me, and do please forgive a bit of artistic licence - at thirty, I'm not precisely a 'girl' any more!

1) Casual Faerie

The idea that sparked 'casual faerie' as a style concept was me trying to combine several of my favourite styles - faerie, boho and a raggedy art-student kind of look vaguely inspired by the character Karou from Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone, all slouch beanies and messy hair - but in a casual, non-overpowering, non-costumey way, as though (to get kinda cheesy about it) a faerie had decided to take a bunch of art classes and needed to blend in a little bit.

Casual faerie is: combat boots with tea dresses, lots of lace, blue and silver, smudged eye make-up and glitter, messy hair (probably blue or green or faded pink), a faraway expression, short nails, torn stockings, mismatched socks, worn boots, chunky scarves, sketchbooks and bitten pencils, ink stained fingers, silver earrings, slip dresses, thrift shop cardigans, muted or dark florals, jewel-coloured velvet, moon jewellery, flushed cheeks and bright eyes, body glitter in strange colours, wilting daisies tucked into braided hair, oversized leather jackets, dungarees, ugly sweaters, strange charms and magpie feathers tucked into your handbag, the smell of books, mismatched textures and layers, silver beads in your hair that glitter like stars.

The casual faerie girl shops in flea markets and thrift stores. She smells of tea leaves, lavender and peppermint. She carries her art supplies in a battered old brown suitcase she picked up for £1.50 in Age Concern. She wears vintage lace bridal gloves with the fingers cut off. She likes to sit outside and drink tea in the moonlight. The bottom of her handbag is coated in glitter and birdseed. An introvert, she talks and laughs with friends in the coffee shop but never seems quite there, as though she has one foot in this world and one in Tir Na Nog.

2) Storybook Girl

She's the one who stumbled into a fairytale and never found her way out.

She's the smell of books, dust and sunlight.

The storybook girl needs comfortable clothes, because there's another world in the back of her wardrobe and there might be lions around the corner and you can't run away from witches if your shoes don't fit.

She's the queen of cable knit, pensive expressions and steaming coffee. There are ink stains on her cuffs and she doesn't read Vogue and she has non-fictional feelings for fictional characters*. She spends her life looking for magic, both inside her books and in the world around her.

The storybook girl doesn't care much about her make-up or nails. Her hair is messy from running through the forest, her cheeks are flushed from the fresh air and she's half-mad from living in the world inside her head. She's scuffed Doc Martens and chunky scarves, mustard and beige, cranberry and cream, moss and autumn rain and fallen leaves. A wildflower wanderess with freckles and a ready laugh.

She likes things cozy and quiet inside and wild on the outside. She lives for a mug of cocoa by the fireside and a howling wind. She dreams of moonlight and mountains, becoming a lighthouse keeper or a mapmaker or a professor of folklore. She slips away from parties to read and look at the stars. She's not a manic pixie creampuff, just intense, bookish, more into Tolkien than Twitter.

She sees the wonder in the everyday. She owns legwarmers, fingerless gloves and a bobble hat. She knows her own mind and doesn't mince her words. She's not minimalist because it looks good on Instagram but because the time it takes to put on jewellery and lipstick is time that could be spent reading or wandering in the fields. She's a nerd and a bird-mad girl, both at once.

The storybook girl is free and wild, unconstrained, unconventional, and quietly, gently feral. Fisherman's jumpers, baggy jeans, men's belts, scruffy boots, undone shoelaces, patched-up backpacks, elbow patches, cat hair on her blazer, the smell of bonfires, road trips, grass stains, muddy Converse, unraveling cuffs, long hair, flannel shirts, vintage sweaters, drunk on fresh air, daydreams, wanderlust and sweet tea.

*I borrowed that from Bookworm Boutique.

3) Untitled

Half-woman, half-faerietale, she is a nomad, slinging cards on roadsides and in taverns all over these isles. She wears earth tones, patterns in rich autumn colours, jewel tones, brocade, paisley and tapestry prints. Crochet and lace, silver or warm copper-coloured jewellery. She smells of coffee and incense, moss and rainwater.

She could be a professor of divination. Big spectacles, a gentle (if not slightly bewildered) demeanor. She has long, soft, flowing hair. She collects Tarot cards. She wears cardigans, crystal jewellery, moon and star symbols. Soft, rosy, golden make-up, or a flash of iridescent teal. She wears gold glitter under her eyes on nights out. She loves witchery, owls, and walks in the moonlight.

She's a writer or an artist, a pencil in her hair, ink on her fingertips. Short nails, messy hair. Her haunts are greenhouses, old, quiet bookstores with that musty vanillin smell, and abandoned places. She might live in a fortune-teller's caravan, or in a houseboat with forty brocade cushions and clove-scented candles, or in a tiny apartment with plants growing on the windowsill. She might serve you in the bookstore with her hair in a messy bun. Sometimes her hair is blue, sometimes brown, sometimes red or blonde or faded green.

She studies folklore. Cable knits, dungarees, midnight-blue velvet, faded jeans, pin-striped waistcoats with worn buttons, jumpers patched at the elbow, long skirts, vintage dresses, silk knickers, harem pants, embroidery and folk prints. Tie-dye socks. Her dressing table is covered in perfumes and scented lotions; oak, frankincense, woodsmoke, amber. Her lip balm tastes like tea. She always has candles burning.

She reads runes. There's a Katherine Genet book in her handbag. She wears an old leather jacket, and takes her coffee milky and sweet. Glitter on her sheets and on her collarbones. She drinks elderflower cider and honey mead. She wears tea dresses with combat boots. With her friends she goes vintage shopping, stargazing, storytelling and wildcrafting, seeking out poky shops in strange towns, drinking espresso Martinis at two a.m..

'She's mad but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire,' - Charles Bukowski.

'She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and thoughts that wander off the edge of the world,' - Joanne Harris.

'Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things; fairy tales, dead languages; weird folk beliefs; fascinating religions, and more,' - Laini Taylor.

As fun as it was to re-read and resurrect these, I must also admit that this prescriptive approach to dressing isn't me any more - I like to be free to change and let my style remain fluid. Whilst I'm much pickier about my purchases, I don't like to overthink or try to impose rules or labels on myself. I've gotten much more relaxed - a far cry from deliberately trying to style myself in an 'effortless' way. My main takeaway from these concepts is that I didn't trust myself very much at the time - I very much felt that my style needed some kind of limits, or a solid definition, in order to "count". Whereas nowadays I just make sure I love the things in my wardrobe and get dressed in them - I don't really mind that I can't sum up my look in a pithy statement (or perhaps I can: Pippi Longstocking does witchcraft? Rainbow Brite has let herself go a bit? Luna Lovegood goes to Glastonbury? Dai says these are not far from accurate - "if the Pippi Longstocking and Luna Lovegood ones were smashed together in a car crash, that would be you".).

Fiction: Gifts for Witches

An excerpt from 2015's unfinished NaNoWriMo novel... I may have to try to pick the thread of this one back up sometime.

It was almost midnight.

Mel had been waiting on the end of the street for twenty minutes, the chill of the ground slowly seeping through her cherry-red Doc Martens, her breath trailing from her lips in a sparkling white haze. The latticework of tree branches cast her thin pale face in starlight and shadow, like a lace tablecloth. The night smelt of bonfire smoke and dying fireworks, wet leaf-mulch and frostbitten grass.

She squeezed the hagstone that hung on its ragged red string around her neck, tracing its worn surface with the pads of her fingertips. The hagstone wasn’t magic. If anything, it was antimagic, a piece of nature so ancient, so stolid, that it couldn’t be charmed, cursed, tricked or fooled. Hagstones were for breaking glamours, finding things. Mel figured the only thing you couldn’t find, by looking the hole worn through its centre, was normality.

Mel had brought a backpack, heavy with an assortment of oddities. Mostly they were gifts. A more correct word, perhaps, would have been ‘offerings’, but Mel rejected the terminology of outdated deities and hippy-dippy wannabe priestesses. In the backpack there were two perfume bottles (both green, thick vintage glass that sparkled like cats’ eyes) and two jam jars carefully washed and filled with dirt and moss and secrets on tiny torn up bits of notepaper. Witches liked secrets. For your everyday run-of-the-mill magical workings and/or application to the Wyrd, such a collection would probably have been perfectly acceptable payment.

Mel was well aware that what she was going to ask for tonight was far beyond run-of-the-mill.

So in addition to the four bottles and jars, she had also packed her diary from the year she turned thirteen, a ball of indigo wool with purple lurex sparkles, a suicide note she wrote in the back of a trashy paperback when she was seventeen, a handful of snail shells wrapped carefully in bubble wrap, a magpie feather that was not quite black and not quite green, and a small jar of lime marmalade.

There were other things in the backpack as well, but Mel was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

“You’re early,” said a voice from behind her left shoulder. It was a thin voice, a wind voice, the skittering of dead leaves across tarmac.

“No, I’m not,” Mel said. She was pleased to note that she sounded calmer than she felt. “You’re half an hour late.”

A silence. Not an absent silence, but a weighty, broody silence.

Mel rolled her eyes and turned around. There was no one there.

“I’m not falling for that, either,” she said, looking very hard at a slant of shadow between the thick trunk of the old tree and the wall of the last house. In the sickly streetlight shine, the jagged shadow might well have been a shoulder, an elbow, a long narrow hand with bony fingers. Or it might not. “What’s the matter? You can call up a storm and read the bones of the earth but you can’t tell the time?”

The witch stepped out from behind the tree.

Sort of.

What actually happened was that shadows on tree bark and dead leaves and dust and starlight shifted and congealed into the shape of a person. Mel saw this briefly, and then forced herself to unsee it. Even in Elbury, where magic walked the streets and sang in the air and sludged through the sewers like blood and piss, where you were brought up knowing – not believing but knowing – that there were faeries at the bottom of the garden, it didn’t pay to let yourself see things that your mind couldn’t possibly be expected to make sense of.

Mel had tried to use that excuse for her algebra homework one time. Hadn’t worked.

The witch took a step towards her. A car came around the corner behind them, its headlights flickering across the trunks of the slender trees lining the road and casting zoetrope shadows across the witch’s face. Mel held the witch’s gaze.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” said the witch. She had a tapestry bag slung over her arm, its colours faded with age. She stroked it absently with the other hand as she walked towards Mel, as though the bag were a restless animal she needed to comfort. Her footsteps made no sound on the brittle golden carpet of frost and leaf.

“My name’s Mel,” Mel offered awkwardly.

The witch cocked her head to one side, birdlike. “I know,” she said. Her voice was reedy and distant, like a night bird calling across a mountain lake, a thin and haunting note that made the hairs on the back of Mel’s neck stand on end.

“What do I call you?” Mel prompted. Witches were naturally curious; sometimes she wondered if they agreed to do any of the things they did just so that they could look at you, watch you, study you. It wasn’t unusual, in Elbury, to see a witch standing in the street, hypnotised by the falling rain or the steam off your coffee or dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. It made it difficult to convince them to get to the point.

The other trouble with witches was their erratic behaviour. Don’t talk to strangers was good advice on the whole, but it took on particular resonance in this town. Consorting with witches was not something that one generally did. Especially if you liked all your fingers and toes where they were and preferred not being a frog - or in an oven.

“You can call me Bijou,” said the witch. “It’s not my name. But it’ll do.”

Mel nodded.

The witch had dusky brown skin and a grey pea coat that was rather too big for her, so that she appeared to nestle in its folds like a bat wrapped in its own wings. Her hair was a cascade of dreadlocks, once dyed blue, now a faded greyish-teal. She wore a very long scarf, green and black striped, that moved with the wind, although not always in the direction it should have done. Her fingers were thin, clutching, bent like twigs.

Mel unzipped the bag, the sound unusually loud in the still night air, and took out the jars one by one, handing them over. The witch took each without word or expression, her long pointed fingers gliding over the glass. She held them close to her face, sniffed them, shook them, peered at them intently. Each one vanished into the depths of her pea coat, and she looked at Mel expectantly, waiting for more. Mel’s nerves thrummed with tension. The price for what she was asking was high. She knew that. She wouldn’t let it stop her, not now.

They took my sister, she thought, but she cut that line of thinking dead before any more words could form. Not now, not here. It was too dangerous, too raw.

The witch lifted her head abruptly in a sharp, jerky motion and sniffed at the air, her nostrils flaring. “Angry thoughts,” she whispered. “Desperation. And fear… a bitter brew. Delicious. Delicious.” She leaned towards Mel, angling herself downwards like a heron pecking at weeds.

Mel breathed slowly and deeply and tried not to make any sudden movements. She was suddenly far too hot in her winter coat. “You know what I’m asking?" she said softly. "You know why I came?”

Bijou looked down at her. The planes of her face now seemed predatory, and her mouth was pulled into a thin white line. “I know why you came.” The words were an exhalation, almost a sigh. “I can help you. Of course I can. But… far safer for you to simply… forget.”

“No. I can’t forget. I won’t forget.” Impatient, Mel offered up the lime marmalade next, breaking the tension, and Bijou hummed and nodded in what might have been approval.

Then the snail shells. Bijou accepted them carefully, her sharp fingernails pricking the pustules of the bubble wrap as she transferred them gingerly to an inside pocket of her voluminous coat. The diary, its pink cover orange under the streetlights, a year’s worth of pre-teen secrets and outpourings, lipstick kisses and bad poetry. The suicide note, which the witch pressed to her face; inhaled deeply. The feather. The wool.

The wool went into the tapestry bag. Mel was careful to look away when the bag was opened and she kept her gaze averted until it was closed.

There were all sorts of witches. They did mostly the same thing, to be fair, but they went about it in different ways. There were cyber witches, who drew their magic from the clacking of keys and the sizzle of circuit boards. There were city witches, who walked widdershins down alleyways and drew sigils in spray paint. There were not many kinds of witch who carried their power in a tapestry bag, which wriggled, like a kitten, when it thought Mel wasn’t looking.

Mel thought about asking what sort of witch she was hiring, but she didn’t know how to phrase the question without giving offense and she had a feeling she’d be happiest not knowing. She wanted three things, three very simple things, really – an answer, a map, and a key.

Breaking the Spell of Consumer Culture

The winter season got me, like many people, thinking about aspects of our culture like commercialism, gifting, and money. As do probably quite a lot of people in the wider Pagan community, our family celebrates a kind of blended version of the Pagan Yule and the secular Christmas (which should be a contradiction in terms, but certainly for most people I know there's not a lot of Christ in the festive season - which itself of course pre-dates Christianity. Perhaps we should call the modern iteration, with its inflatable Santas and themed hand soap dispensers, something slightly different, like ChristmasTM). 

Anyway. There are aspects of modern Christmas that I really love, and which suit our extended family with its Pagan/agnostic/atheist/Methodist blend. I love mulled wine and roasted chestnuts, Christmas stockings and carol singing, roast dinners with bread sauce and Brussels sprouts (controversial!), visits to Santa's grotto and the big Christmas lights switch-on in town. What I don't love, and this is hardly ground-breaking (someone in the Guardian usually writes a similar column each year, for starters) is the rampant commercialism, over-advertising, over-saturation and glorification of all-out balls-to-the-wall consumerism.

This is where, for me, the gentler Yule traditions really come into their own. We're kind of feeling our way into what works for our family, as there are so many different practices associated with the season and already so much to do at this time that to try to re-enact all the aspects of a traditional twelve-day celebration would lead to total overwhelm. But it does help to remind me of some of the origins of our modern celebrations, and that keeping things simple isn't always the worst idea and in fact much more in keeping with the history of this ancient festival. Instead of buying more decorations and more plastic crap every year, we collect pine cones and holly branches. 

Yuletide, though, is one of the few times of the year when I feel that consumerism is largely absent from modern Paganism. The rest of the time, it seems to be part and parcel, sometimes even a main aspect. Consider: we are encouraged to own not just one Tarot or oracle deck, but to collect several - or many. Crystals, a limited resource, we often treat almost as disposable - leave one here, bury one there, buy three or seven or however many for each working, rite or spell. We are encouraged not just to have sufficient of any given item but to build collections. People seem to compete on social media to have the largest, fanciest, most 'aesthetic' of altars, even if that means buying new statues and altar cloths and other decorations with every turn of the Wheel. 

I realise it's a fine balance, as we want to support the artists and artisans in our communities, as well as the shops and small businesses, but as gift shops and crystal shops abound at every mystical or sacred site, and our communities both on and offline come to revolve around shops, markets and commerce, perhaps we need to get realistic about how much is really enough. 

In the introduction to her book Seasons of a Magical Life, H. Byron Ballard muses that there seem to be less Pagans cleaning up streams and picking up litter - practical tasks to build relationship with the land - than there are sitting behind their screens quibbling over practices and terminology. To this I would add that also, we are shopping. You can literally buy a witchcraft-in-a-box kit; but for me part of the practice, part of the experience, part of the point, is in the finding, the growing, the making, the foraging, the adapting, the cobbling-together. The more we buy our tools and our spells, the less involved we are with the mud and the roots, the blood and the bones, the craft. If you can download an app to tell you when the moon rises, you stop needing to look at the sky. 

A Mystical Year?

Like so many of my posts, this one is inspired by a book I read recently, The Year of Mystical Thinking by Emma Howarth. Apparently I just love it when people set themselves year-long challenges. Emma Howarth found a pack of Tarot cards she had used and loved when she was younger, which inspired her to spend a year exploring the realms of mysticism and magic to find ways to bring more joy and enchantment to everyday life. As you have probably guessed, I am very much here for this idea and was extremely tempted to have a go at the same thing myself. Although I'd probably set myself different challenges, as Reiki and astrology don't particularly speak to me, and my disposable income is a bit too limited to book too many crystal readings and sound baths.

But, a more mystical year sounds like a wonderful idea to me. I started thinking about different things I could incorporate - I already celebrate the Wheel of the Year, but I would like to go to more rituals (both in person and online). (Side note: we did try to attend a gorsedd for Samhain, which would have been my first public ritual, but we got held up in traffic, couldn't find a parking space, and then couldn't find the right group amongst all the covens and groves who had flocked to the same stone circle. For the winter solstice, we are planning to leave earlier!) I'd like to spruce up my altar, which is currently a very informal affair situated on the windowsill behind the kitchen sink, as that was the only safe place for it to be during moving chaos and with an inquisitive three-year-old, but it keeps getting splashed with water and I can't decorate it with paintings, photos or fabric. 

A huge factor for me would be trying to be more aware of nature - since we moved I'm still finding it hard to rekindle that connection, and generally don't know the moon phase unless I look it up on my phone (#paganfail). Oh, and that yoga and meditation practise seems to keep sliding down the priority list - don't know how that happens.

Now that I'm using Instagram again, it's quite important to me to make sure I stay rooted in the physical, offline world and not return to the days of doing everything for the 'gram - which is all right really, as my messy house, permanent exhaustion, and haphazard intuitive Paganism don't actually photograph that well. I still find it really easy to get sucked in to what other people are doing, so a challenge that refocuses me on my own stuff is also good. It's all about achieving that balance between being able to connect with people and be findable, but also being able to keep my mind clear, and I think I will only get there through trial and error unfortunately!

Of course, I'm very aware that I still have not completed the challenge of a year without shopping, and I'm slightly uneasy about how this might sit alongside a mystical year. I firmly believe that any kind of spiritual practise should not depend on buying products, but I'm also aware that local Pagan communities often communicate via their local supply stores, so when looking for open rituals, classes or courses it would be rather hard to rule out visiting such stores. Also, pretty things are tempting and nice, and I'm only human.

What I've been thinking about for the reincarnation of my shopping ban is running the year from Samhain to Samhain, as a way of connecting my Pagan practise with my desire for escaping consumerist living. And a vague hope that trying to flow with the seasons might make the process a little bit easier - for example, right now we are spiralling inwards towards the contemplative and restful period that is the dark half of the year, which to me does not feel like the right time for the bright, intensive stimulation of an online shopping frenzy. (So yes, I've already started another no-shop year, with little fanfare this time - but to be honest, there are currently some life circumstances that are not too great, and I wonder if perhaps it won't last that long as willpower is in short supply. On the other hand, so is money, so there's that...)

Walking the Wild Edges

Since I realised the calming, uplifting effect that walking in nature has on me, I've been spending more and more time outside. The Spud is benefiting from this too - he loves to be out in the fresh air. As well as our everyday walks, when the weather is good we pack a picnic into my backpack and head out on a longer expedition. 

In recent years I've moved from the country village where I grew up to a council estate in the suburbs (by way of a few people's spare rooms, after splitting with my ex shortly before we were due to go travelling). There was a bit of adjustment required when we arrived in this grey terrace, but soon I discovered there was a nature reserve behind the estate with a river running through it. Now the Spud is bigger and can walk further, we hike across the fields to the woodlands I used to walk in when I was growing up. 

Each year more land is sold to the developers, and more of the fields I used to play in are swallowed by the urban sprawl, but it's still relatively easy to scratch off the thin veneer of civilisation and find ourselves far from anywhere, between Roman roads and Old Straight Tracks, copses and hedgerows and sun-dappled glades of celandine and primrose. You can still see the progress of mankind in the ploughed fields and tumbledown barns, the glint of a beer bottle in the nettles, the pylon stalking unexpectedly across the horizon like an invader from another time. But it feels for all the world as though we're alone on the edges of things, where something magical might still happen.

I grew up here, I found myself thinking, as the Spud and I shared a sandwich and a drink of water in the shade of a hedge. Looking out over the fields I could see the straight, tree-lined cut of a Roman road. I'd walked that road with my mother as a child, and for years after I'd had a recurring dream about it, a cloaked rider on a dark horse pounding down the hill towards me. 

The Spud and I followed the footpath across the centre of the field. Vast clouds sailed across the sky like zeppelins, sending shadows chasing over the ploughed earth. I felt like Tiffany Aching walking on the Chalk. Perhaps, I thought idly, if I were ever to set up an altar again, I might do better to have some of these flints than some fancy shiny foreign crystals, no matter how pretty. After all, this ground here is what I'm made of. This chalk and flint may as well be my bones. My mother's maiden name comes from "Free", and there have been Frees here, and in the surrounding area, since records began. (I did some digging into my ancestry recently, and other than my paternal grandmother who was from Bornholm - and her ancestors, back to the 1700s at least, adding a strain of Norse to my makeup that I'm quite proud of - my family looks to be of Anglo-Saxon descent on both sides.)

Just as I was musing about flints on my altar, the Spud caught hold of my jeans and offered me a huge flattish oval specimen that he had prised out of the dirt of the path. Crouching beside him, I turned it over in my hands, and caught my breath. The underside of the flint was covered in sparkling crystal that glittered in the sunlight. Wow, I thought. Okay. I can take a hint.

My sparkling flint

This is far from the most strange thing that has happened to me out on the wild edges of this land. Nor am I the only one who can tell stories about this area. (Britain on the whole is a strange country with an equally strange history, which is why I love it so much.) For example, a few years ago I was working in one of the last independent shops on my local high street. The owner was (is) a fairly well-to-do bohemian-ish lady who lived in the next town over. To get home from work she had to drive through several villages (including mine) and along an old, but well-travelled, road overlooked on both sides by woodlands and open fields. One night she had passed through my village and was heading through moonlit farmland when something dashed into the road in front of her, paused in the headlights for a moment, and disappeared into the hedge on the other side.

But in that frozen moment she saw it quite clearly. "I can only describe it as a goblin," was what she said, and though the shop staff speculated that it may have been a flashback from an acid trip in her misspent youth, she was quite shaken, and it was a while before she drove that way at night again.

The street I grew up on was at the edge of the village and ended in farmland. There was a big pasture at the end of the road, which was bordered on the far side by a very old narrow footpath known locally as the cinder track.

One evening when I was about eight or nine, my friend Alec and I were sitting with our backs against someone's garage door on the edge of the pasture, talking rubbish and looking out over the fields as the sun went down. We both saw, at the same moment, a figure striding along the cinder track towards the village.

I remember looking at Alec to make sure he was seeing it too, and my own fear was reflected in his eyes. The dark figure - a black silhouette - was taller than the straggly trees that bordered the footpath, making it ten, eleven feet tall or more. Its arms were unnaturally long, reaching past its knees. And even from this distance, impossibly, we could both see its eyes, which were deep red, glowing like hot coals. And there was this... feeling, seeping from it like mist, a malevolence.

Without a word to each other we both bolted, ran for our houses, leaving dust in our wake.

Sometimes, walking in the woods with my little boy, I feel like I've stepped sideways out of the flow of what is deemed to be 'normal life'. There are days when I'm so enmeshed in the System -  earn your money, pay your bills, check your emails, go to the supermarket, watch telly, work work, rush rush, veg out, repeat - that getting out of it seems impossible. I look at those I know who live in vans and on boats, who drift on the wind and the tide at whim, and I can no longer figure out a way to join them. 

But I'm not sold on the other way of living either, and I feel that keenly when we're wandering on the edges. I feel this gulf between me and the world of Friends re-runs and hair straighteners, Love Island and eyelash curlers and Primark... Suddenly none of that has any meaning. I feel more and more like I'm looking at that world from somewhere else, and it's a language that I don't understand any more.

Sometimes it's alienating to believe in magic and monsters when most of those around you are existing in a different reality. But I've seen what I've seen and felt what I've felt, and the flint of the land, thousands of years old, is in my bones. Strange things still happen on the Old Straight Tracks, even as the sound of traffic encroaches and the pylons march on across the landscape. The weird and the wild are still out there, beyond this 'civilised' existence we've trapped ourselves in, if you know where to look.

Let's Get Metaphysical

I suppose you could say I'm a lapsed Pagan. I've dabbled (the most accurate term in my case, I'm afraid) in assorted branches of Pagan religion since my pre-teens. Recently, due to my increased interest in and connection with nature, history, folklore and more, I've been taking another look at these faiths and traditions. My intuition suggests that introducing a spiritual aspect into my life will help to fill the void inside that I've previously papered over with excessive shopping.

This void is not the gaping darkness it once was. These last couple of years have done me good - I've picked up a variety of creative hobbies, renewed connections with family and friends, and even with the wider world through activism, and disconnected somewhat from my gadgets. I'm not as painfully self-conscious, not as distracted, and not as prone to constant comparison. Lately I've picked up my long-neglected yoga and meditation practice too. It's a bit sporadic, but it helps. Looking deeper into the spiritual now feels like a natural next step - one I've avoided for a long time, for fear of looking or sounding 'woo-woo', upsetting the die-hard sceptics amongst my family and friends (admittedly there are some people I just won't discuss anything of this nature with), or simply feeling worried that I don't know what I'm doing, and might not find what I've always felt I'm looking for.

(Do you ever have the feeling that you're following a trail of breadcrumbs through life? Since childhood I've felt 'nudges' or seen signs that I do my best to follow, trying to piece together a bizarre map of coincidences, hunches, feelings, and notes from a plethora of old books. More and more lately I find myself musing on the saying, "That which you seek is seeking you.")

Why Paganism? Because it feels right to me. I grew up with remedies from the herb garden and food from the hedgerows. When I walk on the land, I feel part of a huge and intricate web. The more I see and come to know of nature, the more it feels miraculous, magical. I feel my ancestors, my history, my connection to the soil and the chalk and the bones of the land. In our home, this year we have begun to celebrate the turning of the seasons by marking the solstices and traditional fire festivals - I think it's a good way for all of us to feel connected to nature, and the little one enjoys gathering greenery and blossoms to decorate the table for our feasts.

Our table for Beltane (May Eve)

Once when I was young, I stayed up all night reading poetry, and the dawn chorus and the breaking light seemed like such a gift, such a wondrous and incredible thing, that for a short time I thought I had found God, and became a devoted churchgoer. I can still feel that sense of awe and joy, of reverence, for the natural world, but I no longer feel it fits within the framework of patriarchal religion. That was just the only frame of reference I had at the time, the only hook on which I could hang such emotions and experience (having attended C of E school).

I'm also psychic. Or perhaps that's a bit strong - intuitive, or sensitive, might be a better term. In really small ways usually - dreams that come true being the most common. I also briefly had a sideline in telling fortunes at secondary school for fifty pence a pop, until my accuracy was denounced as 'creepy' and one girl spread a rumour that I could tell you when you were going to die (spoiler: no I can't). I've never made any real effort to work with it or hone it - in fact I've generally suppressed it (that fear of being too woo-woo, again) - but every now and again I get something a bit more dramatic and difficult to explain, such as the way I met my second boyfriend. I woke up one Saturday morning, and could 'see', in my head, exactly what was going to happen that day. Not as a vision, but the knowledge was just THERE, whole and complete.

I got into action before my rational mind could talk me out of it. I got up and dressed, tidied my room, took my guitar out of the cupboard and stood it in the corner. I wrote my phone number on a slip of card and put it in my pocket. I walked to my friend Ana's house down the street, and together we walked to a house we'd never visited before. My now-ex was in the garden. We looked at each other. Ana and I walked away. In my head, I was counting down - and on cue, he came running after us. I gave him my number.

An hour or so later we were all hanging out in my conspicuously tidy room. Ana was stroking my pet rat. The new guy was playing Basket Case by Green Day on my guitar. We were together for over a decade. In fact, part of the reason I stuck out the relationship was so long was because of the circumstances in which we met - I felt perhaps we were capital-F Fated. Now I suspect I simply wanted a boyfriend so much that I accidentally manifested one.

It's not that I think this kind of experience is a prerequisite for choosing a Pagan path, but I do feel that these traditions provide a good structure for learning how to use and channel this 'ability', so that - I hope - it can become something I can work with and direct rather than being something that just happens to me.

I've had other weird experiences - both in similar vein, and very much not - which I may talk about at some point, as some of them have shaped my world view in a big way. I don't often discuss any of this, as I know even my most supportive friends might be disbelieving, and I don't want to feel I have to excuse or justify what I have felt and experienced. But I'm done with pretending that such experiences and feelings don't have a huge influence on who I am. I don't want to suppress this part of myself any more - I want to embrace it, and go deeper.

As a teenage Wiccan, I very much followed a Pagan-by-numbers approach. I bought a book that told me the names of some deities, and the right words to say for this or that ritual, and which herbs or coloured candles to buy. I dutifully followed the steps, but I never FELT anything. It was like shouting into an abyss.

Now I am a bit older, it's obvious why this approach didn't work. You can't just read a name in a book and tell yourself to believe in it. This time around, I intend to listen to my intuition, read widely, get my hands muddy, and find a path based on what I know, feel, experience and believe.

It's time to get my woo-woo on.

The Life You Want Is Not For Sale

August last year was a breath of fresh air after lockdown as we were able to go on our annual trip to our favourite little cottage in Pembrokeshire. I drifted onto Pinterest and Instagram once each, and wasn't able to tear myself away from my emails as much as I would have liked, but the holiday was an interesting benchmark to see how I was changing. 

Our first visit, I was heavily pregnant, had no real sense of identity and so was shopping constantly as if I could build a self that way, and found it a relief to give up wearing make-up (strange now that that once seemed so radical!) and immerse myself in sightseeing and novels.

Our second, I was not far into my first attempted no-shop year. The Wi-Fi had arrived, and I was anxious and plagued by comparison, desperate to improve myself in various ways as I didn't feel up to the standard of other women I saw. This was the year of frantic Pinterest- and ASOS-scrolling in bathrooms.

This year, I felt much more relaxed and comfortable in my own skin. I kept up with messages, surveys and emails, more because I felt I should than because I wanted to, so I didn't get that complete sense of escape, retreat and renewal, but it didn't get out of hand either. I enjoyed trying local foods, and I did make some purchases, including a second-hand knitting book from a junk shop, a hat from a woollen mill we visited, and a skorts situation (one of the most useful items of clothing I own! Dries really quickly and has three pockets!) from an ethical clothing store we visited so that I could go swimming comfortably whilst on my period. I felt much more engaged with and aware of nature - we spent a lot of time on the beach, swimming, clambering over rocks and finding incredible things in rock pools. And the comparison was gone - hooray!

In September, our trip to Glastonbury rolled around, shortly before my birthday. Again, I made some purchases - the first of which was a book on nålbinding and a bone needle from the Viking shop Wyrd Raven (love me some heritage crafts!). 

As usually happens when I find myself in places where everyone is a bit alternative in manner of dress, I felt a bit boring and basic. I can't win with this. If I bust out the velvet dresses and shitkicking boots I feel self-conscious and like The Weird Friend(TM) (I have friends who do introduce me as "the weird one" - they don't realise I'm actually really super-sensitive and cry a little inside). If I wear jeans and t-shirt I feel plain and unimaginative. But the comparison is a far cry from what it used to be, and I don't need dreadlocks and a cupboard full of dubiously sourced crystals to be interested in the environment or to enjoy Glastonbury. 

We had a busy weekend of sightseeing, drinking blackberry mead in our hotel room and (in my case) looking hopefully for faeries, and I had no difficulty with refraining from shopping until the very last day, when I broke on all counts. I couldn't resist an Instagram post, and I bought three items of clothing. I was disappointed with the first point, but not the second in the end. Although I was time-pressured (Dai and the Spud were waiting in the car) and budget-constrained, the three pieces I bought - essentially on impulse, wanting to capture the sense of excitement, unconventionality and free-spiritedness I was feeling - have turned out to be three of the most-worn, most-loved and useful things I own! A chunky multicoloured knitted jacket with a fleece lining, which has served me well over the winter, a pair of purple tie-dye dungarees, and a pair of harem pants with a muted rainbow stripe. 

Before I decided I was going to make some purchases, shopping ban be damned, the Spud and Dai and I sat eating our breakfast and drinking our much-needed coffee at a spindly table in the village square, basking in the sunshine. I was hunched over my phone, researching the ethical credentials of the shops I planned to visit, until I was satisfied I could give myself the green light to go ahead without guilt on that front. 

I was also pleased with myself because I have a clear memory from my first Pembrokeshire trip, when I chose not to buy a pair of bright tie-dye leggings, because I was worried they might "draw too much attention to me". I was happy that I was beginning to choose for myself, not make myself small or try to fit a label (I used to buy pretty much anything vaguely goth that came across my path).

Coming home from Glastonbury I felt quite rejuvenated. I expect that, living in a place that is largely pretty provincial, it's healthy to be reminded that it's okay to be a bit more 'out there'. I started to make more effort with decor around our home, and I considered planning an annual or biannual trip to Glastonbury to stock up on mead, Goddess statues, Viking jewellery and unconventional ethical clothing. 

I had a twinge or two in case this was all a bit consumerist, but at the same time I wondered (as I have many times before) whether the human soul simply needs colour, beauty and art every now and again.

A lot of my wardrobe felt a little lacklustre in comparison to my new things. I had been playing it safe for a long time - worried about attention, or vanity, or consumerism. I'd almost forgotten the joy of impulse-buying something that is exactly right, or choosing a book in a real, physical bookshop. Non-chain-store shopping that is ethical and vibrant and brings a little excitement. Surely this is not the same animal as the blind, semi-desperate basket-filling I used to do in Primark, IKEA, Zara, it's-cheap-so-I'll-have-it? Is it selling out to consumer culture to take joy in well-chosen material objects, to appreciate the things we use and cherish them, not buy them to be used once and discarded?

Browsing online started to frustrate and irritate me. I couldn't find items that produced the same spark, especially since I wasn't sure what keywords to use or where to look. Standard labels we use like 'hippie' or 'alternative clothing' mainly turned up stuff that was mass-produced, sweatshop-made and unoriginal, which wasn't at all what I was looking for (is it 'alternative' if you bought it from the same website or brand that all the other 'alternative' kids are shopping from this week? What's unique about a goth-in-a-box kit from Attitude Clothing? Tell me how that's less basic than buying all your clothes from New Look). 

Then it was my birthday. It was fantastic and felt really special - books, flowers, sunshine and a most excellent Indian takeaway. 

On my birthday, I decided that the shopping ban was to be no more. I wrote in my journal, "I want to be able to treat myself without guilt - enjoy books, films, music and art as and when I want to without feeling bad about it. And I want to learn to find a balance between spending and being frugal without going to one extreme or the other." 

Can you guess what happened next? That's right! I went to the other extreme. It started so promisingly - we went to an artisan's market, and I bought nothing. Hooray! I had discovered that I could make good decisions and apply what I'd learned without clinging to the framework of trying never to buy anything. 

Except... not so much. Online browsing, annoying and unsatisfying though it was, quickly filled up my spare moments. Within three days I'd bought six clothing items, an art piece, and some more books. Whilst the items were great, I knew I couldn't afford for this to continue, and I also felt lacking in purpose without the ban to direct me (here's a thing I should probably do something about, as I don't intend to be on a shopping ban forever). So I reinstated my limits.

I want to enjoy my clothes, but I don't want to go back to having to prove how ~alternative~ I am by buying into a 'look'. And I don't want to spend hours online, fruitlessly searching for - what, exactly? I feel like an exciting, enchanted, magical life is out there, but I just don't know how to find it or create it. I have deduced, however, that it's not for sale on Etsy.

Nineties Fantasy Has Ruined Me For Normal Life

As I was pondering whether my February purchase should be an Abney Park poster that gave me chills down my spine (in a good way), or a set of herbal hair care products to baby my tattered ends, I suddenly realised what a vast number of my purchases - valued successes and obsessive overspends alike - had in common. A glance at my library of fantasy, sci-fi and urban fantasy novels, my modest art collection (heavy on the dragons and faeries), my t-shirts (same), even my perfume collection (with names like Goblin, Elf Queen and Shieldmaiden) should perhaps have clued me in sooner. I'm completely besotted with magical worlds, fantastical creatures and anything that taps into that, from music to unicorn socks.

The thing is, this used to be a world I actively participated in creating for myself. I grew up reading Chris Wooding, Tamora Pearce, C.S. Lewis, Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, J.R.R. Tolkien and many more, and I wrote my own stories and songs and drew my own art inspired by these worlds to varying degrees. Into my early twenties, I was still writing novels and fanfic, although I noticed that the more time I spent in the loop of shopping and social media, the more laborious it got. Although I suspect that the amount of time I spent immersed in mediaeval-esque fantasy has a lot to do with why I can spin wool by hand on a drop spindle, nowadays I spend hours searching for the perfect book, TV show or album - not bad in itself, but representative of the fact that I now simply consume instead of participate.

Once I came to believe that the things I was making weren't necessarily that great (from a critical or commercial standpoint), the idea started to seep in that I should spend my time doing something more "productive" instead. I didn't devote enough time to my drawing to ever become a "good" artist - so why bother? What was I ever going to do with those pictures anyway? My writing wasn't terrible, but getting published seemed to involve a lot of marketing and self-promotion, which wasn't what I wanted to spend my time on. And gradually my writing dried up too.

Except that "more productive" thing I should be doing never arrived. I went to work, I watched telly, I spent a lot of time online. I did try MMORPGs, but I didn't find that gaming gave the same sense of being 'in' that world. I do like Dungeons & Dragons, but I'm hampered in getting into character by my own shyness, and my ex attends the only D&D group I know of in my town. I did do some character art, though, not gonna lie... (My character is a halfling barbarian with a background in piracy... Yes, my original Dungeon Master let me have my halfling be a barbarian (berserking and giant warhammers typically requiring a character taller than the average toddler, but my dorky heart wants what it wants) and I REGRET NOTHING.)

Fast forward a few years, and my imagination and vibrant inner life have pretty much stagnated. I realise now that I shouldn't have worried about being productive, or whether what I was making would be commercially viable. I was so convinced that if I wanted to be creative I needed to be able to sell the end product, to other people, for money, that I overlooked the happiness and satisfaction I got from building my own worlds. The things I get the most enjoyment from buying now are those that tap back into that inner life - albums that tell stories, like Abney Park's Aether Shanties, and magazines and books that are full of magic, like my Enchanted Living subscription, and anything by Naomi Novik, Holly Black or Kate Griffin.

So I hereby give myself permission to be unproductive. To doodle pointless elves. To make bad art and write bad stories and use fanfiction to hang out in someone else's awesome world. To not feel bad if no one ever reads those stories but me, because sometimes the point of something is simply the doing of it, and the satisfaction it gives you, which you can't just go out and buy. To be inspired by other people's work, not feel disheartened or intimidated. To make things just for me, to write the things I want to read, instead of hanging over the shoulders of great authors (metaphorically... that would be creepy) waiting for them to write the exact thing I'm thinking about.

Sometimes, making a lot of bad art leads to good art. But if it doesn't, and at the end of my life all I leave behind is a heap of bad art, that would still be better than leaving behind no art at all. 

Buying Magic, Borrowing Books, and Being Invisible in a Bikini

Buying Magic

On one family day out in the Year of the First Shopping Ban (or 2019, as some people call it), Dai, the Spud and I ended up in Burley, a small village in the New Forest which draws a substantial tourist crowd for its ties to Wicca and witchcraft, as the home of the famous witch Sybil Leek. Full of shops packed with incense, crystals, jewellery, witch figurines, spell components, hippie clothing and more, it's a lovely quirky place and has long been one of my favourite places to visit. But during the shopping ban, I'd had many of the shops there mentally earmarked as "shops I wouldn't be able to resist".

And yet, I did! We had a delicious dinner in the tea rooms and a walk around, but I didn't find myself tempted by a single thing. In fact, the phrase "New Age crap" drifted through my mind more than once. I wasn't getting caught up by the atmosphere, the vibe of the place. I just... wasn't buying it. 

In some ways it was a little sad that the dazzle of the magic shops no longer had the power to instill such wonder, but at the end of the day, a shop is just a shop, whether it sells esoterica or groceries, and all else is glamour, an illusion designed to get you to part with some cash. 

Don't get me wrong... I strongly, firmly, utterly believe in magic! In many ways, I am the perfect victim - sorry, target audience, for the peddlers of smudge sticks, crystals, Himalayan singing bowls, Tarot cards and whathaveyou. Yes, all right, I own three decks of oracle cards and my favourite magazine is Enchanted Living. Guilty as charged, I am full woo-woo, I just keep it under wraps most of the time because I don't go in for tie dye skirts or crushed velvet (not right this minute, anyway). 

I am all for having a little enchantment in your life. It adds glamour to the humdrum, a bit of sparkle - even meaningfulness - to the everyday. It fuels creativity. I just don't believe that you can buy magic. 

Yes, there are shops in which you can buy ingredients for every spell and potion you can think of. Yes, I once had a heavy interest in Wicca and bulk-ordered candles, velvet altar cloths, pentacle jewellery, herbs and all kinds of other paraphernalia, but over time I realised, well, it's just not the same, is it? Like buying spellbooks and grimoires from Amazon (done that, too). Doesn't it then lose its charm? Its meaning? Maybe it doesn't matter if you buy your lavender or grow it in your own herb garden. But maybe it does? Not least in our modern era, when your healing crystals could have been sourced from an industrial mine using the labour of underage workers, and your cleansing herbs threatening the potential survival of a species. Nothing very magical about that.

Borrowed Books

Similarly, but in less of a space cadet vein, let's return to the topic of buying books on Amazon. What a soulless process that is, compared to the many happy hours of my youth spent in bookshops, charity shops, book fairs and the good old free library. Like many people, I have done it an awful lot, because it's convenient and cheap. But with reviews, GoodReads, book blogs and other such tools, I now know everything about a book before my fingers have even touched the cover. I enter the relationship already knowing that three other readers thought the ending was weak. During the shopping ban, I rediscovered the pleasure of borrowing books, from libraries and from friends, and thereby rediscovered the serendipity of finding a hidden gem, something which no "readers also bought" suggestion list can ever truly replicate.

An insidious tendency in our modern society is that we don't buy anything without reading reviews. Sometimes, this is a matter of common sense - electronics, car seats - sometimes you really do need an objective opinion. But sometimes, I have come to notice, I use other people's opinions to guide me instead of making my own choices. In today's world, we automatically make our choices based on other people's experiences, from GoodReads to TripAdvisor, to what we think will get the most likes on Instagram. I've never forgotten a friend mentioning on her blog that she ordered avocado toast in a cafe because "as we all know, avocado is having a moment right now."

Our First Family Holiday

In July 2019 we took our first holiday as a new family, to the Isle of Wight. In a rare moment of prescience, I had booked and paid for the short trip during the early months of my pregnancy, guessing correctly that by this stage of the game Dai and I would be tired, stressed and desperate for a change of scenery. I didn't expect that I would have blown my savings, although my reluctance to ever look at my bank statements should perhaps have clued me in. 

Previously, holidays had given me yet more opportunities to splurge. First of all, a new holiday wardrobe - sandals, shoes, floaty floral dresses, a floppy straw hat that would be annoying as heck to wear and never see the light of day again. Then I would buy the equivalent of another new wardrobe whilst ON holiday - I must admit to a fondness for certain overpriced surf clothing brands - not to mention all the books and souvenirs I would generally buy. At some point I'd stopped looking at holidays and day trips as breaks or adventures - they had just become an opportunity to do some more consumption in a different place. This had hit its peak some years previous when I went to Whitby Goth Weekend - I went with one suitcase and came back with five, which made the long train journey home nothing short of a misery.

This time, things would be different. Dai had suggested I set myself a £1 budget to buy what he called "a proper souvenir" like a pin badge or stick of rock, as would have been the case when we were kids. At first I resisted this idea, but eventually I realised I was looking for a loophole which would allow me to go and buy a new hoodie or whatever from Billabong or Rip Curl. So £1 it was.

As it turned out, I didn't even spend that much on myself. Though we stayed just moments away from Shanklin Old Town and all its quirky gift shops, nothing caught my eye or piqued my interest for more than a moment. I was able to put all of the holiday money I'd squirrelled away towards entry to attractions, food for our self-catering apartment, and some lovely evening meals out.

It wasn't the most restful holiday we'd ever had. Little Spud didn't want to sleep in an unfamiliar cot, and the one-room apartment grew hot and sticky at nights. Yet I had a good time, and it wasn't lost on me that the best day of the holiday involved no phones, cameras or even money - we took the Spud swimming for the first time at a hotel nearby. We had free access to their facilities as the same people owned the hotel and apartment building, but by good luck and happenstance we had the pool all to ourselves that afternoon. The Spud absolutely loved it, and I'll never forget the brilliance of his smile and his delighted squeals.

It was also a turning point for me, as I hadn't worn a swimsuit of any kind in public since I was about fifteen years old. My body image is something that, like many women, I have wrestled with, and I'd simply stopped going swimming over a decade ago so that I didn't have to reveal my human, imperfect body. Bad skin and disordered eating had left me convinced that I would end up the butt of every joke if I ventured into the water. But I did it, once at the hotel pool, once at the beach, and absolutely nothing happened. No one looked twice at me. What a relief it was to discover that no one cared! Another blow against that carping inner voice.