This has been, I think, the worst year of my life. But things are improving. More on that below, but first, a quick shout about my current publishing project…
There is just 1 day left to back Crab & Bee’s Matter of Britain on Kickstarter. It is a book of short, wyrd, anarchic retellings of Albion’s folk tales. Here are what our advance readers said about it:
This is an inspired retelling of some of the finest tales and tale tropes of England, at once very old and very modern, firmly rooted in enduring landscapes and mindscapes
Professor Ronald Hutton author of The Witch, Blood and Mistletoe, Pagan Britain and one of Philomena Cunk's most game interviewees
In the Matter of Britain, Crab and Bee appear to have casually gathered up the folk consciousness of Britain, laughed at it, stamped on it, and lovingly restored it to our modern landscape. But that might not be the truth of it. You will know many of these characters, and yet meet them for the first time. This is a folk masterpiece.
Lisa Schneidau - oral storyteller and author of the Folk Tales of Britain & Ireland series
For those who do not recognise themselves in the narratives they have been told here is a new set of myths, ancient but future-orientated too. A hallucinatory journey through a re-imagined Albion and its landscapes. Origin stories for a people to come who are also already here.
Professor Simon O’Sullivan - author of From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair
Hallucinatory and hypnotic, grounded and earthy, this is a re-enchantment of the land, its past, present and future, with dirt beneath its nails.
Dr Katy Soar - Senior Lecturer in Classical Archaeology, University of Winchester
Crab and Bee have this knack of coming at things out of left field, back to front, bottom up or inside out. On their psychic and physical peregrinations, the familiar becomes fantastic, grotesque, eldritch or wondrous, the fantastic and mythic revealed in the everyday. In the process they reveal the flecks of gold in the post-industrial muck.
John Constable aka John Crow, author of The Southwark Mysteries
The book is already funded, but all extra money we raise by the end of the Kickstarter tomorrow is being put into organising a book tour so that Crab & Bee can take their tales back around the land that inspired them. Find out more here.
Back to my life.
I don’t normally write about myself here. I try to keep these posts short, and ego-free.
But I’m not sure I can do it any more. So I’m offloading.
Trigger warning for suicidal ideation. Please pause now and sign up for the Zero Suicide Alliance’s suicide awareness course. You could save lives. I have.
I’ve hated this year. Everyone I know has hated this year.
We’re living through the collapse of everything we knew as normal, with a topping of ambient genocide, while living costs are twice what they were when David Bowie died.
Personally, I’ve had relationship, financial, and health woes, but what’s pushed me too far is something so ridiculous, I’m almost embarrassed to mention it.
We’ve moved to the countryside by mistake.
I now live an Instagram-perfect life, off-grid, with few real responsibilities, and fewer financial worries than most, in one of the most beautiful places in England.
But it’s so fucking lonely.
So lonely, that for the first time in 35 years I’ve considered killing myself.
I actually started; decided to starve myself to death, because I knew it would give me ample time to change my mind; which, thank fuck, I did.
Everything’s fine right now!
Thanks to The Blindboy Podcast I’ve figured out so much more about my particular flavour of neuroherbs-and-spiciness.
I always thought I was an introvert. Turns out I’m just an extrovert who’s shy around new people.
Turns out I need people, loads and loads and loads of creative, inventive, crazy people, to feed my mind, to fuel my battery.
Much as I love the handful of farmers and retirees who live around me, I need more.
And the last few weeks have given me so much more.
I’ve travelled to Liverpool, Sheffield, and London, participated and performed in The People’s Day of Death and Abyssmass, and been reminded that I have scores and scores of wonderful friends who love me, respect me, admire me, are rooting for me.
(In truth, I never forgot this, even when I was seeking death; I know that I am loved, but I need to experience that love in flesh, and blood, and breath, and bone, in order to be kept alive).
And I also need to sing, and I need to dance. And I have!
At last year’s People’s Day of Death, I met undertaker Andy Jones, who taught me the song Crossing the Bar (based on a Tennyson poem). We spent most of the night, around a campfire, inviting people to sing it with us, improvising ever richer harmonies.
At this year’s Day of Death, we recruited folk singer Rebecca Hearne, and Tocky Tommy, the pure embodiment of Scouse heart and world’s number one bus tour guide. They helped us lead 400 people in the song as they boarded the Mersey Ferry, and then again after we’d crossed the River Styx to Birkenhead.
Somebody captured this magical brief footage of us (wearing shaman costumes by Sans Jim Sanders)
At Abyssmass two weeks later, stripped of my three companions, I again led a crowd of people singing the same song.
Several said it was their highlight of the night, which, given that I was up against the Marina Abramovićesque hopscotch-and-sex-fuelled Enochian invitation to worship witch-goddess Will of Margaret, as well as Sarah Kershaw appearing as the void, singing and dancing itself out of its own womb, and Francesca Way as backdoor-mage drag king Doctor Dirty Dee, I consider to be… brazen lies.
And then I got to dance to the entirety of the Beatles’ White Album (yes, including Revolution #9) performed live by the incredible 30-piece Sheffield Beatles Project. I am full of music and love.
So. Turns out I need people and music in my life. I will keep that in mind.
On my way back from London, I saw this message scratched into the painted-over window of a closed down bank:
And, really, that sums it up.
We all live in the moment between the click and the bang.
Death is coming for you soon, no need to offer any assistance.
There are always unexpected surprises waiting just around the corner:
Don’t be afraid. It's only love.
Don’t be afraid. You’re already dead.
Love is simple.
🖤
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