It's a lot easier to get up and down Britain than it is to get across from one side to the other - by public transport, anyway.
However, the fact remains that Hereford is in the far west of England, and Lincoln is far to the east, and I was determined to get to Lincoln (and back again, obviously).
I was not looking forward to the journey. I was looking forward even less to the return journey, which would (for various complicated reasons) not only be across the country, but across the country on a Sunday! It didn't help my anxieties that the staff of Hereford railway station seemed to be as baffled about how to do the journey as I was myself. At least the fare seemed to be quite reasonable - £55 for an off-peak return, which is only a little bit more than a taxi fare from Hereford to Hay!
It wasn't as bad as I'd feared.
The journey out started with the college bus from Hay at around ten past seven in the morning, which left me plenty of time to wait for the Birmingham New Street train. I always pop into the local newsagents to get a magazine, so I had something to keep me occupied (and chocolate - I thought I'd need chocolate).
The change at Birmingham, to the Derby train, went smoothly. The chap pushing the refreshments trolley was very jolly - and so was the train guard, who looked at the way I had been told to go and said: "We can do better for you than that!"
So instead of going up to Derby, then changing for Beeston, then changing for Lincoln, he sent me straight up to Nottingham to change for Lincoln. Nottingham station is going through a big re-development - it's going to be very smart when it's finished, but it's like a building site at the moment. It was quite easy to find where I needed to be, though.
The final leg of my journey stopped at every little station on the line to Lincoln, and I got there at about half past two in the afternoon. My Young Man had got there earlier (he was travelling up and down the country) and he took me straight for a beer!
On the way back, we left the B&B at ten o'clock, and got a taxi round to the station rather than trundle all that luggage up the High Street. The station didn't actually open until half past ten, and quite a little crowd had gathered by the time the doors were opened.
I had several options to get back home - but I had to wait until three o'clock in the afternoon for two of them, so I decided to go for the one that put me on the quarter past eleven train. That way, I could go to the first changeover in the company of the Young Man, before he carried on south to London.
He got off all right, but my connection was delayed by engineering works - he told me later that his train was delayed at the same works, and he'd been very impressed with the speed that the engineers were working to get the track back up and running.
Meanwhile, I was hanging around on the platform at Newark, and beginning to realise that there was no way I would catch the connection that I was aiming for. So I went to the nice man in the Customer Services office. "Why have they sent you this way?" he asked. "We can do better than that for you."
So he put me on the next train to Peterborough.
About a minute after I arrived in Peterborough and trundled my case across to the next platform, the train to Birmingham New Street came in.
At Birmingham, the train to Hereford was waiting at the platform.
And outside the station in Hereford, I climbed straight into a taxi.
So I did the journey in about six hours rather than the eight that I thought it would take!
Thank goodness for friendly and helpful railway staff!
Wednesday, 18 September 2013
Tuesday, 17 September 2013
Steampunk Superheroes
A few more pictures from Asylum last weekend:
Superwoman outside the Victoria pub
Catwoman, Robin and Batman at the Castle
and Captain America, who makes the patchwork corsets - that's her stall in the Westgate hall.
Superwoman outside the Victoria pub
Catwoman, Robin and Batman at the Castle
and Captain America, who makes the patchwork corsets - that's her stall in the Westgate hall.
Monday, 16 September 2013
Lincoln Steampunk Asylum
I've just come back from a wonderful weekend in the city of Lincoln, which was hosting the fifth Steampunk Asylum (so called because the first events were based around the city's old mental asylum). It's the first big Steampunk event I've been to, and I had the most enormous amount of fun! It kind of reminded me of the early days of Star Trek conventions, when there was a great outpouring of fan creativity (this was before any of the films were made, and well before The Next Generation), and it was all so relaxed, and friendly.
This is me, dressed as a Steampunk (and Whovian) Alice in Wonderland - on the same day that Robert Rankin was signing copies of his new book Alice on Mars! A little while after this picture was taken, I found the perfect hat to go with the outfit in one of the vintage clothes shops up the Steep Hill - it's a 1940s round cap with a cascade of blue feathers down the back.
The following day, I took part in the Wild West shoot out!
Here is El Guano/El Zombiro fearlessly facing his opponents in the Castle grounds, courtesy of Mr Eric, who is pictured at the far right of the line (his wife was taking the photo). The final show down involved about a dozen gunslingers with nerf guns, and started off like the gun fight in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, with a musical box.
This is me, dressed as a Steampunk (and Whovian) Alice in Wonderland - on the same day that Robert Rankin was signing copies of his new book Alice on Mars! A little while after this picture was taken, I found the perfect hat to go with the outfit in one of the vintage clothes shops up the Steep Hill - it's a 1940s round cap with a cascade of blue feathers down the back.
The following day, I took part in the Wild West shoot out!
Here is El Guano/El Zombiro fearlessly facing his opponents in the Castle grounds, courtesy of Mr Eric, who is pictured at the far right of the line (his wife was taking the photo). The final show down involved about a dozen gunslingers with nerf guns, and started off like the gun fight in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, with a musical box.
Sunday, 8 September 2013
Ann Crispin and Yesterday's Son
I saw on tor.com today that Ann Crispin has died. She was only 63.
Ann Crispin wrote one of my favourite ever Star Trek novels - in fact, two that come as a pair - Yesterday's Son and Time For Yesterday. It starts with the premise that, while Spock was trapped in the past of the doomed planet Sarpedion, he got Zarabeth (the woman who saved him and Dr McCoy from certain death in a snowstorm) pregnant. At the beginning of the book, he discovers that he is a father, and insists on going back to Sarpedion's past to rescue the child. Kirk and McCoy, being who they are, insist on going with him - and they find Zar, who is a young man, not a child, and who causes Spock quite a bit of soul searching.
I loved Zar - I loved the way McCoy cut his hair into Spock's fringe style, and the way he stalked off and got himself a ham sandwich when he violently disagreed with Spock but didn't want to show it emotionally, and how he experimented with sliding doors, and looked with wonder on his first alien sky full of stars. I was there, in the story with them, and that is the sign of a very good storyteller as far as I'm concerned. It's all the more remarkable in that this was Ann Crispin's very first professional submission.
She was also, it is obvious from the comments over on tor.com, a very nice person, who will be greatly missed from the SF family.
Ann Crispin wrote one of my favourite ever Star Trek novels - in fact, two that come as a pair - Yesterday's Son and Time For Yesterday. It starts with the premise that, while Spock was trapped in the past of the doomed planet Sarpedion, he got Zarabeth (the woman who saved him and Dr McCoy from certain death in a snowstorm) pregnant. At the beginning of the book, he discovers that he is a father, and insists on going back to Sarpedion's past to rescue the child. Kirk and McCoy, being who they are, insist on going with him - and they find Zar, who is a young man, not a child, and who causes Spock quite a bit of soul searching.
I loved Zar - I loved the way McCoy cut his hair into Spock's fringe style, and the way he stalked off and got himself a ham sandwich when he violently disagreed with Spock but didn't want to show it emotionally, and how he experimented with sliding doors, and looked with wonder on his first alien sky full of stars. I was there, in the story with them, and that is the sign of a very good storyteller as far as I'm concerned. It's all the more remarkable in that this was Ann Crispin's very first professional submission.
She was also, it is obvious from the comments over on tor.com, a very nice person, who will be greatly missed from the SF family.
Saturday, 7 September 2013
Sol III Star Trek Con, 1985
I've been having a clear out, and at the bottom of a cupboard I found a file full of - well, historic documents!
Back in the dim and distant past ("Remember the good old 1980s, when life was so uncomplicated?") I was a member of a couple of Star Trek fan clubs, STAG (Star Trek Action Group) and Starship Excalibur. I also used to go to Star Trek conventions, and I wrote Con Reports for the newsletters of the clubs. In a way, I was blogging even then, but in those days I would type it out on a manual typewriter, and send it off to the club secretary. She (and presumably her minions) would then type it out as part of the newsletter, make photocopies, and send them by post to the members, once every two or three months. And if we wanted to reply to a letter or article in the newsletter, we had to wait three months for it to appear!
So here is the Con Report for Sol III, 1985, just as I wrote it:
"Friday: We reached Liverpool from London about the same time as the opening ceremony. The Adelphi Hotel is a mere stone's throw from the railway station, and Reception proved to be quite spectacularly Edwardian, with a mirrored ceiling and lots of marble and gilt. We discovered that the hotel had been modelled on a luxury passenger liner when it was built in 1914. The washstand in our room was original marble (so was the plaster, complete with cracks, but otherwise the room was very comfortable).
The mezzanine level was even more impressive than reception, dotted with potted palms among the seats, with more marble pillars and gilt. All the rooms were off this central area, with the main hall through a hypostyle, more pillars and mirrors. There were a lot of new faces about - first time attendees had a green star on their badges; and a few costumes were already in evidence, including a very good Imperial Klingon who, I learned later, reacted completely in character to a passing tribble - leaping about eight feet backwards.
Saturday: Rose fairly early, and then spent three-quarters of an hour trying to put some new blue make-up on evenly. It was really too dark for an Andorian, and as per usual I hadn't tried it out pre-Con. I went down to breakfast looking like a blue panda, and found that the waiters were extremely helpful (perhaps this had something to do with the split in my skirt from ankle to waist). The poor staff were coping very well, considering that this was their first Con.
Then to the main hall, for James White's talk, which he read with a magnifying glass, as he suffers from a diabetic eye complaint. He was very amusing, for instance about his early days as a writer, when the carriage return on his aged typewriter was three cans of baked beans in a string bag. (N.B. All my quotes are paraphrases, more or less). "Press 'release' and let gravity and baked beans do the rest.... at least I knew that I would never starve as an aspiring author." James White wrote the Sector General hospital books, and other 'hard' SF, and was curious as to why a Star Trek con had invited a member of the 'lunatic fringe' to talk. He also told a rather involved and very funny story about intelligent plankton who wove themselves into a tartan carpet under stress.
Shortly after this, while collecting a drink (orange and lemonade, I hasten to add) I was approached by someone who asked me if I would like to speak on local radio! "Good grief!" I said, followed by "Yes, of course." Being told to go down to the registration desk in ten minutes, I had no sooner taken a sip of my drink when I was approached by a chap with a badge marked 'PRESS' in large friendly letters. Would I mind having my picture taken? So off we went to the art room, where the light was good, and he took several pictures, including a closeup of my by now blotchy blue make-up. He borrowed a pen from a passer-by to take my name and species, and said that my picture would be in Monday's Liverpool Daily Post. Gosh, fame at last! Then I went down to the registration desk, to have my picture taken again, in a group shot with all the other costumed fans they'd been able to round up. It turned out to be a local hospital radio service, and they interviewed James White, me, an Australian midwife who works in Harrow (dressed in a 14th century ball gown, having got the century wrong when she decided to visit Earth), Miri Rana in Starfleet uniform, and a Vulcan ambassador and STAB member, Robert Wooder. It was during the general chatting after recording the interview that it was mentioned that a group of educationally subnormal children would be coming with their teacher on Sunday morning, as a way of introducing them fairly gently to strangers in the outside world. (I didn't actually see them, being busy elsewhere - and if this is the outside world, lets have more of it!)
I arrived back in the main hall in time for Mark Lenard's talk. As on his last visit at Aucon 81, he was an excellent speaker, and told many anecdotes about the series and the two films. He got us all to repeat his Klingonese phrases from the first film. "The green slime was coming towards us. I was shaking, the camera was shaking, I was shaking the chair, and I had to look up and try to act...."
In the evening I changed my make-up for a paler blue greasepaint which I've used before. The standard of the fancy dress was as usual high. The best Trek entry was the priestess T'wit, keeper of the marbles on Mount Seleya. She was looking for the miscreant who had robbed her of a great prize i.e. Spock's katra. "She pauses... (she points at Mark Lenard on the judge's table)...but no - the eyebrows are wrong and the ears are wrong.... Perchance she will have more luck in London where she has heard of a certain Elgin, who has a great collection of marbles...."
The end of the competition was enlivened by the kidnap of Sarek of Vulcan by STAB, the statutory murder of Chris Chivers and Anne Page being forced around the audience so that paper money could be put in her garter. £110.53 was collected up off the dance floor.
Sunday: Sat with a lady called Susan Broughton and her mother for Lisa Tuttle's talkk, which was much concerned with sexual equality, how she discovered SF and started writing and what it was like to be an American living in England. She thought it a good thing for an SF writer to always have the edge of feeling a little bit alien, and suggested that the same thing gets people into SF fandom - feeling a little bit different from 'normal' people.
While at lunch, Mark Lenard wandered by. "My, aren't we pretty?" he said to me. "You're an um...?"
"Andorian," I supplied, trying not to grin stupidly. "That a Vulcan ambassador could forget names is acceptable - but species?) He spoke again in the afternoon, mostly about other shows he'd been in, like 'The Wild, Wild West', 'Buck Rogers', (as an ambassador who could remove his head) and 'Mission Impossible'. He also demonstrated on a small boy from the audience, how the latex appliance for Urko in 'Planet of the Apes' had been put on. He was also in 'The Greatest Story Ever Told' when, as a magi, he fell off his camel.
A STAG meeting took up the earlier part of the afternoon, with its own slide show quiz. Questions ranged from the serious - 'name the episode' - to the ridiculous - 'name the kid in the yellow shirt' (who happened to be Kirk) or 'name this brain and his two friends'. Best answer came to a slide which actually showed Spock leaving the bridge in 'Amok Time', to which the question was 'where is Spock going?' The answer: 'To re-negotiate his contract.'
(Best T-shirt of the Con, by the way, was "My Ceti Eel died of hunger").
The evening was taken up with the Heroes and Villains party - I got my free drink by saying I was Thelev's sister from Journey to Babel, and also an Orion spy. This got me shot by a friend dressed as Blake, after asking if there was a bounty on me. There was a great variety of costumes, including the sixth Doctor, the Master, a Skeksis, cowboys, Supergirl, Princess Irulan and the Shadout Mapes, and several devils with tridents. We stayed for the Starfleet Academy Challenge - the questions ranged from general media and books to specialist sections on a ST character, episode and film, and were really quite hard. The PARSEC team was a worthy winner with 84 points.
Monday: And the programme was running late again, in true con tradition. We arrived in the main hall for the end of 'Beastmaster', which Tim Broadribb had volunteered to put on at 7.30am for those who had missed it on Friday evening. There was a guest panel before the closing ceremony, when it was announced that the money collected for the various charities would come to nearly £2,000 when it all came in and was counted. Mark Lenard had brought some pictures to sell for the US Diabetics and the proceeds were split evenly with the British Diabetics charity, the rest of the money raised going to the main charity, the Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Appeal. One sponsored swimmer raised over £100 single-handed! And finally, back to London (and my picture never did get into the Daily Post).
Good grief - it all comes flooding back! I went to the con with Pat Keen - I was living with her in London at the time - and most of the names I mentioned were famous fans. Miri Rana was a lovely retired lady who loved all the dressing up and was very popular - everybody knew Miri. Chris Chivers did technical things with soundboards and things, and I think he also worked at Andromeda Bookshop. Anne Page was actually collecting for the con charity and was in on the whole thing (which was why she was wearing the garter in the first place). And Tim Broadribb was the projectionist at many Cons. I honestly don't remember anything about STAB.
In the same newsletter was the news that DeForest Kelley was coming to the UK for the first time; Theodore Sturgeon had died; Riverdale, Iowa had declared itself to be the birthplace of Captain Kirk, and Thom Christopher was trying to interest Hollywood in a film or TV series of The Ship Who Sang, after he and Anne McCaffrey had done a reading from the book at a previous con.
Back in the dim and distant past ("Remember the good old 1980s, when life was so uncomplicated?") I was a member of a couple of Star Trek fan clubs, STAG (Star Trek Action Group) and Starship Excalibur. I also used to go to Star Trek conventions, and I wrote Con Reports for the newsletters of the clubs. In a way, I was blogging even then, but in those days I would type it out on a manual typewriter, and send it off to the club secretary. She (and presumably her minions) would then type it out as part of the newsletter, make photocopies, and send them by post to the members, once every two or three months. And if we wanted to reply to a letter or article in the newsletter, we had to wait three months for it to appear!
So here is the Con Report for Sol III, 1985, just as I wrote it:
"Friday: We reached Liverpool from London about the same time as the opening ceremony. The Adelphi Hotel is a mere stone's throw from the railway station, and Reception proved to be quite spectacularly Edwardian, with a mirrored ceiling and lots of marble and gilt. We discovered that the hotel had been modelled on a luxury passenger liner when it was built in 1914. The washstand in our room was original marble (so was the plaster, complete with cracks, but otherwise the room was very comfortable).
The mezzanine level was even more impressive than reception, dotted with potted palms among the seats, with more marble pillars and gilt. All the rooms were off this central area, with the main hall through a hypostyle, more pillars and mirrors. There were a lot of new faces about - first time attendees had a green star on their badges; and a few costumes were already in evidence, including a very good Imperial Klingon who, I learned later, reacted completely in character to a passing tribble - leaping about eight feet backwards.
Saturday: Rose fairly early, and then spent three-quarters of an hour trying to put some new blue make-up on evenly. It was really too dark for an Andorian, and as per usual I hadn't tried it out pre-Con. I went down to breakfast looking like a blue panda, and found that the waiters were extremely helpful (perhaps this had something to do with the split in my skirt from ankle to waist). The poor staff were coping very well, considering that this was their first Con.
Then to the main hall, for James White's talk, which he read with a magnifying glass, as he suffers from a diabetic eye complaint. He was very amusing, for instance about his early days as a writer, when the carriage return on his aged typewriter was three cans of baked beans in a string bag. (N.B. All my quotes are paraphrases, more or less). "Press 'release' and let gravity and baked beans do the rest.... at least I knew that I would never starve as an aspiring author." James White wrote the Sector General hospital books, and other 'hard' SF, and was curious as to why a Star Trek con had invited a member of the 'lunatic fringe' to talk. He also told a rather involved and very funny story about intelligent plankton who wove themselves into a tartan carpet under stress.
Shortly after this, while collecting a drink (orange and lemonade, I hasten to add) I was approached by someone who asked me if I would like to speak on local radio! "Good grief!" I said, followed by "Yes, of course." Being told to go down to the registration desk in ten minutes, I had no sooner taken a sip of my drink when I was approached by a chap with a badge marked 'PRESS' in large friendly letters. Would I mind having my picture taken? So off we went to the art room, where the light was good, and he took several pictures, including a closeup of my by now blotchy blue make-up. He borrowed a pen from a passer-by to take my name and species, and said that my picture would be in Monday's Liverpool Daily Post. Gosh, fame at last! Then I went down to the registration desk, to have my picture taken again, in a group shot with all the other costumed fans they'd been able to round up. It turned out to be a local hospital radio service, and they interviewed James White, me, an Australian midwife who works in Harrow (dressed in a 14th century ball gown, having got the century wrong when she decided to visit Earth), Miri Rana in Starfleet uniform, and a Vulcan ambassador and STAB member, Robert Wooder. It was during the general chatting after recording the interview that it was mentioned that a group of educationally subnormal children would be coming with their teacher on Sunday morning, as a way of introducing them fairly gently to strangers in the outside world. (I didn't actually see them, being busy elsewhere - and if this is the outside world, lets have more of it!)
I arrived back in the main hall in time for Mark Lenard's talk. As on his last visit at Aucon 81, he was an excellent speaker, and told many anecdotes about the series and the two films. He got us all to repeat his Klingonese phrases from the first film. "The green slime was coming towards us. I was shaking, the camera was shaking, I was shaking the chair, and I had to look up and try to act...."
In the evening I changed my make-up for a paler blue greasepaint which I've used before. The standard of the fancy dress was as usual high. The best Trek entry was the priestess T'wit, keeper of the marbles on Mount Seleya. She was looking for the miscreant who had robbed her of a great prize i.e. Spock's katra. "She pauses... (she points at Mark Lenard on the judge's table)...but no - the eyebrows are wrong and the ears are wrong.... Perchance she will have more luck in London where she has heard of a certain Elgin, who has a great collection of marbles...."
The end of the competition was enlivened by the kidnap of Sarek of Vulcan by STAB, the statutory murder of Chris Chivers and Anne Page being forced around the audience so that paper money could be put in her garter. £110.53 was collected up off the dance floor.
Sunday: Sat with a lady called Susan Broughton and her mother for Lisa Tuttle's talkk, which was much concerned with sexual equality, how she discovered SF and started writing and what it was like to be an American living in England. She thought it a good thing for an SF writer to always have the edge of feeling a little bit alien, and suggested that the same thing gets people into SF fandom - feeling a little bit different from 'normal' people.
While at lunch, Mark Lenard wandered by. "My, aren't we pretty?" he said to me. "You're an um...?"
"Andorian," I supplied, trying not to grin stupidly. "That a Vulcan ambassador could forget names is acceptable - but species?) He spoke again in the afternoon, mostly about other shows he'd been in, like 'The Wild, Wild West', 'Buck Rogers', (as an ambassador who could remove his head) and 'Mission Impossible'. He also demonstrated on a small boy from the audience, how the latex appliance for Urko in 'Planet of the Apes' had been put on. He was also in 'The Greatest Story Ever Told' when, as a magi, he fell off his camel.
A STAG meeting took up the earlier part of the afternoon, with its own slide show quiz. Questions ranged from the serious - 'name the episode' - to the ridiculous - 'name the kid in the yellow shirt' (who happened to be Kirk) or 'name this brain and his two friends'. Best answer came to a slide which actually showed Spock leaving the bridge in 'Amok Time', to which the question was 'where is Spock going?' The answer: 'To re-negotiate his contract.'
(Best T-shirt of the Con, by the way, was "My Ceti Eel died of hunger").
The evening was taken up with the Heroes and Villains party - I got my free drink by saying I was Thelev's sister from Journey to Babel, and also an Orion spy. This got me shot by a friend dressed as Blake, after asking if there was a bounty on me. There was a great variety of costumes, including the sixth Doctor, the Master, a Skeksis, cowboys, Supergirl, Princess Irulan and the Shadout Mapes, and several devils with tridents. We stayed for the Starfleet Academy Challenge - the questions ranged from general media and books to specialist sections on a ST character, episode and film, and were really quite hard. The PARSEC team was a worthy winner with 84 points.
Monday: And the programme was running late again, in true con tradition. We arrived in the main hall for the end of 'Beastmaster', which Tim Broadribb had volunteered to put on at 7.30am for those who had missed it on Friday evening. There was a guest panel before the closing ceremony, when it was announced that the money collected for the various charities would come to nearly £2,000 when it all came in and was counted. Mark Lenard had brought some pictures to sell for the US Diabetics and the proceeds were split evenly with the British Diabetics charity, the rest of the money raised going to the main charity, the Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Appeal. One sponsored swimmer raised over £100 single-handed! And finally, back to London (and my picture never did get into the Daily Post).
Good grief - it all comes flooding back! I went to the con with Pat Keen - I was living with her in London at the time - and most of the names I mentioned were famous fans. Miri Rana was a lovely retired lady who loved all the dressing up and was very popular - everybody knew Miri. Chris Chivers did technical things with soundboards and things, and I think he also worked at Andromeda Bookshop. Anne Page was actually collecting for the con charity and was in on the whole thing (which was why she was wearing the garter in the first place). And Tim Broadribb was the projectionist at many Cons. I honestly don't remember anything about STAB.
In the same newsletter was the news that DeForest Kelley was coming to the UK for the first time; Theodore Sturgeon had died; Riverdale, Iowa had declared itself to be the birthplace of Captain Kirk, and Thom Christopher was trying to interest Hollywood in a film or TV series of The Ship Who Sang, after he and Anne McCaffrey had done a reading from the book at a previous con.
Saturday, 31 August 2013
Badger God
Badger culling is in the news. Despite scientific evidence that culling will not work to prevent TB in cattle, and the opposition of wildlife trusts and the RSPCA, the government is pressing ahead with the support of the National Farmers Union.
Volunteers are going out by night to protect the setts as far as they can, and it occurred to me that there really ought to be a god of badgers for Pagans to appeal to.
A little bit of Googling brought up something interesting.
There is indeed a Gaulish badger god - at least, if the translation of Moritasgus really is Great Badger. It might also be Sea Badger, or "masses of sea water". There was a Romano-Gaulish shrine to Apollo Moritasgus at a place called Alesia in present day Burgundy. The Romans often tagged the name of one of their own gods onto a local deity, and since Apollo and Moritasgus were both associated with healing, it seems apt. There was a healing spring at the shrine, and excavations have turned up offerings of model parts of the body, much as you'd find today at Lourdes or other Catholic healing shrines. Alesia is nowhere near the sea, though, which makes me tend to favour the Badger translation of the name.
And then it gets even better, because Moritasgus's consort goddess is Damona - the Divine Cow.
Alesia became even more interesting when I dug a little further, too. It wasn't just the site of a healing shrine. Anyone who's read Asterix will be familiar with the name of the great Gaulish hero Vercingetorix. Alesia is the place where Julius Caesar defeated Vercingetorix in battle, and conquered Gaul (except for that one little village where Asterix lived, of course). It was, in fact, a huge siege, with the Romans throwing up vast earthworks to cut off the Gauls from their re-enforcements, and traces of these earthworks have been picked up by aerial photography There's a statue of Vercingetorix there now.
So here's to Moritasgus, the Great Healing Badger, and his consort Damona the Divine Cow, and to the volunteers who are going out to protect the badgers in Somerset and Gloucestershire.
FAQs about the cull can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22614350
Volunteers are going out by night to protect the setts as far as they can, and it occurred to me that there really ought to be a god of badgers for Pagans to appeal to.
A little bit of Googling brought up something interesting.
There is indeed a Gaulish badger god - at least, if the translation of Moritasgus really is Great Badger. It might also be Sea Badger, or "masses of sea water". There was a Romano-Gaulish shrine to Apollo Moritasgus at a place called Alesia in present day Burgundy. The Romans often tagged the name of one of their own gods onto a local deity, and since Apollo and Moritasgus were both associated with healing, it seems apt. There was a healing spring at the shrine, and excavations have turned up offerings of model parts of the body, much as you'd find today at Lourdes or other Catholic healing shrines. Alesia is nowhere near the sea, though, which makes me tend to favour the Badger translation of the name.
And then it gets even better, because Moritasgus's consort goddess is Damona - the Divine Cow.
Alesia became even more interesting when I dug a little further, too. It wasn't just the site of a healing shrine. Anyone who's read Asterix will be familiar with the name of the great Gaulish hero Vercingetorix. Alesia is the place where Julius Caesar defeated Vercingetorix in battle, and conquered Gaul (except for that one little village where Asterix lived, of course). It was, in fact, a huge siege, with the Romans throwing up vast earthworks to cut off the Gauls from their re-enforcements, and traces of these earthworks have been picked up by aerial photography There's a statue of Vercingetorix there now.
So here's to Moritasgus, the Great Healing Badger, and his consort Damona the Divine Cow, and to the volunteers who are going out to protect the badgers in Somerset and Gloucestershire.
FAQs about the cull can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22614350
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
I Want to be a Space Vixen
While I was in London, I got taken out to see a show in the West End (as one does).
This particular show was in what amounted to a cellar just off Leicester Square. When we got there, the only indication that there was a theatre there was the box office and a set of stairs leading down. The Reduced Shakespeare Company were doing a show in one of the rooms, but we were going to see Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens.
It was a tiny venue, which meant that the actors were right there amongst the audience - we had to cross the stage to get to our seats, and it was set out like a disco.
Before the main action, the stage was taken by the Martini Encounter, described as "Permanently shaken. Occasionally stirred". They're a ukelele and close harmony singing trio, who lull you into a false sense of security with 1930s standards and then sing something very rude in the same style. Which was very funny.
Then the mics were whisked away, and we were in Saucy Jack's seedy disco, where artistes are being murdered. The only clue is a slingback sandal found with each victim. The Space Vixens arrive to investigate (with the power of Disco) - and one of them has a Past with Saucy Jack. Another of them has a sweet romance with Sammy Sax, the saxophone player who has ambitions to leave Saucy Jacks, and the third Space Vixen falls for a raunchy bubblewrap smuggler. Watching from the sidelines is a German professor who wants to get more than drinks from Saucy Jack's kilted barman, and a waitress (played by a man) who longs to be a Space Vixen herself.
Music - dancing - glitter boots! A Pantomime villain to boo! Some of the people sitting at the end of the stage obviously knew all the songs and were having a great time - and I came out singing "I Want to be a Space Vixen" and "Glitter Boots Saved My Life".
The Space Vixens
This particular show was in what amounted to a cellar just off Leicester Square. When we got there, the only indication that there was a theatre there was the box office and a set of stairs leading down. The Reduced Shakespeare Company were doing a show in one of the rooms, but we were going to see Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens.
It was a tiny venue, which meant that the actors were right there amongst the audience - we had to cross the stage to get to our seats, and it was set out like a disco.
Before the main action, the stage was taken by the Martini Encounter, described as "Permanently shaken. Occasionally stirred". They're a ukelele and close harmony singing trio, who lull you into a false sense of security with 1930s standards and then sing something very rude in the same style. Which was very funny.
Then the mics were whisked away, and we were in Saucy Jack's seedy disco, where artistes are being murdered. The only clue is a slingback sandal found with each victim. The Space Vixens arrive to investigate (with the power of Disco) - and one of them has a Past with Saucy Jack. Another of them has a sweet romance with Sammy Sax, the saxophone player who has ambitions to leave Saucy Jacks, and the third Space Vixen falls for a raunchy bubblewrap smuggler. Watching from the sidelines is a German professor who wants to get more than drinks from Saucy Jack's kilted barman, and a waitress (played by a man) who longs to be a Space Vixen herself.
Music - dancing - glitter boots! A Pantomime villain to boo! Some of the people sitting at the end of the stage obviously knew all the songs and were having a great time - and I came out singing "I Want to be a Space Vixen" and "Glitter Boots Saved My Life".
The Space Vixens
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