Learning Magic with PC Peter Grant

"Magelight or Magefire is so common among MAGIC USERS that it is probably what an APPRENTICE Wizard learns to do on his first day. The operator simply thinks, and a small ball of bluish or white light appears.... It is otherwise not good for anything much, but it would be nice to be able to do it."
So says Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land.
Peter Grant, the hero of Ben Aaronovitch's series beginning with Rivers of London, is a bona fide APPRENTICE Wizard - he had to take an oath and everything - and the first thing he learns to do is make a werelight, which is the same thing as Diana Wynne Jones' magelight. In his case, however, it takes him four hours of practice a day for a month before he can do it, and then he burns his hand the first time. He also has to learn Latin, because all the books of magic back to 1775 when Newton codified the practice of magic (in between inventing science and reforming the Bank of England) are written in Latin.
I like Peter a lot. The story is told in the first person, and he has a nice line in snarky comments that had me laughing out loud on occasions. He's also pretty good at being quick-witted in dangerous circumstances.
The other thing I like a lot about the book is The Folly - a sort of gentleman's club for magicians, though at the moment (for reasons at present shrouded in mystery) the only occupants are Peter, his Master/Inspector Nightingale, Molly the not exactly human maid, and Toby the ghost hunting dog. Charles de Lint has a similar big house with lots of unusual occupants (sometimes artists and sometimes more esoteric guests) in his Newford urban fantasies. I'd love to live in a place like that, with three libraries, and good food - I suppose the Tardis is another similar place (when you get beyond the console room to the library and swimming pool and so on) and Ben Aaronovitch has been a Doctor Who writer.
There's another Doctor Who writer who is writing a broadly similar series about police dealing with magical crimes in London - Paul Cornell, whose first book in his series is London Falling. He's also a very good writer, but I found his characters much less likeable, and the world they live in rather more bleak, than Rivers of London. Terrible things happen in Ben Aaronovitch's world too - people's faces fall off in graphically horrible detail, for instance - but there's a lot more humour.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

Women Warriors - Nicola de la Haye

Nicola de la Haye inherited the title of castellan of Lincoln Castle. Mostly her husbands carried out the duties - she married William fitz Ernais, who died in 1178, and after him Gerard de Camville, whose father was the admiral of the fleet that took King Richard the Lionheart and his army to the Third Crusade.
In 1191, though, Gerard was at Nottingham with King John, and she was in charge during a month long seige of Lincoln. In 1215 - 17, she was again in sole command of the defence of Lincoln during the unrest when King John died and the French invaded. John's only heir was Henry III, who was about eleven years old at the time, so Prince Louis of France made a bid for the throne of England. Young Henry had the advantage of having William Marshal on his side, the greatest knight in Europe at the time, and totally loyal to the Plantagenets. He was Henry's regent, so basically ruled England until the young king came of age. Nicola was in her mid sixties by that time, and William Marshal was around seventy, but they were more than a match for the French besiegers! She continued as castellan under King Henry III, and also served as the High Sheriff of Lincolnshire for a time.

Hunters Moon

To my great joy, I found the Green Arrow story Hunter's Moon, by Mike Grell, at Forbidden Planet, which is the follow up story to The Longbow Hunters.
These are the stories I remember when they first came out - I used to go to a comic shop round the corner from New Scotland Yard, and read Green Arrow stories over my (frankly rather horrible, but cheap) vegetarian curry in the police canteen. It's great to see them again - and they are just as good as I remember.
In fact, tucked away in one of my old scrapbooks, I found a few pages of one of the original comics. Green Arrow has come upon three thugs robbing a couple in a Seattle park, and proceeds to beat the stuffing out of them. "You know, just when I start to think there's hope for mankind," he says, "I run into guys like you, and my faith in human nature is restored."
One thing that impressed me when I first read the stories in the 1980s was that the characters had to deal with real problems - it wasn't all just beating up the bad guys and moving on to defeat the next supervillain.
Dinah Lance/Black Canary is still dealing with the trauma of her torture in the Longbow Hunters, to the extent of going to a hypnotherapist about it - but she really gets back to being her old self when she gets into a situation where she can beat up some bad guys!
This also does wonders for her love life with Oliver, and that's something else I didn't expect when I started reading the comics - bedroom scenes!
Some of the stories, or scenes in stories, I remembered vividly on re-reading, but some I didn't remember at all. I don't think I got every issue of the comic originally. It was all great fun, and I'm looking forward to finding the next volume of the series.

A View of My Fantasy World

It was a bit of a surprise to see a picture of something that I thought I'd invented in my own head. On Facebook last night, I came across this picture, posted by Queen Marie Stuart of Scotland and France and shared by Celtic, Renaissance and Medieval Trims. Queen Marie said she'd found it on a Russian site which she couldn't translate.
I looked at it and saw a scene from my first novel, Like Father, Like Daughter.
Mal and his daughters are travelling down the river, on the run and hoping to get to someone who will protect them. They're on a wherry, because I like wherries, and it's called the Garnet after the wherry in Arthur Ransome's book set in the Norfolk Broads, Coot Club, which takes the twins Port and Starboard part way down the river. (That wherry is actually the Sir Garnet.) While most of the world of Ytir is medieval, I saw no reason not to add nineteenth century wherries if I wanted to.
On the way down the river, they stop for the night at the wharf of a riverside town - and in my imagination, it looked exactly like this picture. That's even the Maid of Moissac in the background, the bigger ship with the high stern.

Here's how it's described in the book:
"Mal leaned against the stone wall of the warehouse and stared down the dock again. It was almost full dark now, and the only light came from the tavern windows and a couple of lanterns hanging from the stern of the Maid of Moissac behind him. Ahead of him, there was another tavern, with another group of sailors hanging around the open door in the yellow glow of the lantern light.
He counted down the row of boats again: a wherry, the Swift; a long rowing boat called Esnecca; a gap and then another wherry, the Minnow. Where the Garnet had been there was a small patch of open water.
Mal sat down on the nearest barrel of fish and leaned back against the wall. Billy Garnet was going to be furious when he got back. His hand moved to the small money pouch at his belt, but he didn't need to open it to know that there wasn't enough there to buy him another passage down the river, and certainly not enough to compensate Billy Garnet for the loss of his boat. He doubted very much whether either of the girls could handle a boat. He knew Branwen had never so much as sat in a rowing boat before. At least they were on their way downriver, though, while he was stuck in Bredelais with soldiers and a sorcier searching for him."

Stocking up on Comics

I've been for a fun day out in Cardiff - at one point I was walking along a pedestrianised area and it occurred to me that I'd probably seen it in a leaked clip from the next Doctor Who series, where Clara is making a phone call, and Peter Capaldi comes out of the Tardis, and gets a big hug.
The decision to shop in Cardiff was partly in order to use my Marks and Spencer gift voucher, but mostly I wanted to treat myself to comics. So I was delighted when I found Hunters Moon, the Green Arrow story which is the follow up to The Longbow Hunters by Mike Grell, at the Cardiff branch of Forbidden Planet. I found a Captain Marvel comic there, too, which has whet my appetite for the next collection (a big space battle, unlikely allies, and Captain Marvel has lost certain of her memories since I last read about her).
Cardiff Indoor Market has an interesting little book stall with lots of comics, too - in fact, he said they'd got a lot more that they hadn't sorted out yet, waiting to come in, all from the late 1970s to 1990s. He had 15 issues of Elfquest, starting from the first issue, with a few gaps, and he let me have them for £5!
At WH Smiths I got the first two Ben Aaronovitch novels in the Rivers of London series, the police procedural with magic. It'll be interesting to see how they compare with Paul Cornell's London Falling, which starts from a very similar premise.
And at Waterstones I found Death, the High Cost of Living by Neil Gaiman. I've only read bits of his Sandman stories, but I always liked Dream's sister Death, and this is a lovely story about her. And Mad Hetty who has lost her heart, and a New York teenager who is thinking about suicide.
So I've got lots of goodies to keep me occupied :)

From Sherwood to Westeros

I happened to see a copy of the Sun today, not a newspaper I normally read, and there was a story in it about an actor who was giving evidence in court against the man who had bitten part of his ear off. The actor's name was Clive Mantle, and that rang a faint bell with me.
So I looked him up and found, to my delight, that he had been Little John in Robin of Sherwood in the 1980s. In fact, he was recorded as saying it was one of the most enjoyable acting experiences of his career.
He's done a great variety of things since then, on film, TV and stage, most notably a surgeon in Casualty and Holby City - but I very rarely watch anything like that, so I hadn't noticed him.
Now he's back in something I am following, though - he's Lord Greatjon Umber, one of the Stark bannermen, in Game of Thrones!

Women Warriors - Gudrid the Far Travelled

Anyone who knows about Norse exploration to Vinland will know the name of Lief Eirikson, or Lief the Lucky - but fewer will know of his sister in law, Gudrid the Far Travelled, or Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, to give her her full name.
She married Lief's younger brother Thorstein, and travelled to Vinland (the coast of North America, probably to the settlement at l'Anse aux Meadows) with him. This was impressive enough on its own - sailing to Vinland was sailing off the end of all known territory, but she did more than that.
Thorstein died, and Gudrid returned to Greenland, where she married Thorfinn Karlsefni, and then returned to Vinland with settlers including five other women.
One of my favourite stories about her is of a time when the Norse were attacked by Skraelings (which was what they called the local Native Americans). The men were beginning to flee when Gudrid, who was pregnant at the time, ran forward to snatch up an axe that one of the men had dropped in his flight, while calling the men a bunch of cowards. They could hardly turn tail when their leader's wife was running in the other direction, towards the attacking Skraelings, and they managed to beat off the attack.
Later, she gave birth to Snorri Thorfinnson, the first European to be born on the American continent. Many Icelanders can trace their ancestry back to Snorri.
The attempt at settlement did not succeed, so they returned to Greenland, where Gudrid converted to Christianity - and from there, she made a pilgrimage to Rome. Some say she met the Pope there, and told him what Iceland and Greenland were like.
Nancy Marie Brown has written a book about Gudrid, called The Far Traveler - she also has an interesting blog, mainly about Iceland, called God of Wednesday, which can be found at http://nancymariebrown.blogspot.co.uk/
There is also a novel called The Sea Road about Gudrid, by Margaret Elphinstone, and both these modern re-tellings depend on the two Sagas that mention Gudrid, The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red.
So apart from the skirmish with the axe, she wasn't, strictly speaking, a warrior, but I don't think anyone would have wanted to mess with her!

Who-Natic: Review - The Minister of Chance - Prologue Film

Who-Natic: Review - The Minister of Chance - Prologue Film: In a previous post (which you can find  here ), I talked about the  Minister of Chance  and how you can download the free audio series an...

I'm listed in the credits as a Cornet in the Sezuan Rocket Division, and my Young Man is a Disc Warrior, so in small ways, we have contributed to the existence of this film.  The setting, Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire, has been one of my favourite timber framed houses for a long time, and it's perfect as the home of the King of Tanto.
The audio series is wonderful, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the visuals for the rest of the story....

Women Warriors - Viking burials

Here's an image that turned up on Facebook, which claims to be of the weapons discovered in a 10th century grave in Finland, with the body of a woman. I haven't been able to find out where the image came from, and I haven't been able to find any reports of such a burial either, so I can't be sure if the claim is true or not.
However, archaeologists over the years have found quite a few burials with a variety of grave goods from the Viking era. In the early days of archaeology, it was assumed that, if a body was buried with a sword, axe or spear, they must have been male, and burials with jewellery must have been female.
The truth, as is often the case, is much more interesting and complex than that.
Modern archaeologists have access to a lot more scientific tests on their finds than was the case fifty years and more ago, and several "male" burials have been found to be female. The reverse is also true - several "female" burials have been found to be male.
So, were these women warriors? It's the obvious assumption when a man is buried with weapons, but is it true of the women? Was a sword a symbol of high status in society, without any correlation with the ability to use it in battle?
The truth is, from the remains alone, even backed up by reading the sagas, we just don't know.
There is an interesting line in the Hervarar Saga, though this contains a lot of legendary and folk-tale material: "As soon as [Hervor] could do anything for herself she trained herself more with bow and shield and sword than with needlework and embroidery." If women were portrayed in folk-tales in this way, there was at least a possibility that women in real life could act in the same way.

I tend to the belief that people who were buried with weapons knew how to use them. In 1981 a burial site was excavated in Gerdrup near Roskilde in Denmark.* It was dated to the 9th century and the grave contained a woman's skeleton. She was buried with a spear, an iron knife and a needlecase. Nearby was the skeleton of a man with his feet tied together - his neck had been broken. In male burials, a slave was often killed and buried with the man, and it would seem reasonable to see the same thing happening here.
The reason I tend to the belief that she could use the spear she was buried with, though, is that a spear is not a high status weapon. Just about anybody who turned up to join a warband could afford a spear, whereas a sword took a lot more metal to make, and needed far more skill to make. Any blacksmith could turn out a few spear heads.
This was one of the first burials to be discovered where the burial was obviously female, with weapons. Others have been found since, and older material has been looked at again - the idea that only male Vikings invaded Britain, for instance, and married Anglo-Saxon women when they got here and settled, is rather contradicted now that we know that about half of the burials that are known are of women - and it is now possible to find out where a person grew up if you have one of their teeth.

*information taken from Women in Anglo-Saxon England by Christine Fell

From One Queen to Another

I've been following tor.com, where Keith DeCandido has just been rewatching Rejoined, an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. This is the one where Dax meets someone from her past - in fact, an ex-wife of one of the symbiote's previous hosts (writing about Trill relationships can get complicated). In fact, the other Trill has a new host, too, and she is played by Susanna Thompson, who is playing Moira Queen in Arrow at the moment, Oliver's morally dubious mother.
The episode features the first kiss between two women in all of Star Trek, and it was quite a controversial scene at the time. Keith DeCandido points out that, in episodes where a regular character meets an old flame, the old flame has only a short time to establish themselves and convince the viewer that they really did share a passion - and he says "this time round they struck gold."

I was also interested to find that this isn't the first time she's played a Queen, as she also played the Borg Queen in several Voyager episodes.

Hobson's Choice

I've seen the film, of course, starring Charles Laughton and John Mills - I'd say it was the film about Salford, but A Taste of Honey has to vie for the honours there. At any rate, it's the film about Victorian Salford.
I hadn't realised there was also a novel. It's by Harold Brighouse, who wrote the original play, with Charles Forrest. Apparently it's quite rare. I picked up a copy published by Northern Classic Reprints, because I thought it was about time I read it. After all, it describes the area I grew up in, though anyone visiting from 1879 would have difficulty recognising it.
The proof reading was appalling - but everything else about the novel was a delight!

Hobson has three daughters and a boot shop, and the three daughters want to get wed. Maggie, the eldest, has been running the place for years, while her father spends most of his time at the local pub, the Moonrakers - and when Maggie wants something, woe betide anyone who stands in her way!
To start with, I was enjoying the book for the descriptions of the places and the rhythms of speech that I remembered from my gran. Agecroft Colliery is mentioned, which was just down the road from where I used to live, and at one point Hobson walks from Salford to Besses o' the Barn - which is a heck of a long walk for an overweight middle aged man who generally only walks between his home and the pub. On the way back, he meets one of his daughters walking out with her young man on Kersal Moor. I used to play on Kersal Moor - there were still the remains of wooden steps and pathways from the days when it was a popular location for going for walks on Sundays.
Maggie and Willie spend an afternoon out at Belle Vue, to celebrate their wedding - I remember the Zoo there closing (with a picture of a sad eyed monkey in the Manchester Evening News) and my mum used to go to the speedway races there in the 1950s.
They talk about the posh houses on the Crescent - my first job was on the Crescent, at Salford University (which didn't exist in Hobson's day, of course) and they walk in Peel Park, which I used to cycle through on my way to work, and they look down on the horribly polluted River Irwell. (There was a saying: "Irwell, Irk and ink are all impossible to drink", the Irk being another local river).
When disaster is staring Hobson in the face, someone remarks that there will be a story about it in the Salford Reporter. Or even worse, the Manchester Guardian!

Then I started thinking about the options open to Maggie. When she declares her intention to marry Willie Mossop, her father's boot-hand (who is the best cobbler in Salford and on whose work the success of Hobson's boot shop relies), her father throws them both out. So she sets up a rival business with Willie - but she has to go to a rich woman locally to ask for a loan to start up the business, and when they open a bank account it has to be in Willie's name. Women couldn't get bank accounts back in 1879. The only way for Maggie to make a success in business is to do it through a man - she has to marry Willie Mossop.

Over the course of the book, Hobson claims (and believes) he doesn't need the assistance of women and would be better off without them - until he finds that his tea isn't cooked, and the beds aren't made, and he starts spending more and more time in the Moonrakers - where he discusses keeping women in their place with his friends, who all agree that women need to be kept submissive by threats and violence.
In spite of all the odds being stacked against her, though, Maggie comes out on top, and everything ends happily.

Seattle in Fiction

There are many, many books and films and comics and so on set in London and New York, and many of them are great fun - but there's more to Planet Earth than that.
One place that hasn't been used as a setting all that often is Seattle.

In The Longbow Hunters, Mike Grell sent Green Arrow and Black Canary to Seattle to fight crime, rather than the fictional Star/Starling City. Apparently the proximity to the Canadian border was one of the reasons for the choice, opening up ideas for plots.

I next came across Seattle in fictional form in Wizard of the Pigeons, by Megan Lindholm. "It did not have much of a reputation for sunshine and beaches, but it did have plenty of rain, and the folk who lived there were wont to call it 'The Emerald City' for the greenness of its foliage." That's what she says on the very first page - which makes it an even more fitting place for The Emerald Archer to live. Even better, I see from the Wikipedia page about Seattle that it was also known as Queen City until 1982.
I like the way magic is presented in the story, and the threat to Wizard from Mir is serious enough to threaten the city. Wizard's friends Cassie and Rasputin are great characters as well. I was always sorry that there wasn't a sequel, but Megan Lindholm has gone on to greater things as Robin Hobb.

And then, from the end of the 1980s, there's Ishmael, the Star Trek novel by Barbara Hambly that sets Spock down in the middle of 19th century Seattle and the TV series Here Come the Brides (which starred Mark Lenard, who played Spock's father Sarek), and adds Klingons. Oh, and Spock's lost his memory. I knew nothing of the TV series when I read the book - I don't think it ever crossed the Pond to the UK - but I did enjoy Barbara Hambly's writing. There are all sorts of little references to other Western series and SF series tossed into the mix too, and it's fun to spot them. In fact, I don't think I ever did spot them all - but it didn't matter to the story; it just added local colour. Reading Ishmael led me on to the Darwath books (and one day I'll get round to the Benjamin January books). I have a vague memory that there was some sort of copyright problem with the use of Here Come the Brides, but whatever it was, it seems to have been sorted out now.

I gather that Seattle has more recently been the setting for several TV shows I haven't seen, like Frasier, so the city hasn't been entirely ignored. It looks like a nice place to visit.

Arrow

For Christmas this year, I was given the DVD set of the first season of Arrow. My Young Man knows I like the character Green Arrow, and the trailers we'd seen looked intriguing. And the sight of Stephen Amell's bare chest didn't hurt any, either.
So I was looking forward to a superhero with a bow and arrows, fighting crime in Starling City.

Well, I've just finished watching the whole season, and - wow!
It's not just superhero with bow and arrows fighting crime; it's a lot more interesting than that!

First of all, I was impressed with Stephen Amell. He seemed at first to be fairly unemotional (as you might expect from someone who'd been stranded on a remote island for five years), but as the series went on, and the flashbacks telling the story of his time on the island continued, I started to notice just how good an actor he is. It's instantly obvious that the privileged playboy who washes up on the island and has no survival skills whatsoever is not the same as the competent, self-contained man who returns to Starling City, and as the season progresses, you can see Oliver on the island gaining more confidence and competence gradually.
Then there's John Diggle (David Ramsey). I very often like the sidekick better than the hero, and Diggle is lovely! And he's a man with great integrity, who tells Oliver straight when he thinks he's wrong (and Diggle usually turns out to be right).
This was where it started to get interesting for me - when Diggle started asking Oliver what sort of superhero/vigilante he wanted to be. It wasn't as simple as going out and taking down the bad guys. Sometimes, Oliver needed someone to watch his back. Sometimes, the problem was such that Oliver had to let the police handle it. And it's good that Diggle has his own agenda (going after the murderer of his brother) and his own romance (with the widow of his brother).
There were the practical problems, too. It's a great idea to have your superhero HQ hidden under your nightclub - but what happens when the building inspector wants to check that everything is up to code?

Oliver's romantic and family life is pretty tangled, too, with his ex-girlfriend Laurel Lance, and her dead sister Sarah (or did she die?) who was on the Queen's Gambit with him when it sank - whose father is the detective who is obsessed with bringing "the Hood" to justice. He argues for the Law rather than vigilante justice, imperfect though the legal system is - and he's the one who points out that the vigilante has killed 26 people, near the end of the season. Even if they were all bad guys, that's still 26 dead bodies, who had families and lives to live.
And then there's Oliver's mum Moira, who is implicated in all sorts of bad things with Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman oozing charm and villainy), who is the father of Oliver's best friend Tommy, who is going out with Laurel now.... And Moira is now married to Walter, who worked for Robert Queen (Oliver's dad), who died when the Queen's Gambit sank. Walter is another lovely character - and he seems to be one of the very few good guys, despite the posh British accent which usually means that the character is a villain in US shows.
And if all that wasn't enough there's Thea/"Speedy", Oliver's little sister, who gets into trouble, then starts to get more serious, and meets Roy Harper, who was Speedy in the comics, and comes from the Glades. It's not just very rich people fighting each other for the soul of the city - Roy is a working class bag snatcher and thief from the worst part of town. He wants to find out who "the Hood" is, (because "the Hood" saved his life) and he cares about what happens to his city, too.
And I haven't even mentioned Felicity yet, who is awesome - a computer geek who gets more and more involved with Oliver's crime fighting as time goes on. I think I'm right in saying she was only supposed to be in one or two episodes, but was so good in the part that they kept writing more for her to do.


It's also a cast with a lot of racial diversity - Walter is black as well as British, and another businessman, Frank, who has been doing business in China, is Chinese. Oliver also has Chinese friends back on the island (he wasn't all alone for five years - it was a lot more complicated than that). In The Longbow Hunters, there is a character called Shado, who is Japanese, and was brought up by the yakuza. For the purposes of the series, she's now Chinese, but still an awesome archer. (But they do keep shooting arrows off into the undergrowth on the island, and they never seem to go looking for them again, and they never seem to run out either....) There's also a bad guy in The Longbow Hunters called Fyres, and that's the name they've used for the main bad guy on the island.
And it's a cast with women who talk to each other - Laurel has friends and colleagues, and Thea talks to her mum (or has screaming rows with her, but that counts too).

And now I've got to the last episode, where all the pieces are thrown up in the air, and Starling City will never be the same again - so I'm really looking forward to what they do with that in season two.

Green Arrow

I'm going to a comic convention in London in March, and I'm starting to get quite excited. It's a very long time since I went to any sort of SF Con, so this will be testing the water before the big one, WorldCon (LonCon 3) in August.
I knew I was going to wear my home made Captain Marvel costume (and I now have the red boots to finish the costume off), but then I had a look down the guest list again. I'm very much a beginner when it comes to comics, so most of the names mean nothing to me, but one name did leap out at me - Mike Grell, who wrote the Green Arrow adventure The Longbow Hunters.
Back in the 1980s, his Green Arrow stories were just about the only comics I read.
I was planning on putting a Green Arrow costume together for WorldCon - because a group of friends want to do DC superheroes (so I obviously can't be Captain Marvel for that). I own a longbow, and like the character, so Green Arrow was an obvious choice.
Then I looked at the weapons policy of the conventions, and decided that maybe I wouldn't be taking my real longbow and arrows along. So I've bought a toy bow, but I couldn't resist doing this when I found a mini pair of boxing gloves on a recent visit to town:

In The Longbow Hunters, Green Arrow is getting back to basics, and not using trick arrows any more, but one of the most famous trick arrows he used were the ones with little boxing gloves on the end. This isn't a very good picture, but the best I could do in the dreary, rainy, grey conditions we've been having recently.

Remembering Ianto Jones

I think this is wonderful! Ever since the episode of Torchwood's mini series Children of Earth in which Ianto died, there has been a little fan made shrine on Mermaid Quay in Cardiff as close as possible to the entrance to the Torchwood Hub (which has since been blown up on screen, but never mind that).
I have to say, I prefer to remember Children of Earth, and pretend the American series of Torchwood never happened (though the American doctor was excellent). And Peter Capaldi in Children of Earth was absolutely brilliant.

Happy Imbolc

Picture of the Goddess Brigid by "lindowyn"