We were all washing up after the Christmas Eve meal. (Have the ham on Christmas Eve, cook the turkey on Christmas Day and serve it with the leftover ham. Works every time.) Enough booze had flowed and enough Annie Lennox had been played that the atmosphere was convivial and the discussion loose. This year the [...]
One of the more interesting things that struck me about re-reading the Simonomicon oeuvre late last year was a throwaway comment relating to the first gate (of the moon). The gate of the moon -like Yesod- is the first one the seeker has to pass through. And the point Simon made was that most seekers [...]
Most of you won’t ever have been to Christchurch. I used to go there every second week. At fourteen I fell in love with the place from 30,000 feet up. Through cloud cover. At night. I didn’t fall in love with Christchurch because it was pretty or interesting -it is neither. But it is neither [...]
Seasonal Magic Disorder. It’s like SAD but, you know, for magic. Let’s leave aside anything calendrical here, like Oak/Holly Kings or particular deities tied to particular agricultural dates. What I want to know is if the flavour of your magic is affected by anything meteorological. Let me explain. I first noticed this in New Zealand [...]
You would think my last post was ‘the Halloween post’ but no. This is it. Because it has vampires and demons and death. Also because the main picture is a veritable sugar explosion. It started as I was absorbing something Deb wrote that has ultra relevance to where I am at right now. You see, [...]
An interesting article in the Telegraph caught my eye yesterday. Half of all Muslim men and three quarters of all Muslim women in Britain are unemployed. That’s a jaw dropping statistic. And you just know what’s going through going through the minds of the more bigoted sections of society as they read their “news“, pausing [...]
Nothing like travel to make you think of home. Especially when you’re sitting in the Piazza della Signoria, drinking a beer as early evening turns to late evening and some kind of cover band starts belting out Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound.” (Incidentally, a great song when you have been drinking in the sun for [...]
A dear school friend accompanied me on my recent trip to Nottingham. Through a series of ‘random’ coincidences, he has ended up as the general manager of a large event construction business within three years of graduating from university. On the other side of the world. Over five to six hundred beers in the shadow [...]
You know those weeks where it seems like 109.3% of the people you know has a birthday? Yeah well, I just lived through one of them. And because I am the ‘optimal’ combination between lazy and opportunistic, I bowled over all the gift shopping in one evening: The British Museum had a ‘members only’ night [...]
I have exactly 666 comments on this blog. Fittingly (?), lucky number 666 was Psyche and her comment on my last post was one of the more helpful ones I have received. But in honour of the number 666 I thought I might post something about Crowley. Except, to talk about Crowley, I have to [...]
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