Normal Service Has Been Resumed

...Or as near as I ever get to normal.

I am supposed to be going to see a friend's talk tonight on matters pagan and spiritual. He is a good encouraging friend but I find it hard because little on the pagan scene actually interests me right now. My explorations of Wicca have led me to increasing impatience with its founder and the scene itself seems oddly vacuous to me. There's little new thought, or even deep consideration of old thought. I find it hard to feel anything towards it at all, except acceptance that it has helped several of my friends find their own satisfactory approach to life. But real magic, whatever that may be, has become more numinous, not less; I don't mean Harry Potter spells, but something impossible to describe or touch. The freeing of imagination and inhibition that various forms of ritual attempt to bring about can be useful, but much of it is a mummery to create a sense of community; a worthy aim in itself, I guess, as long as it doesn't pretend to be anything else. Those I see with a working spirituality often syncretise; Celtic saints become mixed up with gods and goddesses, nature, poetry, art... the result has a kind of resonance to it. I like it.

Tonight will be interesting I am sure, but even thinking about it wearies me. I cannot believe how tired I feel. I could sleep right now.

In other non-news I have learned almost nothing about my paternal grandfather. I can find no records of him being in the Highland Light Infantry under his marital name. The Mitchell Library explained why that might be; apparently many's the Glasgow boy who enrolled in the forces under an alias and a false age, some of them as young as 14 or 15. Partly it was because they were eager for a fight but for many it was to get away from home. Grandfather might have been one of those children. I tried to track him via his parents names, but can find no birth certificate for him in Scotland, nor in Ireland or Northern Ireland. I'm not going to be able to check him out properly until I can see census returns for 1920/21 onwards, and that's not going to happen for two more years at the earliest. Besides, Irish/N.I records do not seem to be entirely complete, or I'm not using them properly.

There's a possibility that he's an orphan of course, but under his adopted name I would expect more in the way of records about him; right now he's less foundling more changeling, but that's just my love of mysteries and fairy tales crashing into each other.