smokingboot

It is never a good sign when a writer writes about writing. And here I am, a few things crowding in on me tonight. Finding a new thing to write about, a new thing to burn about even, seems so hard, no research igniting me. There's that topic, perhaps ever more appropriate, the spirit of place, the once, future, and never England, the evocation of the land half known. Oh but talk about the road least travelled, this is the reverse... a constant motorway of authors racing off to find Nostalbion. It's like 'All gone to look for America,' with morris dancers.

I know a poet/mystic whose talents are extraordinary. He is a man of age and grace, as well as a well known rescuer of elderly badgers in Glastonbury.I envy him his words, his world.

The story of English Eerie as a genre is, I am convinced, based around a rapid displacement off the land and into cities for the population long ago. The ghosts we see in the wheatfields are us. Stories of Devizes and its madness make me laugh or just raise my eyebrows, but they interest me because they shouldn't be real, and yet they were part of my life, a personal mythology, our own Hookland. There's no real reason for anyone else to find them interesting.

Hookland is this: http://folklorethursday.com/urban-folklore/970/#sthash.3Xy445DO.dpbs I know what Southwell means by mythic circuits, but sometimes I suspect that it's all that we are becoming, all done. Then I look at the words of the cunning man from Glastonbury, his poetic freshness and wisdom, and realise it's far from done. But he is driven by his love of it all, and I do not have that.

Where then is the story?