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Stone Age daydream

18/12/2014

Way back in the Stone Age, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I could get away with claiming to be young, I saved up my pocket money and bought an album called "Slade Alive".
    I don't remember anything about it now, except that it was red and I played it a lot. I also played “Electric Warrior”, T Rex, and my friend Mark had us all round to listen to “Master of Reality”, Black Sabbath, when it first came out. Then I grew up. I think.
    But walking through M&S earlier today, picking up a reduced ham-and-pickle sandwich just as Noddy Holder launched into “So here it is, Merry Christmas” on the store’s soundtrack, I wondered for a moment whether I really am a 56-year-old father of four living in Falmouth...
    ...or am I still lying on a sofa, somewhere in the early seventies, watching the music weave itself into the pattern of the wallpaper?

Not in Cathcart's 'Collective Hallucination'

7/12/2014

One of my favourite pieces of writing is a short story called The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood. It's dated (published in 1910) and I wouldn't necessarily recommend anything else by the same author. But The Wendigo does one thing exceptionally well. It's set in the "Canadian backwoods", and Blackwood writes so effectively about "the wild solitudes" and the "singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures", that I read it again just to revisit the setting. The lake, and the forest, and the wind (and the scents on the wind), and the wilderness.
The Wendigo itself duly turns up and does its thing, and if I remember rightly, I might have left the light on after reading it for the first time in my early teens. Blackwood was "one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre", says Wikipedia, and he was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which in completely inappropriate modern-day terms, means he was seriously New Age. I don't suppose The Wendigo is particularly scary by modern standards, no more than (say) one of those black-and-white X-rated movies of the nineteen-fifties, and I'm also taken by the gradual way it builds up its effects.
There are pictures of Algernon Blackwood, but nothing royalty-free at Morguefile, Shutterstock, et cetera. The story itself is easy to find. This picture, which I've used before, was taken outside the Boston Public Library.

Stone Age daydream

Not in Cathcart's 'Collective Hallucination'

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