Redemptive Totems
Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 39)
NEWS: Announcing Bardskull in paperback, on the streets 23rd January, 2025, and a wee Irish Christmas tour with Glen Hansard in aid of Ukrainian Action Ireland. I’m afraid tickets are mostly gone, but contact venues direct if you’re going to try and squeeze in. The evening in Celbridge is the local church.
Finally, for folks considering sending bookish gifts this year, we’ve been replenishing the shelves with all manner of delights at my small press Cista Mystica. Christmas posting dates from the UK are approaching alarmingly rapidly, so do have a peruse if you’d like to catch the Christmas post: festive new arrivals and Christmas posting.
It’s the fairy tale time of the year. The leaves are mostly off the trees, and so all the way in and out of Sussex there are slim pale branches reaching down to stroke or scrape the roof of my car. By about three o’clock the sky starts to tilt towards darkness and all available warmth is swiftly draining out of the chalky soil. I arrive in the beautiful village of Firle (meaning Oak) and hoik my drum and bags the final few yards up to the vicarage, meet the Vicar – my good pal Peter Owen Jones – and we head to the pub, The Ram, for Guinness and dry roasted peanuts by a walloping rosy orb of a fire. We hunker in the section that used to be reserved for the farm workers, who would linger on a pint or a half pint the whole night, due to their wages. Oh, those branches scrape the windows, darkness falling completely now. It feels like we are hingeing from Autumn into Winter.
Sussex, like Canterbury the other week, has some history for me, a bit of haunting. So to return, it slips me onto the rack of recollection. There’s them ghosts everywhere – in the pub, walking the fields, as I turn in bed: life’s accruement of consequence. In this, the dark end of Autumn, I am continuing my pilgrimages around the south and the east of Olde England. It is a theatre of presences.
On the Sunday morning I’ll be talking around a few of the themes of last week’s Substack. I do appreciate the lively response the thoughts evoked. On my arrival back in Devon from Sussex I submit to the flu-ish cold that has been dogging me for days, so while reading the comments I can’t really reply to them all as I can barely see the screen. I am doing better now: I’d ended up backstage at a Nick Cave gig and picked something up, super friendly though everyone was. I am writing/reading this from bed.