Spirits

There is something so comforting about a glass of your favourite spirit. I don't like to drink more than a glass these days, but I can really savour a good brandy or whisky.
And I do mean savour, in that almost existential way that Hugo from 'Les Mains Sales' watches Hoederer drinking coffee and thinks about the coffee having flavour because it is in his mouth.

Spiritual.
Spirits.

My son Ben went for an audition at a Music College in Brighton and against the odds, has been offered a place. We're all dead chuffed. Ben doesn't have the problems that Laurence has had, but he has been becalmed for the last little while, unable to motivate himself, unsure what he wanted to do. So I'm mightily pleased about this.

And Alex, my Alex, the unsung heroine, has been down staying with her brother in Portsmouth, helping to look after her niece and nephew during Reading Week, while Sue has been experiencing some difficulties late in her pregnancy. Now Alex, my Alex, has to go back to London because lectures start again.
It's hard to be here and not able to help out when Sue and Austen could use the help.

'The Blair Witch Project' was creepy, not as scary as its hype, but creepy nonetheless.
And sometimes, when we are out in the woods, we see some twigs stacked together for no apparent reason and we say, 'Blair Witch Project'. It happens more often than you'd think.
Perhaps people passing are driven to put sticks together, who knows.

But why is the idea of a crone in the woods so creepy? Was it because you never saw anything, just heard sounds and this witchy ikebana kept appearing?

And then, is it less creepy if the unknown is an alien? Or a half-human, half-beast? Or just spirits?

When a friend of mine went on a vision quest with a First Nations guide, she had to spend a night alone in the forest.
She heard voices, sounds she couldn't identify. She would have been comforted by coyotes, being a naturalist, she wasn't afraid of them, but human voices, quarrelling, out in the forest where she knew there were no human settlements for miles and miles, when she had been brought up river by canoe and dropped there - that kept her awake and petrified all night.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself.
And really bad spirits.