Goodnight from the Great Orlando, exhausted by a shift on Blaxwich Pier peeping around the corners of time to tell day-trippers their fortunes. Goodnight from Molly Cogg, collecting haunted driftwood at Winterhorn Cove so she can make a spirit-freeing bonefire. Goodnight from Hookland.

Remembering reading tarot on Essex piers as college student side-hustle. Memories leaking into Hookland. A world made alien by time.

The high walls of certain boneyards give the impression of belonging to a prison. A case of Internment for the dead rather than simply being interred. Yet time topples all stones, fade the power of all wards. Some part of us knows even the dead's confinement must end. – #CLNolan

The warden of the Ossuary of St. Mild is officially known as Keeper of the Bones, however, they are called other things. 'Whisper Warden' and 'the Bone-dust Teller' are two of the most common. For even on consecrated ground, folklore grows and blooms. – #CLNolan #FolkloreThursday

There will be a ‘Classic’ Worzel HookWatch soon. Profoundly different to the wonderful Cook version.

The Crowman - Worzel’s maker/God - summons a jury scarecrows who cross the fields like a zombie army to try him for his life. There are only two verdicts - guilty or very guilty. The fear the scarecrows feel in the Crowman’s presence is deeply dark. Your god is real and he will rip your arms off.

For the record, episode four of the second season of ‘Classic’ Worzel Gummidge is the most horrific so far in the rewatch and may become a #HookWatch.

Have no fear, we are aware of each other.

Rightly so.

The witch walks green ways. The witch walks wild ways. She navigates by tree-whispered mysteries and seeks to become entangled in the promise of the wood's magics. Every path she takes becomes a conversation with the land itself. Her relationships are her power. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

Proper.

Every ebb tide gifts the salt hag temporary scrying pools. Brined reflections of tomorrow. Opportunities for seaweed phytognomy where she may peer round the corners of time. The shore is her temple. She never lacks space for magic. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982 #WitchSky

None of the darkness of the original books is removed, it’s there coming through in every moment when the forced jollity stops.

All of this and two children whisked to the county because social services in the city would take too much interest in their circumstances otherwise. Behind the slapstick and silliness there is a strata of unspoken terror bleeding through.

The original 1980 Worzel Gummidge is dark as fuck. Disembodied heads in sacks whispering to farm hands, scarecrows delighting in savaging other scarecrows knowing they won’t die, just suffer pain. Cunning Folk with a penchant for punishing their straw creations for being talkative. #FolkHorror

The land refuses our easy labels. We call it empty, but we know that isn't true. It roads are ghost-soaked. We can drive and not pass another car for a quarter hour, but still might glimpse a phantom pack pony line or ragged straggle of Half-there folk forever on their way to market. – #CJosiffe

Goodnight from Ashcourt Necropolis’ stone guardians, wary of further vandalism conducted under pretence of hunting the Iron-toothed Vampire. Goodnight from Liv Malin, increasingly convinced certain figures walk between the photos held in the Wyndham Archive. Goodnight from Hookland.

Way beyond my neans.

Some overpriced wonder I will never own and I am unlikely to hear?

I have never known anything broken that is fixed by hate.

Your language is strange to me.

Mrs. S. has accused me of making noises like a coffee machine. I can rarely make noises like a human being these days, coffee machine sounds is way beyond my capacity.

I live with the only cat who objects to Radio 3 because Paganini sounds like things whistling in the television. #Cats

Someone once described Hookland as ‘mainly shit and full of unnecessary detail’. I used to dispute this until I started writing an actual grimoire that I’ve only referenced a few times just so any future references would be consistent. An actual working grimoire. Absolutely unnecessary detail.

It's a mistake to think of the church as the landscape's only sacred space. To travel to it, you walk a territory of folk faith. Navigate marsh edge with its mirefolk, with its greed for appeasements. Cross meadow and nod to it sprites. You hear the growl of genii locorum. – #EmilyCBanting, 1982

At Lammas, the borders of Faery expand. They enfold. They entangle. To walk the edge of the field is to risk accidentally crossing into those silvered lands with two moons and unfamiliar stars. No wonder it is regarded as a date of disappearance. – #CLNolan #Lammas

August 1st – Puck Fairs Starting on the old Celtic festival of Lughnasadh and lasting for two days, the Puck Fair is a pre-mediaeval tradition that is still going strong in Hookland. Associated with St. Urian and the faery folk, legend has it that the fairs started as the one point in the year when Hookland and Faeryland were close enough that trade between the two realms was possible. This is often offered as an explanation as to why the fairs used to be held on hilltops sacred to the faery. Whatever their actual origins, the Puck Fairs have become two days when an annual horse and cattle fair is supplemented by traditional matchmaking such as the 24-hour trial marriage (where the couple put together may separate at the end of the fair without any consequence), dances, bouts of wrestling and stick-fighting, horse races, story-telling contests and colossal amounts of drinking. Brutally suppressed during the Cromwellian Commonwealth, condemned by Methodists, often a source of modern moral outrage and an aggravation to the police, the Puck Fairs have proven to be a tradition that is exceptionally hard to kill off. Some have noted there is an increase in the number of people who disappear around the time of the Puck Fairs.

Alt Text version:

It is not just #Lughnasadh and #Lammas today. In Hookland it's the start of the Puck Fairs where the old sense of things lives on amid an excuse for sex, booze and trade with Elfland.

Surely the time has come for us to for a co-op for the reviewing of stationary?

Goodnight from Keith Hoyt, dubious of Nathan Tippet’s promise that all the secrets of magic can be found in his lock-up garage. Goodnight from Martha Underwood, entering an understandable state of low panic after discovering a clay effigy left on her doorstep. Goodnight from Hookland.