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Dec 9, 2022Liked by Hookland

“Lore lives in its telling, not in its grinding down.” Exactly this! Folklore shouldn’t be train spotting - black shuck ✔️, Mari Lwyd ✔️, but a joyful discovery of sprets, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, Wet Jemmies, no-faces, cry-no-mores & all new, old and differently remembered tales of the land.

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Persactly so. Folklore isn't cut-and-paste. We can choose to enjoy it as an unfolding enrichment, an enfolding cloud of wonder or we can reduce it a joyless trivia. I choose to navigate it as joy.

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It's curious to recognise yourself in the negative image of a description. The culture I grew up in shared no folklore, in celebration or threat, and I can only surmise that was a colonial rejection of the land's historic lore paired with the inapplicability of the colonist's stories to our area. Maypoles were gone, no strangers came knocking and wassailing, Guy Fawkes had too many complications to be imported, and Halloween was just plastic masks, turnips with candles and sheets of 'fireworks' that spewed worms of ash 'cos real fireworks were illegal.

I feel the loss.

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Dec 9, 2022Liked by Hookland

Thank you

Always a good day when Hookland arrives in my inbox.

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Thank you for reading.

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Dec 9, 2022Liked by Hookland

The Borland Brothers sound like ancestors of Ghost Bros

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Ghost Bros do less ecological damage.

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