The Law of Return

Nobody will be surprised that I am very suspicious of any philosophy which lays down that what you give out, you give back. As a witch I am quick to see patterns of control and here I see a philosophy which only works as long as everyone else is living by it. It is also a philosophy which is influenced by a person's ideas about forgiveness and what have you.
Take the example of Trump, which is so easy it is a textbook example. He does not experience the treatment he gives other people. And Divine knew what he was about.
It is so obvious to me that there is no automatic return of what we give out, and I believe that it is to misunderstand karma to understand it this way. Rightly or wrongly I understand karma to mean words to the effect of 'you've made your bed and must lie in it'.
I like the approach of the heathens very much, since they seek to live by honour and defend their kin. Unfortunately their values are a little family-based for me, I can't pronounce any of the words, and being a priest of a Greek goddess wouldn't fit well with them.
What I do know empirically is that if you shy away from the tasks facing you  they will keep facing you again. I also know that people's magic has a theme, for example some witches keep having to heal, or reconcile, or teach.
Beyond that, there doesn't have to be a reason why things happen. We seek to find reasons for things, and while I believe broadly in reincarnation I do not think our arbitrary world causes things to happen for a reason.
Oh sod it. Have a soundtrack.

'Tis the Season

And so we arrive at the season of ill will and even more ridiculous stuff than usual. So it's time for a few inflammatory comments from the Hound.
If you should go to a nearby city for its Christmas Market, there are two things you need to know. The first is that those bright things you can see are electric lights and it's not really that wondrous. The other thing is that in a city you keep moving. The stream of people around you will not stop just because you have.
As an old school anarchist I am delighted to hear of so many planned spoiled votes this election. The parties represent only themselves and anything which will stop one of them being in control is very welcome. However I will make one prediction - the days are gone when tiny countries could survive and leaving Europe will mean we end up in a union with the US. Think very carefully what that will mean before voting.
In wonderful news I am baby sitting someone's cat for a few months. He is a gorgeous black cat and of course I understand him better than his normal human, but then cats and witches go together.

Spirit of Place: The Crown, Station Street, Birmingham

We have been very close to here on this blog before, in fact the Mystery on Hill Street I posted about is next door.  There are several pubs with the same name in the city centre, and perhaps I had better clarify that this post is not about The Old Crown in Deritend, although I mean to post about that one of these days. It's sad to see it with buddleia growing out of it, because this is genuine Birmingham history:

My dad (also called Tom Pickering) was Landlord of the crown from the late 1950’s through to about 1970. It was a tied house at the time (M&B) but revenue from the two dance halls went to the landlord if he arranged events there.

I was born in a local hospital in 1964 and my sister actually born there in 65.

There are actually two performance spaces upstairs – a main dancehall with a side “snug” bar and a smaller room (called the Boatman’s Bar – and decorated with utterly incongruous sea related paraphernalia) with higher ceilings (and much better acoustics) both were used interchangeably in the 1960’s – though the second room seems to be the host for most of the Henry’s Blues House meetings.

The list you have online starts in 1970 – but music was a huge thing much earlier than that. I remember it was called “underground” music and started around 1967 – 68.

My gran used to do the catering for the pub and fondly remembered the bands who used to play there. I remember at the height of the newspapers monstering of Ozzy Osbourne her telling me how he was a good kid and always super polite to her on the catering station – although always hungry and trying to scrounge a sandwich.

The Crown was one of only a few venues in the city centre with a license for music and dancing so it attracted the early folk scene too. My mom has stories about the Chieftains having a residency there in 1964 / 65, and there were regular appearances from local bands like “Denny Laine and the Diplomats” and the Moody Blues.

There was a pie stall on old bombed out building near the front door which was hugely popular with local biker community. They labelled themselves “Ton Up Kid” and their big aim was to do 100 mph on their old Norton and BSA motorbikes. these kids formed the nucleus of the early heavy metal fan base.

One of the things that people forget is that there were an utterly notorious set of “cottages” outside the crown (underground public toilets now filled in on the corner of Hill st and Station St) which made it a haven for the early LGBT / Trans community. Who used to mix utterly happily with the Bikers, Rockers and Folkies. It was a very special, if somewhat unpredictable place.

The period 1970 – 75 was when most the Henry’s gigs happened – we had been moved out of the Crown by the brewers. Between 74 and 77 the old place fell into a terrible rut. There was always an undercurrent of violence about the pub, with such a disparate community there frictions and jealousies would be bound to spill over, but my father used to keep a very effective door squad in place and it never really became toxic.

When he left the violence became untenable, and the pub was let out as a tenancy in late 1976 / early 1977. My dad took up rental and returned to what had, by now, become an absolute shambles of a place. He bought back his old door squad and the violence all moved back away.

This is when Billy Dupre asked my dad for his old bar job back. Billy was a lovely gentle sort of a guy – a real 1960’s hippy and kids all loved him (me included) He asked if he could run the (now closed as a fire hazard) back lounge bar as a venue for his “punk” friends – and change the music on the jukebox to allow him to do this.

So he set up and before long the Crown was swarming with Punks. We re-opened the old upstairs dance hall and used it as a venue for a “punk disco” with Billy and his friends playing records. The ATV show Revolver filmed a bunch of the filler “crowd” footage up there.

The Punks made enormous peacock there for 2 years or so until the 1979 Thatcher Govt brought the full weight of the transition to a service economy down to bear – Birmingham was one of the worst places affected and the scene moved first to a mix of Punks / Skinheads (drawn by a shared love of Reggae) and then to a preponderance of skinheads with a few punks.

The two punk bands who got their break there were GBH (famous – still touring) and Drongo’s For Europe (not famous – still touring). GBH had a long term residency there – contact them they have some great stories of the place.

The skinheads drew in the far right and (by this stage of the recession) despirate for money my dad started renting out the lounge and upstairs as a venue for some pretty unsavoury groups. Column 88, Combat 18, British Movement, Ukranian Ex-Servicemens Association (these were some bad bad men) all regularly used the place.

The local bands going through there at the time included UB40 and The Beat – who name check the Crown on the final line of their single Tears of a Clown where Ranking Roger declares that he’s “going down town, going down the crown”. For a while Pig-Bag used the downstairs as an informal “club house” – Art School kids and Skinheads – it was a weird mix.

Curiously there was never any real friction between the mixed race SKA / Skin / Two Tone kids and the Far Right. A more cynical man than I might speculate that that they used to unite in hating the Asians. It was this background that gave rise to the unique multi-racial mix of the Zulu football supporters.

There was an attempt in 1980 – 81 to bring back Heavy Metal to the place – we hired the DJ from the Beerkeller (Bogarts) and this was quite popular for a while – but no real live music. The posters you see up on the walls in the photos are all from that period.

The graphiti (Bill Has Joy… etc) all dates from 1979 and is very much the hall mark of the punks.

By 1982 music had all but stopped at the place. It became home to the Zulu’s and all the Punks moved on. We moved out in the autumn of that year. Source

Other regulars included Status Quo and Led Zeppelin, and it was the spiritual home of UB40.

Ian Campbell – father of reggae brothers Ali and Robin Campbell – recorded the country’s first live folk album there in 1962.

But Admiral Taverns has sold the pub to a Japanese company for a rumoured £1.2 million, and licensee Colleen Andrews, who has has been told to leave by June 22, believes its history could be lost forever.

“I can’t understand why Birmingham City Council is allowing this to happen to our heritage,” she says.

“This pub is the city’s equivalent of The Cavern in Liverpool, where The Beatles started out.

“It could have become a great live music venue again, and a wonderful rock museum. Everyone from The Who to Duran Duran, Thin Lizzy and The Move have played here. On the wall are the words Jim, The Doors.

“I thought that once John Lewis and New Street opened it was going to be fantastic. People were going to come down the new steps right opposite the pub.

“It was going to be the first place they would see.” Source

Another own goal by Birmingham City Council. To be frank its more recent reputation has been a bit dodgy, in fact a friend lost a shoe in there because the floor was so sticky.
The famous first ever folk club record was by Ian Campbell and I will put a couple of his recordings below as a soundtrack. You may need to turn the volume up for Ceilidh at the Crown.

Always a Witch

<Sigh>
Why would people want to be witches? Apart from the obvious appeal that it is the best thing ever, way better than sex. Oh I've just answered my own question.
Otherwise the thing is that you are always a witch, and everywhere the universe can provide you with the next task in rectifying 'karma' and getting stuff moving along.
Stuff of course is a word we occultists use to describe the effects of actions, and that can mean a few whammies flying around.
Take the building manager of my building. He sent me an email asking me to bear with him while he deals with my perfectly simple request. One I made for the first time a year ago and which has since rolled on with great pain and embarrassment to the company. I think they may have finally learned their lesson, the hard way.
The dynamic of witchcraft messes with your life because it always attracts the things that you will deal with to you. It may be that you happen to be the only person who will do it, or you might need to because of your own 'stuff'.
Oh - I've started my new job. As a job it is fine but do I even need to say that only three weeks in the deputy manager has already revealed herself to be an arse in need of a slap? And stupid too - when I'm laughing and joking with the other staff and being icily polite and professional to her that should be a warning, surely!
Although I did have the satisfaction of seeing her suddenly flip to being dead helpful today after another member of the coven fed her to Reggie and Ronnie!
The universe's reward was that one of my (totally straight haha) colleagues suddenly started talking about rimming  I just looove hairy blond men 😍
Oh - Inexplicable likes a sound track -

Witches' Hymn Book: Exit Song

High time we had another hymn to accompany the acts of the witch cult. Deciding whether to leave is relatively easy for the witch and the question 'Is this giving me power or taking it away?' will provide the answer. I would like to dedicate this to my last workplace, which is bearing a resemblance to this video

The University Hospital Compassion Statue

To hospital again for a routine follow up to ensure that I will be able to annoy people for many years to come. It is usually surrounded by hospital staff smoking or children laughing at the willy, but unusually I managed to get a picture of the Compassion statue today.
It was moved to the Queen Elizabeth site after Selly Oak hospital closed:

A Source distinctive bronze sculpture based on the Good Samaritan parable has found a permanent new home at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham (QEHB) after more than half a century.

The Compassion statue, which depicts one man aiding another, had been a familiar feature for patients, staff and visitors to Selly Oak Hospital since it was erected outside the main outpatients department in 1963.

Following the transfer of outpatient services to the new QEHB in Edgbaston, the sculpture was carefully loaded by crane onto a truck in April before being taken away for restoration.

The statue was created by sculptor Uli Nimptsch after a commission in 1961 by The Charles Henry Foyle Trust, who donated it to Selly Oak Hospital. The Foyle Trust provided benches for the public and maintained the statue until the hospital’s clinical services moved in 2010. They subsequently made a donation for the cost of relocating the statue to its new location.

It has now been restored and given a new home alongside the pedestrian walkway between QEHB and University rail station.

Graham Hackett, Estates and Design Manager at University Hospitals Birmingham, which runs QEHB, said: “The Compassion statue holds a lot of affection for people who worked at Selly Oak, visitors and the wider community, so we have effectively moved a large slice of Selly Oak to the new hospital site.”

The sculpture was taken to a firm of conservation specialists to be restored.

Mr Hackett added: “There were quite a number of chips which needed repairing, and the statue was also set on bronze dowels set into the plinth which had cracked and needed fixing. But the main restoration work consisted of cleaning and waxing.”

As well as planning permission, UHB also needed to obtain consent from English Heritage to relocate the sculpture as the site is located within the Metchley Roman fort site, which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. 

Incidentally the Roman Fort connection makes this area of the city one of the most haunted, in the Hound's humble opinion. Incidentally I didn't think I had heard of Kirkup, the poet quoted on the plinth, but on further examination he gets my approbation for iconoclastic action:

In June 1976, Gay News published his poem The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name, in which a Roman centurion expresses the sexual fantasies the body of Christ provokes in him and imagines a history of Christ's homosexual encounters. Mary Whitehouse sued the newspaper for blasphemous libel. Gay News was defended by John Mortimer and both Bernard Levin and Margaret Drabble gave evidence on its behalf, but the jury decided in favour of Whitehouse. The newspaper and its editor, Denis Lemon (of whom Kirkup was later to write an obituary), were fined, and Lemon was given a nine-month suspended sentence. Source

True to form  while I am sitting on a bench writing this post the nearby busker has started playing one of my tunes. Just call me Godfather.

The Hanged Man

In my researches into the Golden Dawn tarot I have reached the Hanged Man and they have made some fascinating revelations. In the deck I have there is the man hanged upside down but there is also another figure, a giant with a rainbow at his feet. The rainbow represents the pact between G*d and man, and the whole card, the descent of the divine into matter. Since there are two figures, whichever way up the card is, either the divine or the human is exalted. Naturally as a witch I don't myself have a dog in this fight, but I have even read somewhere that the 'proper' position for the card is sideways.

A Spectacular Waste of Money

I did forecast on here some time ago that the Central Library would be missed, and while not complete the it is obvious that I was right. Because obviously this

... which is blandness personified, is not an improvement on this

.. Which at least has the advantage of being individual and a landmark. Fools.

How I am Spending my Holiday and Update on Golden Dawn Tarot

I now have a start date for my new job of the 21st, and have settled into a routine for my Payment in Lieu of Notice time, namely, get up, have some breakfast, have a wank, study some tarot cards and maybe have an outing if I feel like it, then watch some TV in the evening. I have always been able to amuse myself and frankly rather look forward to being retired so that my life could be like that every day.
My studies into the Golden Dawn tarot are both creating new problems for me and enlightening some matters. The problem is of course that I can't really claim to understand Kabbalah, and particularly not as related to tarot. For example, I am only just beginning to get why the minor arcana are placed on the sephiroth and the major arcana on the pathways between them. This fact is beginning to make more sense as I study these cards. On the other hand, when I think of the energy of The Fool, I don't think he should be on the tree at all: since he is the time before the first glimmering of an idea, I feel he should be somewhere above it. But hey ho, we press on.
One of the things this study is doing for me is enlightening the exasperating hints Waite keeps dropping that there are 'inner' secrets to the tarot keys, which he does not reveal and are not always visible in his cards (although some of them are well known and discernible by meditation). This study is beginning to reveal some of them, for example:
The Golden Dawn Fool shows a child holding a wolf, and represents worldly wisdom kept in check by perfect innocence.
The Magician represents the Fool in the act of experience, but things are not yet manifest. He has all powers at his fingertips.
The High Priestess carries us across the Abyss on the Tree of Life, and is the vessel of creation. In Golden Dawn terms she can represent the church rather than the Order.
The Empress represents things taking form, and we must be born of her womb to access the higher levels of the Tree. Here I have the slight difficulty that movement on the Tree is both upwards and downwards, although perhaps this says more about me than anything else.
The Emperor wears a fleece over his armour (why did I never notice this) and represents the force of Mars having put down the sword and taken up the wand.
The Hierophant's lesson is not intellectual, it has to be felt and experienced, which was the role of the Hierophant in the Golden Dawn. He links the Ethical Triad of the tree with the Supernal triad, Higher self with Spiritual self. The nails on the card bring together the fragments of the universe.
The Golden Dawn Lovers represents Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the Dragon of fear and the waters of stagnation. The 'inner' meaning is not sexual or the choice depicted in other decks, but is the love of the divine twins of Gemini for each other, the union of male and female within the initiate, conscious and subconscious.The Chariot is the first key to pass the Abyss to the lower Sephiroth, and represents will connecting and reconciling opposing forces.
Fortitude represents the soul controlling the passions. The woman is the same woman in the Universe card. The red line at the top of the card represents the abyss.
The Hermit represents communication with the Higher Self and help from above. I have a friend who refers to it as the wanker card, which of course does not represent the 'inner' meaning!
And so on...

I am watching some Doctor Who. I have a preference for the Second Doctor. Actually, let's be frank here, I have a raging crush on his companion Ben, who enters the series like a walking gay fantasy dressed as a sailor. Have a jelly baby.

Getting to Know the Golden Dawn Tarot

Golden Dawn regalia
of Aleister Crowley

The rumours put around that I am spending my time off work in the company of a rent boy or masturbating are not true at all. In fact I am spending it getting to know the New Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot - the one by the Ciceros.
I have written here before about my problem with Qabala. My problem is that the Major Arcana cards are placed on the pathways (well they have to be, there are 22 of them), whereas their importance would suggest they ought to be on the sephiroth. Cowley talks of them being illuminated by the sephiroth, and I think it should be the other way around. This is only one of the orthodoxies of tarot which I find hard to swallow, and thus I will always incline to witchcraft. Can you imagine what I'd be like in a Golden Dawn temple?
Despite my chronic INFJ mixture of total conformity and simultaneous anarchy, which would make me unfitted to a magical order and even used to make my own mother say she couldn't make me out, I find the Golden Dawn fascinating. In the way I do Freemasonry, but would never join, because it is another of the ingredients of modern witchcraft. The true historical predecessors, the cunning men and women, got their magic from the grimoire tradition, and thus this theft is in a great tradition. I particularly like this article about Doreen Valiente drinking from this well before she met Old Gerald.
Personally the reason I want to get to grips with the Golden Dawn tarot is that if you've seen it, it crackles with magic! It is also the tradition underlying both the Rider-Waite and Thoth traditions so is a venerable ancestor. I have a feeling that learning its system will illuminate much that comes afterwards in tarot.

Even More Good News

Today Human Resources made a visit to my workplace. The woman could see that I wasn't OK and said she would talk to me. The upshot was that we mutually agreed that I would leave immediately and they would pay me for a month.
I can only say what a relief this is. They also acknowledged that things haven't been handled that well.
I have used this picture before. I have a crush on this guy, the trouble is he has such a big dick I'm a bit scared, so I will find some other way of filling my leisure before I start my new job. Don't be too jealous now.

More Good News

I am delighted to announce that I have a new job, doing the same role with a different employer slightly outside Birmingham. The Ts and Cs are also better, and since my current employer is going down the drain fast, it would be hard for them to be worse.
Oh, alright, have a soundtrack if you insist:

And since I can hear you clamouring for more DesiLu, let's go for it:

Obedience

Obedience may seem a strange subject for me to pontificate about but you needn't worry, I am naturally going to subvert it completely.
When I was a child, well before I had the life changing experience of realising that I am an INFJ, my mother used to tell me that she couldn't make me out. Apart from indicating the obvious fact that my mother and I were never going to be on the same page, what she was usually meaning was that, to use her words, I was a strange mixture of absolute conformity and absolute independence. I was and am quite capable of being totally obedient in certain situations while feeling free to subvert the same authority to which I had been compliant a moment before. She could never tell which side I was going to come down on, and of course my reaction to her also could never be predicted. The most extreme example of this was one of many occasions when she threatened to put her head in the oven and I replied, 'Go on, then, but you're wasting your time because natural gas won't kill you'. She asked how I knew it was natural gas and never made that particular threat again!
My existing 'authority problem' crystallised in my twenties with my experience of religious life and the realisation that I was never going to be obedient to those turds. A major turning point was my realisation that the Christian saying of 'in his will is our peace' had only ever resulted in heartache and abuse for me. I realised that my peace was actually in my own will, not anyone else's, and thus my initiation into the magical worldview began. Of course I took to Starhawk's analysis of power over and power with, like a duck to water, and then discovered anarchist ideas about power and authority. I can have power but authorities over me have authority. The reflexive idea of obeying myself sounds strange at first, but locates both power and authority in myself.
Another idea which was very influential on me was an article in a monastic journal I read when a novice about discernment, discretion and prudence. Obviously discretion and prudence are not really me, but this idea of being able to discern is something which hit me like a hammer blow, and probably that's when obedience really ended for me. From now on I wouldn't take people's shit because I myself would discern what was really going on.
Discern isn't really a word used much in the pagan or magical world, but it probably best equates to our idea of divining something. In my subversive way I ask a few questions which without fail show what is going on:
Does this situation look like the way I think things should be?
Where is the authority in this situation?
Where is the power?
Where is the money going?
Who benefits?
Will this give me power or take it away?

As always these questions have proved useful in my current work situation, where as I said recently the situation has rather imploded. The new manager has handed in her notice already, and in fact commented in staff meeting when she announced this that senior management of the company wanted to be present when she made the announcement. 'I'm not a robot,' she said. How I laughed afterwards!
Oh alright, I know you want a soundtrack to this post:

An Update and More Street Art

This was going to be the post I have mooted several times, against quack remedies, but it isn 't going to be now. I am watching a wonderful film which manages to star both William Hartnell and Peter Lorre, and shows holiday makers on the beach wearing suits, so I will settle down and reflect a bit.

I haven't been posting here that much because I have been rather lacking the energy to do so. My work has suddenly gone from being reletively sensible to being stupid as hell. I am delighted to say that all the three people at my level united in a complaint and one of my colleagues has blown the whistle in addition. I am of course hugely proud of my colleagues, but nonetheless am applying for other jobs. This is just one of the times when the world nudges one to make a move, and if they are not going to let their staff report incidents, I'm off.

I am delighted to say that I have a new consultant rheumatologist who took one look at my knees and is starting me on one of the new expensive treatments. This is actually what I have been hoping for all along, because they really are good but you have to have tried a number of other treatments first. One of the reasons I haven't done my post about quack remedies was that I couldn't face writing about the fact that some turds in the world will happily sell people expensive 'remedies' which don't work. The most bizarre is probably the idea that coffee enemas will cure cancer when killing it or cutting it out is clearly the only way to go. Some people of course actually believe that these things work, and I have been reading about the sad case of a woman who set herself up as the 'Wellness Warrior'. She unfortunately had a very rare cancer which kills you very slowly and at a frighteningly young age was told the only option was to have an arm amputated and that would cure it. She didn 't do that, but tried 'alternative' treatments, and in fact didn't seem to be ill because of the nature of her cancer, but did actually die.

The pictures are of various street art pieces. I really appreciate their humour. 

Meanwhile the world hurtles on towards its untimely end. It does actually begin to look as if the world will end in my lifetime. What I really don't understand is the people who keep on reproducing in this environment! Right, I'm off out into the sun.

Turds: the Archbishop of Westminster Again

If I have been rather quiet here it is because I have been having one of those stagnant times before a flurry of activity. The activity has arrived with a bang and amongst other things my colleagues and I have complained about management and I am applying for other jobs. One of the most satisfying things is that the public downfall of a particularly nasty piece of work who has been on the List for years, continues apace.

Archbishop tried to discredit BBC film on church links to abuse

The most senior Catholic leader in England and Wales went to extraordinary lengths to try to discredit a BBC documentary on child sexual abuse and its cover-up by the church, the Guardian can disclose.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, publicly accused the BBC of bias and malice before the documentary was aired in 2003. Documents seen by the Guardian show he also lobbied the BBC’s director of news, wrote to all priests in his archdiocese urging them not to speak to BBC journalists, and lodged a formal complaint against the programme’s makers.
The BBC’s programme complaints unit (PCU) rejected the complaint, and the BBC governors’ programme complaints committee dismissed his appeal against that decision. Nichols refused to apologise to the programme-makers.
Last month the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) criticised Nichols for putting the church’s reputation before the welfare of abuse survivors. In a report, IICSA said Nichols’s response to the BBC programme was “misplaced and missed the point”.

The documentary, part of the investigative series Kenyon Confronts on BBC One, included interviews with survivors who claimed the church covered up cases of sexual abuse. It tracked down Father James Robinson, a Catholic priest who fled to the US after being accused of sexual abuse and who received financial support from the Catholic archdiocese of Birmingham for seven years before he was extradited, convicted and jailed.
At the time of the documentary, Nichols was archbishop of Birmingham and chair of the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults.
At a press conference before the programme was broadcast, Nichols accused the BBC of “using the licence fee to pay unscrupulous reporters trying to recirculate old news and to broadcast programmes that are biased and hostile”.

He added: “That this programme has been allowed to progress this far shows either malice towards the church or a total lack of judgment or of managerial responsibility.” He demanded the BBC justify the renewal of the licence fee.
While the documentary was being made, Nichols wrote to priests in his archdiocese urging them not to speak to BBC reporters working on it. “If you are approached please remember you are not advised to be cooperative. You may, quite properly, refuse to take part in any questioning or interview. This is my advice,” he wrote.
Before broadcast, Nichols wrote to Richard Sambrook, then the BBC’s director of news, saying a re-examination of historic sexual abuse cases was not in the public interest. He claimed reporters had telephoned a priest at 2am, acted discourteously and inconsiderately to a priest who had just undergone major surgery, and “cornered” a priest in a residential care home to question him.

Sambrook told the Guardian: “My recollection of the difficult meeting and correspondence with Cardinal Nichols is that he was entirely focused on trying to discredit the BBC’s journalism in the hope of diverting criticism of the church. Fortunately the BBC’s journalism was sufficiently robust to see off such attempts. He showed little interest in wider questions about uncovering abuse or the welfare of the survivors.”
After the programme was broadcast on 15 October 2003, Nichols lodged a formal complaint with the PCU, claiming BBC reporters used underhand methods to gain access to elderly and infirm priests.
The PCU rejected Nichols’ complaint, saying there were no grounds for his claim that the Kenyon Confronts team behaved inappropriately. It said the investigation was “conducted properly and in line with BBC producers’ guidelines” and there was no evidence of serious breaches of editorial standards.

Some of the 11 sworn witness statements from nuns and priests provided by Nichols to the PCU contradicted his allegations that reporters had not properly identified themselves. Evidence from recordings of some encounters also showed his claims to be false.
Nichols claimed one priest had been left distressed by a visit from two members of the Kenyon Confronts team, who were alleged to be hectoring and intimidating. However, the priest’s statement said the pair were “well-mannered, polite and had respect for my office, although I was glad when I had finished speaking to them. They were not unpleasant or malicious in the way they spoke to me.”
Nichols appealed to the BBC governors’ programme complaints committee against the PCU’s adjudication, and in May 2005 the committee rejected the appeal.
After the decision, Paul Kenyon, the programme’s presenter, and Paul Woolwich, its executive producer, wrote to Nichols saying the archbishop had tarnished the reputation of those who worked on the documentary. “We believe an apology to set the record straight would now be appropriate.”

Nichols replied: “I see no need for me to offer an apology.”
Last month IICSA said Nichols’ response to the programme should have focused on “recognising the harm caused to the complainants and victims. Instead, [it] led many to think that the church was still more concerned with protecting itself than the protection of children.”
After the report was published, the Tablet, a respected Catholic weekly, said the inquiry’s criticisms raised questions about Nichols’s fitness for office.

In a statement to the Guardian, Nichols apologised for at the time failing to sufficiently acknowledge two positive elements of the programme: giving a platform to abuse survivors and locating Fr Robinson.
He pointed out he had offered to give a live interview to the BBC at the time of the broadcast. Woolwich said it had not been possible to broadcast a live interview immediately after the broadcast of a pre-recorded programme, and Nichols had rejected an offer to appear live on Newsnight the same night or the Today programme the following morning.
Nichols’s statement said: “I was annoyed at the approach of the programme-makers who gave a slanted presentation of the real problems we were seeking to address … I accept that my frustration at the approach of the programme-makers led me not to give sufficient attention to the suffering of the victims of abuse perpetrated by the priest in question, although I had already met with all but one of them.

“A more thorough listening to the experiences of victims and survivors has now become central to the church’s approach and we will continue to adjust our work in safeguarding in light of this victim-centred approach.” Source

What an absolute turd. Of course as tends to be the case, as one gets it, other turds go on the List, since a witch's work never ends. Don't worry, there is one person who has been on it longer than Nichols, and I can feel his reward coming as well!

Thought for the Day with Tom Hardy

Now that gets the Hound's seal of approval for Enlightened Consciousness.
Oh alright  if you insist on a bedtime story...

Urban Grimoire: A Modern Spell for Use with Large Corporations

I have had two interesting experiences recently of using a modern spell - literally words to make a change.
Usually I'm not terribly taken with online reviews  because usually they are too easily manipulated, but I have seen how leaving an online review can genuinely impact on a large company's reputation 
Regular readers will remember my shitty previous employers. I left a simply terrible review on a well-known recruitment website for them. At the time I left my review all the others were glowing, so mine was the odd one out, and could have been seen as someone with an axe to grind. I have recently gone back to the site and found that my review has given other people the courage to leave bad reviews, and so now anyone going on that site sees that they are a terrible employer. The lesson I suppose is that one person's courage in the face of bullies encourages others to speak out.
I also left a poor review for the local office of the large national company which 'manages' the building I live in. (I have long accepted that my lot in life is to be the one who points out that somebody is being a turd, it isn't solely that I'm a miserable bastard. True to form, other poor reviews have followed, and I was amused to see on a large review website that my review, while bad, wasn't even the worst because someone had already left a review calling them criminals!
It just goes to show that speaking something brings it into being.

Tarot : Getting the 2 and 3 of Wands Confused

Today I was sat on the canal bank reading a book about the tarot. The author said that she insists on her students rote learning the book meanings of the cards, so I immediately flipped to the appendix to look at these two cards and found she'd given the same meaning for both!
I have therefore had a fresh think about it and resorted to the genuinely old French method of seeing the minors as the manifestation of their majors, which has made all clear. The 2 is from the High Priestess so relates to things hidden and the 3 relates to the Empress so is things expected. In other words the bloke in the 2 could but doesn't know it, and the bloke in the 3 will shortly be able to!
I do like, perhaps in a reaction to Pixie making the cards too alike, Barbara Walker has gone her own way with these cards.

Queer: Ballet Dancer and Wrestler Ricki Starr

Ricki Starr (1931 - 2014) was the professional name of a man who managed to combine dual careers as a ballet dancer and a wrestler.

He was a ballet dancer first, and when he started wrestling imported not only balletic moves but even wore slippers!

The wrestling websites all say that his wrestling had gay overtones. I was going to say that while I have tagged this post queer I wasn't making assumptions about his sexuality, but now I have seen his act I am not convinced the gayness was limited to overtones!

Not sure at all! On the other hand the only thing queerer than a gay ballet dancer taking on the butch world of wrestling, would be a straight one doing so and pretending to be gay.

Apart from anything else, I am such a sucker for a hairy chest!

Turds: Former Archbishop of Birmingham

His Eminence Vincent Cardinal Nichols has come under fire from the Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse for his handling of the matter when he was Archbishop of Birmingham. The Hound is overjoyed because he's been on the List forever.
The commentary by the BBC says:

Once again, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has shone light upon dark areas of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.

This report describes an institution where the safeguarding of children was relegated to second, even third place, with the Church much more concerned about reputation management.

It also appears that Church leaders preferred secrecy over transparency, assisting some abusive priests to leave the country and others to move from parish to parish.

The criticisms of Cardinal Vincent Nichols are particularly scathing. The clear implication of the report is that his focus on reputation management - rather than the welfare of children - meant that abusers were allowed to continue victimising children.

TheTelegraph said:

Since the mid 1930s, there have been more than 130 allegations of child sexual abuse made against 78 people associated with the Archdiocese of Birmingham. At least 13 of them have been convicted in criminal courts and three others have been cautioned.

In his former role as Archbishop of Birmingham between 2000 and 2009, Cardinal Vincent Nichols claimed that a documentary - about the confrontation of a "serial child abuser" priest after he fled to the US - was "insensitive".

However an official inquiry Thursday criticised Cardinal Nichols, 73, who now sits as the Archbishop of Westminster, for failing to prioritise the welfare of children over the reputation of the church during his tenure.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) report found that the Archbishop’s reaction to the 2003 BBC documentary "led many to think that the Church was still more concerned with protecting itself than the protection of children" and concluded that his response to the screening was "misplaced and missed the point".

Following publication of the report Professor Alexis Jay, chair of the inquiry, said: "I am truly shocked by the scale of child sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Birmingham. The number of perpetrators and abused children is likely to be far higher than the figures suggest.

In a statement, His Eminence said (I quote from the Belfast Telegraph):

Following the report Cardinal Nichols said: “I thank IICSA for their review of the past and in my witness statements address all the points contained in the report.

“I look forward to the next phase which I trust will help us in our present and future tasks.”

Help them, lol. More like force them to do what is merely humanly responsible. And you know what? I really really hope His Eminence is elected pope after this one, just because of the associated media scrutiny 😄

Time Travel: the Former 100° Grill and Bar, Essex Street

On the corner of Essex Street and (M)Inge Street in the Chinese Quarter is this unassuming building which is in the middle of being renovated again:

In its more recent history it has been the Hundred Degree Flaming Bar and Grill, but there is no indication that in its more distant past it was the Key Bookshop, run by the Communist Party, and upstairs was the Star Social Club:

The social club doesn't show up a great deal in local history but was the location for a folk club and provided a women's/lesbians' space. The Communist bookshop seems to have moved frequently, but I don't know of one now.

Tarot: The Four Doors Spread

'Read as you can, not as you can't,' is one of my little principles which I keep on about. By and large it is true, but this week I am on annual leave and one of the things I want to do is practice this tarot spread which is perhaps best known for being used by his famous Miss Cleo. I don't understand, when I am perfectly capable of getting a narrative or picture from a line of cards, why I currently seem to be unable to do so with this spread, but I hope that is a situation which can be remedied.
You shuffle the deck and cut it into four piles, face down. You turn over the top cards and place them above so you have four face-up cards above the four face-down piles. You are supposed to turn them vertically so their orientation is reversed in this spread. I don't do reversals myself except when reading with an Etteilla deck, so I turn them horizontally, as is usual in cartomancy. You then turn over the top four cards of the piles so that you have eight cards face up. There are no exact positions but you read them sequentially, left to right and top to bottom. To carry on in time terms or get more information you move up the lower four cards and turn over four more, and you can do this until you get enough information. These instructions are based on the ones on aeclectic tarot forum and I have also read that it helps if you treat cards representing people as nouns and action cards as verbs. There is also a possible third class of cards, the archetypes, which can be seen as outer influences, or in my freeform reading in whatever way feels right at the time.
I notice that Miss Cleo herself used a mixture of psychic impressions, traditional meanings, and her own interpretation, so in reality didn't read that different to me.

(Mis)understanding the INFJ Door Slam

A few more thoughts on the famous INFJ door slammed. If you look on the internet you will see lots of websites which are trying to be helpful by telling INFJs that they do the door slam and giving helpful advice as to what to do instead to try to salvage relationships. These are usually along the perfectly reasonable lines of negotiating and communicating with people, but unfortunately the advice embodies two profound misunderstandings of how INFJs relate to other people.
The first misunderstanding is not allowing for the fact that we function through a set of rules in our head. These rules are perfectly reasonable to us but the key to understanding this is that we don't explain these rules to other people. This may seem unreasonable but that's the deal. Sorry, not sorry. We also feel free to throw these rules out of the window when it suits us. If we like you and want to incorporate you into our world we will ignore the rules for your benefit, but won't tell you that either. This means that by the time an INFJ gets to the door slam, we have actually already negotiated our own rules and by that time we are usually way beyond further negotiation. We may give you a warning, but our innate bullshit detector will know your stuff by then, and excuses etc will merely put a bolt on the already slammed door.
The second thing which the outside world doesn't get is that by the time of the door slam, we don't care. Genuinely. You can tell an INFJ trying to salvage a relationship by our emotion and repeated attempts to tell you what is bothering us. If you ignore them or prevaricate and we are forced to just tell you with no emotion you are being door slammed. Again that is only if we are bothered about you. By that stage you won't be admitted to our inner world and if we're not bothered about you, we'll just disappear. You may think that this is unreasonable but we don't care.
Could we do something different as the helpful advice suggests? Of course we could. But in reality we've already done it.

The Haunting of Borley Rectory 2019

This is a review of the film of this name. The main reason I am reviewing it here is to counteract the many negative reviews it has accrued on the internet, because The Hound thinks it's rather good.
The story of the notorious haunting of Borley Rectory was one of the things on which I cut my weird shit teeth. In fact I have read virtually everything about it except for James Turner's My Life with Borley Rectory, but only because I have never been able to get my grubby little hands on it.
This film's negative reviews largely stem from historical purists. Set in 1944, it features an American serviceman, ordered to live in an Essex cottage and monitor the airwaves. Unfortunately the famous Rectory nun won't leave him alone and he enlists the help of Harry Price.
Probably I have said here before that while I have read both the for and against literature on Borley I have to come down on the side of the sceptic. The story is too incredible to be true, all of the characters too vaudeville, and frankly the level of hysteria would give Freud a fit.
This film is done no service by the way it is described online as the story of Borley Rectory. It is no such thing. It is a fantasy inspired by the already incredible legend of the haunting of Borley. The mere fact that it opens with Marianne Foyster (pictured) speaking in the ruins of the rectory should tell anyone who knows the story that this is not a historical account and some drama is about to happen. A fantastic story based on a fantastic story, this is not history.
But the aspect which makes this film really easy on the eye is that it stars the gorgeous Zach Clifford. I'm not going to go on, because I will embarrass myself!