Spirit of Place: A Selly Oak Tradition

I have commented about this before and only yesterday was pointing out to someone that the spirit of place of Birmingham will look after you if you approach it right, and spit you out if you don't. Shortly afterwards I found myself walking through the Selly Oak area of the city and was reminded of an annual ritual.

I'm sure it happens in other university cities but they're outside the scope of this blog. What happens is that at the end of the summer term (it usually coincides with the Glastonbury Festival), the students' lets on their houses end and they never take all their clobber with them. So either they or the landlord put the stuff out in the street (in the streets running between the Bristol Road and Raddlebarn Road) and the locals come and help themselves to it. 

Please understand that I'm not exaggerating when I say you can literally kit out a whole house and wardrobe for free. Some friends once got a fish tank complete with living fish and had to drive it home very carefully. Yesterday there were people with supermarket trolleys full of stuff.

I didn't have a spare hand yesterday so went back this afternoon with a mental shopping list of some sort of footwear and a cooking pot, and intended to get tomatoes from Aldi on the way home.

So of course I found some work boots (about £60 in the shops) and a pot immediately before loads of unopened tins of food. So I got all that for free and am going back tomorrow because there were still landlords putting stuff out on the pavement. There's nothing more I have in mind but I'm sure I'll find something I fancy.

See, the spirit of the city does actually look after you if you approach it right.

Urban Grimoire: The Review Spell Revisited

Magic has been described as the art and science of causing change in accordance with will, and all acts have been defined as magical acts. I have posted here before about the remarkable magical strength of leaving reviews on the internet. Whether good or bad, your review does have real power online. Now I'm aware that businesses often manipulate their image by posting fake reviews. However, I'm also of the opinion that the public are far more clued up on identifying fake reviews, false information, and what have you, than we used to be. The problem with filling the internet with false information is that people get wise to it. For example, bot comments on social media are now met with a chorus calling them a bot. 

Actually, I quite like to call commenters bots when they're obviously not. If they've left a particularly cruel, inflammatory, or hate-filled comment, the explosion which follows calling them a bot is bound to be good.

But to the subject of the post. It was about the management company of the leasehold flats I live in. The utterly incompetent directors don't involve the other leaseholders and have, for the ten years I have lived here, used the same individuals to do the day to day management, but they've moved through several companies in that time.

Clearly, there's something wrong there, and if I was hugely rich they would be in the tribunal, but there is no hope of creating a mass action out of the 460 flats and there's legally a limit to the power leaseholders can do.

But under the last management company there was a peak of dissatisfaction among the residents of several buildings they manage and people used the power they had, by leaving bad reviews.

And they were absolutely atrocious. If I say that mine was one of the more restrained ones, it should give an idea of how dozens of people were not holding back. They left comments which really can only be described as libellous if they're not true, such as accusing them of running off with people's money and other crimes. My own contribution was to comment on how to take them to the tribunal.

And I'm delighted to say that my efforts mean the company's Google reviews are now headed up by the picture which illustrates this post. 🐴 As I commented in my last post, laughing and ridicule is a really good way of moving power around, and that is pure witchcraft.

Of course I knew the company was rubbish, but this was confirmed by the way they dealt with this barrage of critical comments. They didn't even know or care, that what you do when your professional reputation is assaulted like that is to be pink and fluffy in public and leave sympathetic replies asking the commenter to contact you (see, I could work in comms), but be hard as nails with threatening solicitors' letters behind the scenes. 

What they actually did was leave obviously fictional comments which were even funnier. One of them described two of the staff as the Mulder and Scully of house hunting. I personally edited my review wondering which of the two was so spooky that nobody would work with them and which has been impregnated by aliens.

Their online presence is ruined, and it's hilarious. They've even stopped posting on their social media because of the comments they're getting.

Last week, to nobody's surprise, the leaseholders got letters to say they've sold the property management part of their business to someone else and that's who will be looking after the building from now on. Job done.

Agony Hound: AITA for Faking a Haunted House To Get My Boyfriend to Move Out Because He Refused To Leave After We Broke Up?

High time I intruded and ruined someone else's life again in my role of agony aunt, and this one's a beauty.

(My source for this was somewhere on Tumblr).

The Hound says:

Hon, this isn't ethically questionable. The default position, unless you're exceptionally good friends and have agreed this in advance, is that the one who doesn't own the place moves out when you break up. If someone is clingy/inadequate enough not to do this, they're breaking a major rule of social engagement and all bets are off.

Also, your method of getting rid of him is worthy of a witch, never mind an Oscar. Well done, I couldn't have done it myself. In chaos magic an essential banishing ritual is to laugh at things and this definitely works with taking the piss as well.

Another interesting aspect is the ferret. Perhaps it's a good idea to ask a prospective partner about their ferret, see what they say and demand to see it if they claim to possess one.

What *is* being an asshole is to fake a haunting for years simply to frighten someone, as Noel Gallagher famously did for years to his brother Liam:

The Mirror​ has reported this morning that Noel Gallagher has tormented his brother for years over his fear of ghosts, essentially… by moving furniture about in his bedroom to shit him up.

In Noel’s words, “If we were ever anywhere remotely spooky, we’d tell Liam that the house was haunted, particularly his bedroom.”

“When he’d get up in the morning and go and have his breakfast, someone would go in and turn the pictures back to front, or fucking move a lamp beside his bed across the other side of the room. He’d arrive pale: ‘Have you been in my fucking room?’ ‘No, why?’ ‘You’ve been in my room, because now the fucking lamp is in the toilet.’ ‘No way, fucking hell. Wow.’”

The report also notes that the brothers, in their rock’n’roll heyday (or, “When they were constantly off their tits”), suspected bizarre conspiracies were surrounding them during the 1996 sessions for Oasis’ third album ​Be Here Now​​, which took place at The Farm in Surrey. Noel explained: “Because it’s on a farm, there’s lots of farm people knocking around, we’d always be suspiciously looking out their window, admittedly high as a fucking kite thinking, ‘Sheep’s got a camera. Don’t like the look of that pig.’” Source

Reading The Invisibles....

In 2025 is a strange, synchronistic, experience...

My Lent Book Again

Coming back to report on my progress of reading my Lent book this year, which as I said in my last post is Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

All acts of magic have the magician as their primary target, and reading a book so notoriously magical can only be described as transformative. Morrison described how he put a spell in it to turn the reader into an Invisible and without publishing details of things that are overly personal, it's hitting some serious stuff and pressing buttons.

In terms of stuff which is sayable in public, this post was prompted by the idea of a Hand of Glory (in folklore the hand of a hanged man used by burglars as a sort of candle to put the household to sleep so that they could burgle it undisturbed) which makes obscene gestures is so very me. I also particularly love a scene where Jack Frost makes a magic circle from fag ends taken from the Tesco bag Tom O'Bedlam gave him.

My only sorrow is that at least in appearance I seem to be passing from King Mob to Tom O'Bedlam!

My Lent Book

Annually, I post here about the practice I have stolen from the Christians of taking a book to read for Lent, and since Lent starts on Wednesday it's that time of year. 

The only thing the books I choose have in common is that they're completely unsuitable and not likely to be picked by the Archbishop of Canterbury as his Lent book. Of course since the archbishop has crashed and burned there isn't one to pick a book this year so they can all pick the witch's Lent book.

This year I have managed to lay my hands on a pirated electronic copy of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles graphic novels so that's my choice. I have read this hugely far-ranging chaos magic apocalypse at various times, but never in order and the omnibus edition is very expensive to buy in any form so it feels like it's dropped into my lap.

I'm absolutely howling at the Wikipedia page for the series, which is terrifically vanilla for a series which is, even by my standards, absolutely WILD. Of course I'm most interested in the magic and I remember being impressed with the way the Invisibles invoke John Lennon as a god. I keep threatening to channel Derek Acorah but have somehow resisted the temptation. Perhaps the cover which illustrates this post are the best explanation.

I'll see how I get on with it because I've also started another read through of the bible (not the New Testament, the Hebrew bible is a longstanding passion and I think I can truthfully say I'm the only dog to come top in Hebrew) and hope I haven't bitten off more than I can choose. I heard Jewish scholar Robert Alter say on a podcast that he originally translated a line from 'The Lord is my shepherd' as 'You pleasure my head with oil,' until his wife, shocked, protested that he couldn't possibly publish that, and I immediately knew I'd found my guide for another read through. So I'm using the notes in Alter's translation, but actually reading the updated New Revised Standard Version in approximate order it was written. This gives a completely different impression from starting from the beginning, because you literally just have a few bits of poetry and then straight into the prophets.

Oh, there's something we have to do before I bury myself in my books. *Some* people are always welcome in the United Kingdom.

Urban Grimoire: A Spell to Reverse the Current Upended State of the World

Obviously, I'm all for a bit of chaos to shake things up but the sheer speed at which the world situation is upending at the moment may itself require some shaking out so that it can be put back in an order where the several world Hitlers aren't getting what they want.

To do this: put yourself in a calm or sacred place and frame of mind and see the world being a calm and peaceful place in your mind. See Putin and Trump out of power, Ukraine and Palestine restored to sovereignty, and so on. Even a Green government in UK because why limit yourself. And say these words:

When Magritte died

The stones fell to the ground

The birds divorced their leaves

The night and day agreed to differ

The breasts became blind

The cunt was struck dumb

The tubas extnguished their flames

The pipe remembered its role

The words looked up what they meant in the dictionary

The clouds turned acstract

The ham closed its eye for ever

When Magritte died.

When Magritte died

The toes hid modestly in their shoes

The mountains no longer envied their eagles

The apple shrunk to the size of an apple

Or did the room grow to the size of a room?

The bowler hat lost its ability to astonish

The old healer

Returned from a dip in the sea

Put on his trousers

his boots

his cloak

his hat

Picked up his stick

his sack

his cage of doves (clanging its door to)

And set off on his banal journey

When Magritte died.

(George Kelly: Homage to Magritte)

So mote it be!