Tea and Conversation

Punch, volume 123, 1902

My favourite tea is Earl Grey, hot - unlike Jean-Luc, I add milk.

Why "Conjury Nook"?

In the 'real world', where electrons are tied down by heavy protons and neutrons, there's a farm near to where my parents live in Lincolnshire called Conjury Nook. I think it's a wonderful, evocative name, with a whiff of mystery and strangeness. In such a place, in the dark of the moon, the Fair-folk may still be glimpsed at the bottom of the garden and, lurking in the dew-filled shadows in the skirts of its hedges, you may find pockets of Magic that have escaped the burning tide of Science.

Why do I collect glass candlesticks?

The variety of shapes and colours of pressed glass candlesticks is truly amazing. You'd never imagine that such a simple and decorative object could be crafted in such diverse forms. I have a collection including late Victorian candlesticks dating from 1880 in elegant, classical shapes made from glass as clear as rainwater, pale sap-green Art Deco candlesticks from the 1920's and improbable lifebelt-shaped creations from the 1940's or 50's in clear, green and amber glass. The colours are wonderful, especially when displayed in a window with the light pouring through them - from apricot to treacle-brown, pinks, blues and every shade of green you could imagine. I always swear I'll never buy another, then I'm tempted to break that promise at car-boot sales and antiques arcades. How so many of them survive in a house full of cats is a miracle!

Poltergeist: the Legacy

If you live in the UK you probably won't have seen this TV series. The first season and half of the second were shown on Channel 5, and the first two seasons and about six episodes of the third were shown on Sky One. In the States, three seasons have aired and the programme has now gone to the Sci-Fi Channel.
It has little to do with the Poltergeist movies, except that the little medium woman from the first film has a cameo appearance in one episode as a dead guardian. Here's the premise: since the beginning of Time (or at least for four or five centuries) a secret organisation called the Legacy has been protecting the rest of us mortals from Evil. The Legacy operates from a series of Houses in various cities, each run by a Precept, and they investigate hauntings and other paranormal activities using a combination of historical knowledge, computer data-bases and high-tech science. The series is set in the San-Francisco Legacy house, a yummy gothic mansion located on one of the islands in the Bay (actually it's a military academy in Vancouver) and its precept is Dr Derek Rayne (played by a Dutch actor, Derek de Lint, who has a strong following of fans in the newsgroups) Other members of the group include Nick Boyle (played by Martin Cummins), an ex-Seal, who likes to wave guns at ghosts and demons, Dr Rachel Corrigan (Helen Shaver) a psychologist with a nice line in mini-skirts, and Alex Moreau (Robbi Chong), the resident computer techie.
I have to admit that P:TL is a flawed masterpiece. On the good side, it's made with love - the production values are high, the acting is superb and the effects are glitzy. On the downside, some of the plots have holes you could drive a truck through and the writers do tend to leave no cliche unused.
I love it madly - warts and all - and I'm itching to see the rest of the third season when some kind channel deigns to put it on. I don't usually write fan-fiction, but I've made an exception here. You don't need to have watched the series to read it - you don't need to know more than the basics detailed above, so click on the link and meet the False Knight on the Road.

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