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Doodles From A Follycon Panel

I was on a panel at Follycon this weekend (‘Defend The Indefensible’). Great time, great panelists, great audience. One of the symptoms of this group mania was the off-the-cuff creation of doodles by the panelists to make our points (such as they were). I include them here so as to augment the great body of […]

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Visit To An Ex-Slave’s Grave

“Britain’s first freed slave’s buried there,” Mum says as we drive by a church on the way to the dentist. “Really?” I say from the back of the car. “Some Rastafarians turned up once,” Mum says, “knocked on the vicar’s door and demanded to take him back to Ethiopia.” I presume they meant the ex-slave […]

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The Ainu

It’s something rarely talked about (at least, I only found out myself recently) that Japan has an aboriginal population who were there long before the people we now call the Japanese arrived. They’re called the Ainu, there’s officially about 20,000 of them and they mainly live in the north. Traditionally, the men grow great beards […]

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Black Annis Abroad

Found this image on a Korean tweet while Googling for Black Annis, a nightmarish folktale figure from my neck of the woods, Leicester. Strange to think this technically depicts a tree on the New Parks housing estate but imagined and rendered by someone far away. The weird thing was I translated the tweet and it […]

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