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[jayne-hecate-writer]

Happy New Year?...

As twenty twenty three passes into twenty twenty four, we can all sit back and reflect on where we have come as a society, marvel at the changes we have made for the better as things have improved for everyone, to ensure that they can live happy, worry free lives...

This is of course utter nonsense. Things have not got better, if anything, things have got considerably worse and many families in the UK are facing an uncertain future, filled with fear and misery. With heating bills rising, rents out of control even if you can find somewhere to live and medical waiting lists moving from months into years for essential health care. From this, we can only conclude that Britain is failing. The old Etonian schoolboys who have run the country for the last decade and a half have lined their own pockets, sold essential services to their friends and stolen the hopes and dreams of the poor. Food bank usage is higher than ever and of course, Brexit has been a huge, wonderful success... Opps sorry, I mean a catastrophic failure that we could all see coming, but somehow the likes of Farage and Johnson convinced the masses that a future separate from our biggest trading partners was the best option for us.

Why am I writing this now? I have kept quiet on my views for long enough. In twenty twenty three, I turned fifty. I never thought I would make it to fifty, I had always thought that I would have died in some exciting mountaineering accident, my mangled body slowing rotting in the high altitude sunshine, having dropped from an indeterminate ledge upon which I was having an epic climb. But arthritis and injury put a stop to that dream! Instead I am stuck indoors, riddled with pain and losing my mobility and independence, while living in fear of the next PIP assessment form that is going to drop through my door and force me to justify my existence.

I realise now that my hope for a happy peaceful future has evaporated. I am terrified of getting tooth ache, because I have no access to dental care. If I have an injury that needs medical attention, the NHS is so stripped of money, I will just sit on a waiting list to see a specialist Doctor who probably died of stress related alcoholism or Covid some time ago and may not have been replaced yet. I am not alone in these fears, so many others here in the UK have these fears and I cannot see a bright future for anyone here, except the very richest, most of which are already multimillionaires. Our current Prime Minister is richer than the King, meanwhile his wife has dealings with companies that are alleged to have made huge profits from Government involvement or even corruption. We all know that the Government are corrupt, but the media has carefully taken the hatchet to the anyone who would oppose them, leaving us with an opposition party who recently praised the work of Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher. The woman who destroyed the mining industry before it was cool to do so and also sold off our water and energy infrastructure, who took us back to the dark ages of the rich owning everything the poor rely upon to live. Currently, we have an unelected member of the cabinet, put there by making him a member of the house of lords, a completely unelected body who include people like Andrew Lloyd Webber and even Jeffrey Archer, of Weston Super Mare (some of us remember the scandal that involved him while he was in Government. Oh, they were such happy days, back when a political scandal meant that the minister was caught having intimate relations with someone he/she/they were not married too!). I am even getting e-Mails from Lord Michael Hesseltine, telling me that we have the same views on important political issues, such as Brexit and membership of the EU. OK, well only on that issue.

So what is my hope for twenty twenty four? It is this. I hope that nothing happens to me or my wife, because I do not know how I will pay the rent on my home. I hope that I do not need dental care or surgery. I hope that my car, that helps me with my daily mobility, does not fail the MOT in January. I hope that my Daughter and her partner can find a home of their own. I hope that my friends can find stability and freedom from debt. I hope that my seventeen year old cat makes it for another year . Finally, I hope that my arthritic hands can keep going as I explore my art and my writing. See? I do have hope after all.

My dear friends, I hope that the coming year brings you much needed peace and restorative rest, so we can face the horrors of our society and fight to put them right. I hope that we can remove these overly entitled bigots and old Etonian schoolboys from power and put in place a better, more egalitarian Government who don't want to ship desperate, hurting people off to the country that is still recovering from a horrific genocide of it's own people.

But if all of these hopes fail, you will find me on a mountain, real or metaphysical, praying to the spirit of nature to take me back home and away from this hellscape I have landed in... Oh yeah, I should mention that shouldn't I? Twenty twenty three was the year that I discovered that I had swapped universes, travelled across the metaphysical barrier between realities and landed in this unrelenting hellscape of far right politics and revolting nationalism. I should have guessed really, after all, what kind of lunatic would vote Boris Johnson into power or believe the lies and evil of Donald Trump? The world feels like a computer game, being played for laughs by a teenager who wants to see how evil a society can become before it implodes! Surely, at any moment, the points score is going to be so low that we are going to be wiped out by environmental disaster, while fighting global warfare started by underendowed oligarchs or simply failing to reach the next level in the game. I know how this works, I used to play Theme Hospital and occasionally I put the most evil and corrupt characters in charge, just for the giggles. Oh Heck... None of this is real. What kind of reality would allow for a fourth Matrix movie or make Darth Vader the sympathetic character we all feel sorry for?

Good luck my friends, I hope that despite it all, the coming year brings you the things you need to make your life safe, happy and peaceful. If it doesn't, then come and find me on the mountain and we can shout at the sky together.

With love always, Jayney XXX

[jayne-hecate-writer]

The Hasbro AT-AT project

Our dear friend Neil arrived at our door one day, with the ultimate gift that any Star Wars loving kid from the 80s would want, a three and a half inch tall Hasbro Scout Trooper, with opening helmet, complete with an AT-AT Imperial Walker!

These items had been rescued from a skip and as such were incredibly dirty. However, Neil could see that these items would be of great value to the Star Wars fan in me and so he handed them over accepting only a hug in return. The odyssey of the Imperial Walker was about to start as it sat on a shelf in my office, ready to be given the Jayney treatment. The weeks went by, slowly becoming months and every time I looked at the walker, I could see the damage, the missing parts and the broken sound module. Finally, I put a post on Facebook asking my friends what I should do with it and the resounding reply was that I needed to give it the Jayney treatment and resto-mod it to within an inch of it's armoured life.

Step one was to strip it down and scrub away the filth that it had gathered, clearly sat in someone's loft before entering a skip to be scrapped. It saddens me that someone would throw a toy like this away when it could be played with by a child who would love it, but I am sure that the Rebel Alliance would approve of it being scrapped! However, as a confirmed adherent to the Dark Side, I could not allow such a thing to happen to Imperial property and accepted my fate. The cleaning went surprisingly well and under the filth was a very good condition body, with only minor damage to the legs that was easily fixable. The biggest problem however was the missing chin mounted heavy blaster cannons. With some on-line research I found out that this was the Endor Edition Walker, released in 2006 and in it's incomplete state was next to worthless, making it the perfect candidate for what I was planning. Replacement blasters were available, but at just under twenty pounds per side, I was not keen and started to look into constructing my own. Here I went down a strange and unusual path delving into the depths of Spru-Goo, sculpting and chemistry.

Wobbly time slip time... Wooo! On the 7th of February of this year, I took some old model sprues and chopped them up into small sections and dumped the lot into an old cherry jar. I then poured on a bottle of acetone based nail varnish remover and screwed on the lid good and tight, not only to keep the smell in, but to prevent spillage if it got knocked over when I left it to work its magic on my shelf for months. The styrene reacted with the acetone and over time melted in the liquid, forming a strange rubber like compound that could be easily sculpted by gloved hands.

When it came to making the chin blasters, I needed a nice curved shape to hold the barrel and my home made Spru-Goo worked a treat. I scooped out the goo from the jar and laid it out on a work mat and started to roll and shape the spongy mass into shape, carefully folding it into layers that gave it a good thick base to work with. When I was finished, I was left with a smooth, one centimetre thick patty of styrene and I left this on a shelf to cure. As the acetone evaporated from the styrene, forming into a strong, rigid plastic once again. It took three days for the Spru-Goo to become workable and then I was able to saw, file and sand it into the shapes I needed to make the barrel holder. Then it was back to the cardboard supply and then e-Bay. I needed a pair of blaster barrels and during my investigations I had found someone who was 3D printing barrels for the original Kenner AT-AT from the early eighties. These although completely useless for my AT-AT were very, very cheap at only £2.50 including the postage and they took less than a month to arrive thanks to sitting in the local sorting office for three weeks due to a major staff shortage and restructuring by post Office management that has still to be resolved.

When I started to build up the blasters, using the Spru-Goo, the 3D printed barrels and some cardboard, I used the bottoms of some vitamin bottles to make the plasma generating chambers and then made a discovery. The 3D printed barrels were hollow, meaning that I could drill out the ends and install some LEDs directly into them to give them the muzzle flash of a firing weapon. The electronics was the easy bit, but shaping the rigid structure of the cannon to hold them was a little more tiresome. It slowly came together and I was left with something I liked, if looking a little more industrial and weapon like that the smooth sculpted original that had been lost. Being made of a mix of materials though, the cannons needed something to pull them all together. The 3D printed barrels visible ridge lines of the printing and although they were smooth to the touch I still didn't like it. I decided to seal the lot with UV resin, a product I have been using more and more of late and have really come to like. So using a small brush, I painted a thin layer of resin all over the complete cannon assembly and got out my UV torch to start fixing the resin... which failed to set. There was simply not enough power in the torch to set the amount of resin I had ended up using and the result was that the resin remained tacky and unpleasant to handle. I finally left it under a sheet of tin foil with the torch switched on until the batteries finally failed, but each cannon remained sticky and wet. In a fit of rage, while sat bored in a hospital waiting room waiting for wifey to come back from an MRI, I scanned Amazon Prime and found the answer to my problem (purely the setting of the resin, my other problems are to discuss another day!). A huge, plug in, resin curing lamp so powerful that it came with a warning about it being dangerous to the eyes and skin! The next day it arrived and I began baking the tacky cannons until they were glassy smooth and everything was coated with a firm, strong layer of plastic. Unfortunately, it was too shiny for the paint and I had to lightly sand it back to give it a key for the paint to stick too before using my airbrush to give each cannon a coat of gunmetal grey.

With the paint on the cannons drying, I turned my attention to the head of the walker and set about making the modifications to the carriers for the chin cannons. This was deeply infuriating and just when I thought I had it all set, the gears would jump, the sliding plates would slip and the whole lot would stop working. Luckily, I have the power of the Dark Side and thus was able to hold all of the pieces together, like a lightsabre under construction before I finally got it to work as I wanted. I cut away the wiring for the useless wheat seed bulbs that came with the unit and replaced it all with the wiring for the LEDs. I also took a razor saw to the horribly printed windscreen of the beast and cut away this awful looking piece of plastic. Using a pin vice, I was able to drill about twenty tiny, half millimetre holes in the cockpit control desk for the optical fibres I wanted to use. Again, the UV resin and curing lamp came to my rescue. I have in the past tried to secure the optical fibres with super glue, hot glue and plastic glue and all of these attempts have been less that successful. UV resin however is optically clear, easy to apply and cures in less than ten minutes with no damage to the fibres. I was able to bunch the fibres and then use resin again to attach LEDs to the other end of the braid. Optical fibres are great and being flexible are easy to use because the light travels along the inside through internal reflection, allowing the light source to be some distance away from the output end, without issue. So bending the woven fibres around inside the head, I was able to hide the LEDs in the base, away from the cockpit. I then lit the cockpit interior with a menacing red light to give the newly fitted windscreen the appropriate evil red glow, just like in the movies.

The wiring was a little more complicated because there is already quite a large wiring loom fitted as standard to the AT-AT and when it arrived with me, something was very wrong with the sound module and failed to work, even when new batteries were fitted. The only option I had was to open the module up and see if I could find the cause of the failure. Removing it from the superstructure of the walker was a royal pain in the arse and I was quickly left with a pile of parts, held together with the long strands of wire that had been fed through small access holes in the plastic parts. Without wanting to rip through it all, my testing had to be done with the parts in place, which was annoyingly awkward at times as bit fell from my work top or got caught around the cat who had wandered past. However, I quickly found the source of the problem, several cracked joints and a fault in the battery box. Cutting away the wiring felt like a bad move, but what choice did I have? It was already broken, if I failed to fix it, nothing was lost. The fault with the battery box however is still present and when changing batteries, the lid must not be screwed forcefully into place because it will damage the box and break the connection to the power lead. I suspect that somewhere in the past, the battery box screw was over tightened and damaged the housing. However, while I had it apart, I also took my razor saw to the housing of the battery box and fitted a hidden switch, which cannot be seen, even with the hold door open. If you did not know it was there, you would never know about the extra cockpit functions I added. Putting the sound module back together, I accidentally pressed one of the activation buttons and was presented with the noise of the walker slowly stepping on Luke's speeder, from Episode Five, The Empire Strikes Back. The other buttons also worked, as did the chin cannons and the sound module sounded great, if rather loud.

Final assembly and paint was the bit I was looking forwards to. Painting something to look factory fresh and clean is all well and good, but everything in the Star Wars universe is grotty. Ships have oil stains, dirty marks and carbon scoring from blaster fire. The smooth grey paint of the AT-AT just looked too fresh and so I raided the paint drawer for the box of texture paints that live at the back. Texture paint is a new thing to me, but having used it for this, I will undoubtedly use it again, despite my having got it almost everywhere including on my lap top screen! The feet of the walker are now covered in mud and sand, all of which came from the box of texture paints. Weathering is most exciting part of any build and for this one, I wanted it to look abused and filthy. I splattered the chassis with crusty dirt, oil stains, rust stains and filth from wading through water. I used roughly six colour washes and stains to give the effect and what I was left with looked OK, but it also still had that shine of fresh paint. It is hard to explain, but freshly applied texture paint is just too clean and dries with a slight sparkle. What kind of filth shines in the sun, I ask you? The wrong kind...

I used a flat matt varnish from Army Painter to finish the model and then left it to dry for four days before I touched it again. The effect is fabulous and I am now very happy with the result.

There is just one problem. The model is roughly sixty centimetres long, twenty centimetres wide and fifty centimetres tall and thus is too big for my office. The obvious answer is that the AT-AT needs to go, but where? This is where you come in. If you would like a one off, Jayney Magicked, Hasbro Imperial Walker, I am prepared to sell the great beast, although I might just keep the little Scout Trooper, because he's cute and I may have other plans for him...

Seriously though, the Walker is now for sale. I am aware that having put over thirty hours into the restoration and rebuild, I am never going to get that time back, but this is not the reason for doing what I do. As a disabled person who has lost her hobbies and her career, I have little else to fill my free time. However, the paint and parts used are not cheap and if I can cover the cost of them, that would be helpful. If you are interested, do please make me an offer and I can deliver it locally (around Weston Super Mud) or mail it anywhere else in the world. With all of painting and modifications, this Walker is now more of a display piece than a playable toy, so it is unsuitable for a youngster to fill with their figures and take it into battle in the sandpit in the garden. However, with care, the older child in us all can have a bit of fun with it. I remain unconvinced by the Hasbro figure scale, given that according to the Star Wars Vehicle manual I have read (thanks to Carol's Mom for that one, last Christmas) the cockpit should house three or more people. The cargo and crew deck in the main body should be two levels, with storage for two speeder bikes, however, if you put a three and half inch figure in there, you will be lucky to get two in the head and three more in the body, with no room for even a single speeder. I imagine that if the Walker were in true three and half inch scale, it would be close to four feet in height and weight more than is safe to risk falling onto a child playing with it!

As always, I am indebted to those who helped me with this project. Carol has made a fabulous video of the finished model and taken some lovely photos of it too.

My close friend Ginny supplied the air brush that I have been abusing with all sorts of paints and of course there is Neil who supplied the AT-AT. Finally, thank you to everyone on Farcebook who encouraged me to undertake this restoration project. I hope that you approve of my work... If not, tough titties, I have done it now!

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Chieftain tanks are my happy place

I grew up in Germany in the 1980s, a time of the cold war, Chernobyl and the Chieftain tank. Sadly, only one of these things has turned into something fun to play with at the weekend.

I have loved the Chieftain tank since childhood and had more than one chance to crawl across one, while still an overly excited pre-teen, visiting the Tank Museum in Bovington. Obviously, as soon as I hit my teenage years, I immediately stopped loving something as loud, obnoxious and heavy as a tank and instead got into music, namely Heavy Metal music.

Along with my love of Heavy Metal music, came my delight in the peace movement and even now aged horribly close to fifty, I am still involved in the peace movement, albeit, while wishing that I had the disposable income and large area of unused farmland upon which I could dabble in my interest in Chieftain tanks.

As we all know, the venerable old Chieftain had something of an Achilles heel out back, in the form the Leyland L60 engine. However, when it did work, the nineteen litre, opposing piston, two stroke multi-fuel engine had a glorious howl to it, despite being chronically underpowered for the vehicle it was propelling. Luckily the pack was easy to pull out and replace while in the field... Every cloud etc.

You can now buy your own Chieftain tank, providing that you have £60K to play with. However you also need a thousand pounds to fill the tank, every time you want to go for a drive of more than half a mile. If you want to know more about this kind of thing, why not go and have a look at the Mr Hewes YouTube channel. If you love tanks, you will not be disappointed.

Now of late, I have of course got into my art in a big way and when I say a big way, I now have a room in the house entirely dedicated to my making art. I have some of my art displayed in our home and the wife even likes some of it! However, I have wanted to make a Chieftain Tank Diorama for a while now and always put it off because of the cost of a decent sized set. Now obviously, the kindly folk at Google would never listen in to my conversations through their monitoring devices in my phones and computers, so it was by pure chance that they displayed to me one day, a whole host of cheap model tanks... It would have been rude to ignore it, so I snapped up a Tamiya 1/35 scale model set for a penny short of £17. The bastard Post Office added their own stab in the back for delivery and four days later, it arrived in my disgustingly sweaty paws. Thus, the plan came together and I got my magic bucket out of the shed. I cut the wood for a base and dropped it in the bucket. I also slapped in some ripped up newspaper and a bottle of glue, then tickled the lot with a paintbrush and then dropped in the bits of tank. I put the lid on the bucket, gave it a hearty shake as I said the magic words (do you really think that I am going to tell you my magic words?) and what do you know? A load of spilled paint, sticky glue, broken plastic and ripped up newspaper fell out of the bucket!

So with a new model set delivered to my desk and the magic bucket on toilet cleaning duty, I set about doing it properly. The base was a piece of off cut chipboard donated by a friend. The newspaper came from my Mother in law, while Wifypoozles supplied the PVA glue. Knowing the dimensions of the tank, I was able to map out the diorama and then start designing the landscape. I knew that I wanted a rocky bank and a drainage ditch either side of the vehicle, with a fence and some grass. Using a cardboard tube and flower arranging foam, I quickly modelled the bank and then using a drill and a Dremel I cut the ditch into the base board.

The base board was then coated with newspaper and a mix of paint and PVA, sealing the tube and foam into place. I also placed a couple of pretty stones and a larger rock into place to give me a rocky bank with an exposed rock face.

With the base dry, it was time to add the soil and substrate, for which I used a mix of builders sand, gravel and pebbles, mixed with PVA. It took a couple of days to dry, but when it did, it was as hard as rock. Using my airbrush, I gave it a quick coat of burnt umber paint, which just deepened the already very brown of the sand and gravel. I used some lichen that had fallen from one of our trees to simulate bushes and shrubs and used some sheet grass from a model railway to make the grassy tufts I wanted at the edge of my gravel road.

I used cocktail sticks and super glue to knock up a fence and then found the measurements for a stile and added one of them too. A quick on line check sourced an army range sign warning about the dangers of picking up used ordnance.

With the base done, I turned to the model tank and began the construction with painting and building of twelve road wheels, two front guide wheels, two rear sprockets and six return rollers. Five hours later, each wheel was assembled, painted and ready for fitting to the bogies. By the end of day one on the tank build, I had assembled the lower hull, with tracks.

Day two saw me make a start on the upper section of the tank, also known as the Glacis Plate and engine deck. This took barely more than an hour and the boxes looked great assembled and fitted. Moving onto the turret was where things got complicated as several tiny parts needed to be located and fitted. The crew doors had to be functional, so that if I decided to use them, I could add the figures for a heads out driving of the vehicle. I also had to fit the barrel lock, which again had to be functional to allow the main gun to be locked into the rearward position. With all of these parts functional, it was fun to add the first coats of paint, a dark green acrylic ink designed for use with an air brush. With the dark green base coat of the plastic, it needed only thin coverage to give the wanted effect, however as the paint dried, it took on the usual glossy finish, totally unsuitable for NATO camouflage. Luckily, when I bought the model set, I also purchased a bottle of clear mat varnish.

Some parts of the set were extremely well made and thus it went together beautifully, not needing anything more than a light sanding to remove moulding marks. Sat on the shelf behind me in my room was two jars of experimental spru-goo and not once did I need it. However some parts were quite poorly made. Actually, that is unfair. The plastic tow cables were brittle and did not lay like real steel cable, so I raided the mountain bike spares and pulled out a stainless steel brake cable, which I unwound to find the wire core. At point eight of a millimetre, this was the exact size to replace the plastic tow cables. However the eyelets that connect the cable to the tank were another story. Using some of the spru-goo, I attempted to model some eyelets. However at the time of writing, the spru-goo has not yet reached full hardness. So with a heavy heart, I cut the eyelets off of the plastic tow cable and with a micro-drill, made a 0.5mm hole and then enlarged it to just under one millimetre. This was just big enough for take a tight fitting steel cable and thus the tow cables were made.

The final pieces to be assembled were the crew and in the instruction guide, all three of the crew are to be painted as white European men. This grated against my more egalitarian heart and so when I started to paint the figures, I painted the tank Commander with a skin tone that matched a photograph of Grand Tour level cyclist, Biniam Girmay, the first Black African cyclist to win a stage in a grand tour. The young man is an extremely talented professional cyclist, who was unfortunately taken out of the 2022 Gyro d'Italia after winning a stage, when the cork from a podium celebration bottle hit him in the eye.

With my crew painted, I fitted them and then decided that they needed a back story, so here it is. The Driver is a Gay man, out and proud. The Gunner is a Trans Man, brave and strong and then the Commander is a young Black man. The sad truth is that during the years of service for this vehicle, it is extremely unlikely that such people would ever get into the army, let alone command of a main battle tank.

Thus my project came to an end, with a large stone holding the tank hull down to the base board as I waited for the glue to dry. So while I wait for the glues, paints and resins to harden, I must find another project to distract me from the unending pain I suffer every day. I know, I will design and scratch build from paper stock an entire model of my motorbike! I am a fucking idiot.

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Mountains... revisited

As a former climber, mountaineer and maniac for mountain sports, it was a joy to come back to the mountains once again, this time in a completely new way.

My dedication to mountain sports was prematurely stopped by illness and disability and so I sort of came to the conclusion that I would never see the mountains again. However, a strange series of events, the love of my friends and family and a determination to give it a shot, led to my return to the Snowdonia mountain range after a gap of twenty years. Obviously this came with a cost and that was in pain and suffering. My body has taken the hit surprisingly well, with only one minor meltdown and a complete failure to comply with my demands. However, this is why we have pain killers and comfortable beds.

The trip started with strapping my faithful friend, Sylvie my Suzuki SV650 to a trailer on the back of my car.

With some glorious company in the form my wife, her daughter and her daughter's girlfriend, we set off on an adventure. Well once all of the annoying mechanical problems had been fixed! We won't go into them here, but let us just say that my patience has been truly tested.

Our adventure took us to North Wales, a place that I loved with a lot of climbing passion back in my twenties and thirties. This year I turn fifty and to be honest I am not sure how I feel about this. I am clearly no spring chicken, but I resent the idea that I am old, I still have toys, albeit big shiny silver ones and I am still very silly with my toys.

Carol rode from our home in Somerset to Wales on her trusty Kawasaki ZRX1100, a true beautiful beast of a bike and Alice rode her Kawasaki GTR1400, a machine that is a mix of sports bike and comfy sofa. The ride up was fun, but the wind on the bridge across the Severn was terrifying. The poor little car felt like it was going to be thrown off at any time.

We arrived safely at a beautiful little farm and set up base camp in a converted grain store. The roof was hilariously low and sloping, but inside it had a basic luxury that was joyous. We unloaded Sylvie and prepared for the week ahead. Our first ride out was a gentle local ride, taking in my old play ground of Tremadog. I spent many happy (and some terrifying) moments on the climbs at Tremadog and enjoyed camping in the field behind Eric's Café. To my utter horror Eric's has gone, replaced by some modern, electronic self service, anti-climber hipster shit hole. With security cameras, huge warning signs and strict private property notices, it has become a hugely unwelcoming place and with a heavy heart we quickly left.

The following day was the big ride out, the trip to Snowdon itself. More correctly known as Yr Wyddfa, the mountain is the second highest in the UK, being around 1030 metres above sea level. I have spent many happy hours playing in this region, climbing some of the classic lines and basically living in the moment. To return on my motorbike with my beautiful family wiped away those frivolous memories and gave me new, happier and more peaceful ones.

The ride was glorious, the roads were hard work, but I loved every second of it, even when I got beyond exhausted and moved into migraine territory. The last ten miles was the hardest, most demanding motorcycle riding I have ever done due to how poorly I was feeling and there were moments when I simply had to grit my teeth and hope for the best as I twisted my throttle and went for an over take. Once back at the house, I boiled over into a grotty, shivering, crying mess and after swallowing incredibly strong painkillers, retired to bed.

I have no regrets, the riding was amazing, even though it caused me a lot of pain. Sylvie was faultless and my little family were beautiful. So despite the pain, I could not be happier. I no longer have this chasm of grief in my heart for the mountains. Instead, I have softer, kinder and happier memories of being truly at peace with myself in an environment that I truly love.

All photo's have been provided by my partner Carol, for which I am very grateful. A feature length Youtube video will no doubt follow soon given that both Carol and Alice are film makers of some talent. Until then, just know this. No matter what happens from now, in this moment, I am truly happy.

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Goth Dad and Vision Video Live in Bristol

With the global state of LGBTQ+ rights being rather shite at the moment, it is occasionally nice to come across something that affirms the right for rainbow people to simply exist and I found one of these things recently and was then rather taken with the character of Goth Dad.

Dusty Gannon created the character for Tictok and Instagram with the intent to share a message of kindness and support to young Goth kids and to be honest, us older Goth kids too. The words of kindness he shared were beautiful and I started to look for more of his kindness and wisdom in the short films and quickly discovered that Goth Dad was the singer of the American Goth band Vision Video.

For many years it has been easier to say to folks who meet me for the first time that I am a Goth, rather than trying to explain the intricacies of Heavy Metal culture. After all my first love is extreme metal, mainly in the form of Black Metal from bands such as Emperor, Enslaved and Akercocke. Already I can see that some of you want to discuss the differences between Black Metal Art, Viking Black Metal and Blackened Death Metal, but lets just make it easy and stick it all under the easily pigeonholed title of “Fokkin Goffic!” to quote the abusive thugs who enjoyed shouting at me as I wandered the dark streets of Plymouth in the late 1990s, before they swapped to “Fokkin Tranny!” Ahh, the vigorous repartee of the average urban 1990s thug, draped in his Burberry tracksuit while smoking Happy Shopper fags!

So back to my original point, I will identify as Gothic when asked, because I tend to wear a lot of black, often with funny make up and appear somehow Vampiric. The fact is though that I do enjoy the occasional Goth band, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Fields of the Nephilim, The Sisters of Mercy and The Cure. Pictures of You, by The Cure is one of the most beautiful songs ever written and everything ever sung by Siouxsie Sioux is pure magic. However Fields of the Nephilim have that dark post apocalyptic feel that makes me want to curl up and die in blissful soundscapes, with the track 'Trees come down' being my particular favourite. So when I found Vision Video, a fairly minor pop Goth band from America, I was happy to give them a listen. What I heard combined the wisdom of Goth Dad with the sadness of American societal despair at school shootings, huge economic inequality, almost constant war and a lack of health care into something beautiful. Despite the poppy sounding music, the themes have a serious message and strong heart, especially when the content of the song drops into the personal experiences of the singer's military service in Afghanistan.

I bought the first album, 'Inked in Red' almost instantly and played it nearly constantly. It reminded of the the very best parts of The Cure, mixed with the best parts of Siouxsie and with hints of Joy Division thrown in too. It remains a beautiful little record, with several high lights among the tracks. However the track Kandahar mixes beauty with a deep rage over the horror of the war in Afghanistan and the slaughter of those caught between the combatants. Let us not hide from the truth here, history will judge this era harshly, for the rampant capitalism that funded wars for oil in the Middle East, which then resulted in the deaths of many innocents. Meanwhile there was significant Governmental funding of groups such the Taliban who were set up and trained by the CIA in their early days, to fight against Soviet interests in the region. After twenty years of war, the West pulled out Afghanistan, leaving it to the clutches of the fundamentalist Islamic Government, who promptly took away the rights of women and girls before starting to complain that running a country was a lot harder and far more work than they had expected!

This leaves the world now as a fucked up mess and let us not hide from the main cause of this as the super rich companies still fight for the right to mine coal, while burning mega tonnes of what they already have dug up and filling the atmosphere with filth. Meanwhile, you are being chastised for not putting out your plastic and glass recycling in separate boxes (I read Environmental Science for my degree and it was heart breaking learning that with enough time the Earth will rebalance just fine, it's just unfortunate that our species probably won't make it!).

Vision Video as a band is not just about Goth Dad. Keyboard player Emily Fredock has a powerful voice as well as being a great musician and when she sings, you can hear her anger coming out too, despite the gentle pop sounds of the music. Combining with Dusty on vocals and guitar, Dan Geller on bass and Jason Fusco on drums, they make some truly joyous sounding music, but with those dark edges that Gothic music demands. None of it is offensive despite the sad imagery each song creates and it is fairly clear that these people will not be burning down any churches, murdering rival musicians in fights over who is the most evil or burying their stage clothes so they can feel the pull of the grave when they perform... All infamous tropes Black Metal has been guilty of in the past. The first. However, as a small Goth band in America, I never thought that I would get to see them... and then came the announcement, that they were to be support for the March Violets on a limited EU and UK tour.

I purchased my tickets that afternoon, despite knowing next to nothing about the March Violets, for the show on a ship in Bristol docks, The Thekla. Having seen some very good shows on the Thekla, I knew that that it would be intimate, with beautiful sound and a small crowd. I purchased two tickets, one for me and one for my friend Jan, my companion for the slightly more odd gigs, such as when we went to see the Kunts in Bristol, or when we went to see Richard Herring live in Wells, or when we went to see Richard Herring interview Kunt in London! I had played 'Inked in Red' to Jan and she quickly grew to love it. So she was quite excited to be going to see Vision Video.

A few days before the gig, we were told that Vision Video would be on early and it was advisable for us to get there in plenty of time for the show or risk missing them. However, the weekend before the show, Jan and I found ourselves broken down in Keynsham where we had gone to play with Lego on a steam train. The alternator in my car had failed and I had driven into the car park of Bitten Steam Railway with no power steering, nor any ABS brake assist, air conditioning, music or dashboard lights. It was thanks to a fairly new battery that we got there at all, but the journey back home again on the back of an RAC van, driven by Rob the kindest mechanic I have ever met. Luckily for me, my darling wifey Carol was on the case before I even got home and she quickly ordered replacement parts and also said that a new serpentine belt would be a good idea and promptly ordered one of those too. By Tuesday my car was back in good health and ready for our trip to Bristol on Wednesday evening. When we arrived at the venue, forty minutes before the doors (hatches?) on The Thekla opened, we sat in glorious sunshine listening to my favourite punk band, Alice Donut. As soon as the (as it turned out) roller shutters opened on the ship, we queued up and were inside within five minutes, only to come face to face with a poster of band times. Somewhere along the way, we had been viciously lied to! Vision Video were due on about twenty minutes later than we anticipated...

Jan and I headed inside the ship and quickly discovered that the floors were remarkably uneven. I had not noticed this before, but on this occasion I really struggled with the venue and found it difficult to keep a steady footing. I wobbled about like Bambi on ice and we eventually found our way down into the stage area (hold?) of the ship. Away from the heat of the day, it was deliciously cool and the DJ was playing some suitably gentle Goth themed music, some of which I recognised but most of which I did not. Like I say, I am mainly a metal head, I just look like a goth to the untrained eye. The first act on stage was electronic musician Kristeen Young and she reminded me of a mix of Diamanda Galas and Kate Bush, with powerful grinding rock backing and her voice that was capable of violent roars and shrill squeals. It was impressive, she was clearly hugely talented and very good at her art, but I did not gel with it and lamented that with her incredible vocal talents, she desperately needed to front a powerful Black Metal band, rather than playing a keyboard based rock music. However, I was probably alone in this thought because she had a lot of fans among the crowd who surged in to watch her perform.

I took the time to grab a t-shirt from the Vision Video merch stand and caused a laugh from the softly spoken American woman behind the desk when I asked for a size suitable for a fat bitch like me. Jan just shook her head knowing that I had said something objectionable, without actually hearing my words.

Finally Vision Video took to the stage and the four piece are just as beautiful on stage as they are on you tube or album. It was fairly clear that they were playing to a crowd who were on their side and I was not alone in singing along to some of the tracks from 'Inked in Red', although I did not hear much if any from the second album 'Haunted Hours'.

The songs were beautifully performed, both Dusty and Emily sang with their usual power, despite having spent several weeks on tour in both Europe and back home in America.

But all too quickly it came to the last two songs and that was when we got to see the heartfelt politics of the band as Dusty gave us a spoken word introduction that laid out all that is wrong in modern American society. He talked about wealth inequality, gun violence, health care provision, warfare and human rights and he did so with the undisguised disgust of someone who has seen the horrors of fighting a war. It was utterly heart breaking and yet also uplifting because surrounded by others of the same opinion, it gave all of us hope that by standing together we could change some of these awful things. With the speech over, they launched into 'Organised Murder' and it felt justified to be dancing to such angry and heartfelt words. With the final song done, they walked off stage to the whooping, yelling and applause of a very happy crowd, despite the sadly short play time. This is not to denigrate their performance time which was just over thirty five minutes. The truth was that I could have listened to them play each album twice and then the special new tracks from the as yet untitled new album. It was a very different experience for me, for a start the front of the stage did not turn into a violent maelstrom of a mosh pit. The dance floor was a remarkably gentle place, while still being energetic and fun.

With the band finished, Jan and I retreated to the seating area and then the toilets and had a chat. We had hoped to get to say hello to the band, which has happened a couple of times on the merch stand when I have seen bands on the Thekla, but sadly this was not to be. We chatted and I complained about the low lampshade that I had hit my head on when we had sat down earlier. The March Violets took to the stage and when I had recovered enough energy, Jan and I descended the stairs to check them out. The March Violets have been touring and producing albums for over forty years, but each song was new to me and to be honest it was not really my thing. It was very clearly being enjoyed by the crowd, but for me, it lacked the brutality of metal or the heart of Vision Video. It was perfectly good, electronic, new wave music from the eighties and I was a child for the eighties and did not turn eighteen until 1991. I had also not been exposed to a lot of music during my childhood, which looking back saddens me now because music is such a huge part of my life these days. However we did not have MP3 players with the sort of data compression needed to carry a whole album collection in my pocket when I was kid. Modern technology utterly spoils us these days, given how easy it is to access my music collection, take photos of bands and browse the internet from the small computer in my pocket that also allows me to call out for fried chicken whenever the whim takes me (thanks Ginny, for convincing me that smart phones were great. I never leave the house without it now!).

Feeling slightly sad that we had missed the chance to say hello to the band, while also feeling unsteady on my feet and remarkably energised at having seen the band, we decided to leave slightly early, meaning getting home at better time and not getting caught by the rush at the end. Slowly and unsteadily I climbed the stairs, with Jan behind me worried that I was going to fall and we reached the top, turned the corner and almost barged into Goth Dad himself, Dusty!

Dusty was everything you hope that a rock star will be. He was generous with his time, he was happy to sign albums and even pose for photos with fans. But the best of all, the politics and the heart are all real for him. The standing up for and caring about LGBTQ+ young people is real. The caring about the state of the world and his wisdom are all real. I wish that I could remember his exact words, sadly I was too star struck to take it all in, but it went something like this. “Those Motherfuckers in power are all old and they are fighting as they die out. Eventually they will be gone and the world will get better as the young people see them for what they were.” I could have cried. It was at that moment that Emily strode along the deck and said hello. We had obviously kidnapped Dusty and she had come to find him, the poor lad was probably on his way to the loo when we nearly crashed into him. But they both stood with us for photos, signed albums and Emily even talked to Jan about cats. These two people, gave me hope. Fuck, I feel old saying that. Now when Jan and I write about faerie warriors in our Winscombe books, it is just possible that we had unknowingly based one or two of them on Dusty and Emily.

I have said it before when I had the pleasure of spending some time teaching art to my friend's daughter, the insight of the youth is what is going to save our world and it will be safer in their hands than it ever was in ours. They will take the goodness from us and the vileness of our hate will fade away, acceptance and kindness will rise, maybe even the religion will fade away too? The world will be 'woke' and when you look at what woke means, a woke society will be a good society where minorities are protected, where institutional racism is dismantled and egalitarianism takes over. Fuck me, I am a fucking dreamer. At my darkest moments, all I can see is a foul dystopian end to humanity as global warming destroys the human safe climate and brings an end to the Anthropocene. As I think of this, I think of my nieces, of my friend's children, of my own children and grandchild and ache for a better world for them and for all young people. I want the youth of the future to feel safe to be true to themselves, to be accepted for being a rainbow person. I want the distinction of being LGBTQ+ to be minor to how we live our lives, just like eye colour is or how tall we are. Maybe, in his own small way, Goth Dad and the band Vision Video can add to that better future?

[jayne-hecate-writer]

A trip out on the motorcycle

Being a disabled person can be boring, really really boring! There are days when I really want to do things, just like I used to do in the past, but my activity levels are directly related to how warm and sunny the day is. If the day is cold and damp, my body refuses to comply and I end up stuck at home, often pumped full of pain killers and barely able to move. On a nice warm day, my joints are a lot less painful and I can do things, although I must be clear here, not to the levels that I previously did. I won't be climbing any mountains anymore.

I have made peace with losing my mobility and to some degree my ability to participate in the rest of my life. So on good days when I can move, I embrace the day and live my best life. Such a day happened last Wednesday, when the weather was just warm enough and my pain levels were just low enough, Carol arranged to meet up with her daughter and daughter in law and then go on a adventure. An adventure that involved riding our motorcycles. For me, I had some trepidation, but I made it, albeit I was exhausted at the end of the day and I could barely walk from the garage to the flat afterwards, despite spending the day sitting down!

We met up in a service station car park and then headed out into the countryside to head towards a small set of locks that have a dock on the banks of the river Severn. We pottered around the dock for a little while, enjoyed the sights, admired the steep drops and tried not to be silly when stood on the edge of the scarily deep canal.

Bored of the docks, or to be more accurate, I ran out of ability to walk, we got back on the bikes and set off to find some dinner. Sitting together to break bread and just be a family was a moment that has changed how I see my world. I don't know when I became old, I certainly don't feel old, but being sat with two young women still in their twenties, right next to a group of international students who had also entered the restaurant at the same time, I felt the weight of my years upon me and yet I was not sad.

I feel blessed to have the family I have. When I made peace with disability, I made peace with myself and with the world around me. I have new hopes and I want to have new adventures, who knows where we are going to go in the future, but one day I really will be old and as I have recently been informed, Alice is going to choose which old folks home I end up in!

Carol filmed the video, with cameras on her her bike and mine. This is the video of our trip.

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Imperial Data Pad

Well, it's winter and it's cold. As is often the case with me, I am fighting the winter blues because the cold and the damp make my bones ache and my connective tissues stiffen like old ironing boards. To counter this, I use the tried and tested method of swearing, sulking and acts of self destruction, such as learning new sports or going too hard with physio therapy to overcome a frozen shoulder, which leads to extra aches and pains.

This year, I have decided to give the complete self destruction a race pass until spring and instead focus my attention onto arts and crafts. To which I have dabbled quite a lot recently, having made the discovery that I am in fact an artist as well as a science graduate. You may be asking why I have talked about my disabilities and then my art? This is because on this occasion, I have combined them in more than one way and I shall explain further, so read on if you would like to know more.

Basically, I really love reading. I read every day and will devour a book in anything from hours, to days or to weeks, depending on the chosen book. However, heavy, thick paper books with fine print are no longer something I can spend my time with due to failing eye sight and painfully arthritic hands. So a few years ago I acquired a Kindle e-Reader and to be honest, it is the best piece of tech I have ever owned and my dear device must be close to ten years old now. I have read hundreds of e-books, some were great classics while some were pure trash. Some of the classics took some work to understand, in particular the philosophical and political works of Hyndeman or Kropotkin and then there was several weeks of my trying to read Marx for fun.

An adaption that the Kindle has, which makes reading so much easier as I approach middle age is that the font size can be made as small or as large as your can comfortably read. Recently, I had noticed that for night time reading, the font size was trending towards the sixteen or eighteen point size. I could wear my reading glasses, but even with font size changed, my biggest problem was light. The Kindle cover I use with my device is now so old and tatty that the flex points are as floppy as old curtains and the LED reading light has significantly dimmed over the years, even with new batteries fitted.

So what was a girl to do? I could go out and buy a new one, the Kindle itself is starting to show the signs of ageing too, being no longer able to fully charge any more and then losing charge in a matter of days rather than previous time gap of weeks. Or maybe I just read too much? However, both Kindle and cover were bought for me by my wife and as such, they have a great deal of sentimental value to me. Luckily, the wife knows that I border on being a crazy artist and despite her saying that I should treat myself to a new device with cover, I think that I can keep these two going for another few years yet. So into the workshop we must go, my dear beloved Kindle.

Step one was the planning and with a simple book cover design, with a built in flip over reading light, the original cover was a rather plain looking design in red PVC fake leather. The edges were fading to white and the spine was threadbare, so it needed some repairs as well as customising with some paint and other fun details. The original light was a single white LED, which I considered changing to a different colour, but I was not sure how that would effect my ability to read in the dark. My next option was to swap out the LED for a brighter white one and then when I took the light unit apart I found that the LED had been wired with a dirty great resistor, which lowered the light output significantly. So I set about fiddling with it to see what I could retrofit and that was when I discovered that the plastic construction of the light unit was somewhat thin and flimsy when it split, before falling apart in my hands. Not to worry, I simply made other plans, involving using a modern pair of LED's mounted on a custom board. Finding the board I wanted to use was easy, I just took a standard LED light and took a hacksaw to it, reattaching as many LEDs as I desired once I was finished cutting, which in this case was just two. I then cut and shaped a new light housing, reflector and set the angle of the LEDs to shine on the middle of the Kindle 'page'.

The rest of the cover needed some inspiration, so with my almost (yeah, right!) fanatical obsession with Star Wars, I set about making the device look like an Imperial Officer's data pad. As always, my choice of media was old bits of cardboard and plenty of cheap super glue. However, for this project I also used riveted snap studs, old knicker elastic and nylon webbing from an old back pack. The front cover still looked fairly plain, so I raided the bottom of the box of making junk and found a moulded plastic sheet that I have used in the past to make realistic looking street cobbles. I don't know what possible function it could have on the cover, but it really does look like is belongs there.

Once I had finished the construction and made it look bright and resplendent, after I sprayed it with my new air brush, with a flat metallic silver paint giving the cover it's smooth shiny gloss, It was time for some fun. This is the bit I enjoy the most, the fun with the filthiest of filth. Using a mix of brown, black, metallic copper and metallic brass paints and then attacking it with sandpaper, I got it looking like it had been through a firefight on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, maybe the Death Star itself. Once it was finished, I hit it with clear coat and left it to harden, while I fiddled with the other parts, such as the new clasp that holds it closed and finally attaching the new light. With it all done I was rather pleased with the outcome. Happily, it is far from perfect because it looks dreadfully dirty, maybe even a little scorched or corroded in places and the previously actual worn out parts have been reinforced nicely. Hopefully, I will get another ten years out of this little beauty.

[jayne-hecate-writer]

This is a precursor to the main event. I present a Maisto 1/12 scale Yamaha R1 modified with fibre optic headlights & taillight. Built into a street scene diorama. This was an experiment because the next project is for my wife, building a Kawasaki Z1 1/12 model kit that she has had for over 20 years. This version of the R1 is a very pretty bike, for lovers of sports bikes, although I prefer something more comfortable these days. The KX Series phone kiosk & post box are all scratch built from scrap card & plastic packaging. The paving slabs are cut from mounting card that had been water stained. The base is made from a damaged insulation board offcut. The electronics are all recovered from scrap computer parts, as are the wires. The LED for the headlights is hidden inside the engine & is attached to the fibre optic strands with UV resin. #scalemodelling #diorama #maisto #Yamaha #r1 #bt #recycledart #womanartist #motorcycleart #yzfr1 #phonebox #artist #modelmaker #painting #uvresin https://www.instagram.com/p/CoVl9IwICER/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jayne-hecate-writer]

I was so very bored & felt creative, then my dear wife came home with a kids model set of the venerable old Tiger one. It's a boxy little cat, with a powerful main gun & a fiddly engine, but for a modler with a brand new airbrush to play with, it's the perfect first victim, I mean project! The model is very simple, with a few well moulded parts & it went together very simply. The turret can turn & the main gun can move up & down. The plastic though was a grim shiny orangey brown, so out came the airbrush. The kit came with paint & I filled the cup. Only the airbrush is very economical with paint, so I had to pour it back out again, which made rather a mess. Lesson learned, I discovered that a few drips of paint go a long way & the tank was looking as fresh as a a year seven on the first day of school! Along came the airbrush again & this time we added filth, grime, dirt & mud. Perfect. The base was a little more complicated. I wanted to try modelling with expanded foam blocks. This base was my 3rd attempt & when given a skim of plaster & gravel, with a dash of Bermuda sand, it was ready for the airbrush. Applying washes is so much easier & the colours are so delicate. A huge thank you to those involved in supplying equipment & model. #modelmaking #airbrush #womanartist #lgbtq🌈 #tigertank #airfix #scalemodelling #painting #diorama #tanks #panzer https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnjqm2xoWDs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Thoughts on the His Dark Materials TV show

Warning Major Spoilers ahead... If you have not yet read the fabulous books or watched the entirety of the story through the long form TV series entitled 'His Dark Materials' or even the film called The Golden Compass, then bare in mind that this discussion might well spoil your enjoyment of Philip Pullman's masterpiece of fiction. I am going to try to take a major dive into the story and offer my critique, which given that I know very little about the critical theory of literature or even how to spell Asriel, might be a bit of a trial!

Still here? OK then, here is my hand, let's take a trip together into the worlds of Dæmons and Dust. From the outset, I cannot promise an impartial review of these works because I absolutely adore them. I may struggle with aspects of them because of the deep emotional scars they touch in my soul, but I continue to love both the books and the person that is Lyra and Pan. I read the books at least once per year and even though I know full well what the Amber Spyglass book is going to do, I always cry at the end because it is so beautifully heart breaking. The books are written for a younger audience than your horrifyingly close to fifty year old reporter and are based upon the work Paradise Lost, by John Milton, which I will admit to you now, I have never read. Maybe that is a task I can try to undertake this year? Hmmm, as if I had not already set myself enough tasks that I am going to struggle to achieve this year!

In 2007, Hollywood released the film, The Golden Compass, the first attempt to bring the story of His Dark Materials to the flickering screen. The first confusion for me was to rename the story from Northern Lights, or His Dark Materials, into The Golden Compass, however there are several reasons for why this was done, some of which include a reference to the original inspiring work of Paradise Lost. However, the film flopped, losing money and support of a wider audience, largely due to the fact that they tried to cram so much into the film from what is a pretty huge book. A young girl called Dakota Blue Richards was cast to play Lyra and she gave us a wonderful, believable representation of Lyra, which is remarkable when one considers what she was given to work with. Sadly this is a comment that can be made for the entire cast of the film to be honest, but the rest of the production was a shocking mess, with often incoherent scenes that rushed past in a blur with little time to digest the events of the book. It was a triumph in that it was even made at all, given the resistance and interference of the studio and even the religious intolerant who claimed the book to be blasphemous (rather proving the point of the book while they did it!). Basically, the cast and crew never had a chance and it was deeply saddening to see the resultant, utterly beautiful looking, film fail. No matter what, I will always be grateful to the crew and cast who tried so hard to make what was probably an impossible dream come true. What good can be taken from the films though is the wonderful portrayal of Mrs Coulter by Nicole Kidman (a person who has in the past had dealings with horrendous theocratic organisations. However, that is a story best left to others to tell.) and Lord Asriel as played by the future Bond, Daniel Craig. Both of them gave wonderful performances and gave Dakota Blue Richards the perfect parents to play Lyra against.

These books are huge and deeply immersive which is one of the problems facing those trying to turn them into other forms of entertainment. I have listened to the Radio play that aired on the BBC a few years ago and enjoyed it to some degree, but again it was limited by the time it had to tell the story. If you are clever with the internet and don't mind listening to a play, this can still be found on line, albeit with some slightly naughty Detective skills. If you want a hint... Try looking for the Internet Archive. Who knows what you will find?

In 2017, the first of The Book of Dust was released by Pullman. Like many of you, I always find that the end of the Amber Spyglass leaves a hurt feeling of grief in the chest when the last page in turned. Yes, some short stories have been released by Pullman, in particular Lyra's Oxford does go into some small detail of her life post His Dark Materials, but this new trilogy promised further adventures for our beloved Lyra. What we got however was thus far something of a mixed bag, with La Belle Sauvage being more of a prequel that fills out the story of Lyra's birth with details of the great flood and goes on to explains how a young Malcolm Polstead and, his often enemy, Alice come to care for the infant Lyra. Along the way they encounter agents working against the Magisterium (the theocratic rulers of Lyra's world), faeries and other complicated beings all of whom have an interest in young Lyra. It was an adventurous enough read, but it did not really fulfil that desire to discover more about Lyra and her adventures after her return to Oxford.

Two years later in 2019 (just before the world went tits up with covid!), Pullman released the second in the Book of Dust trilogy, The Secret Commonwealth. It was from the outset, a deeply disturbing book and anyone hoping to find a happy and peaceful Lyra and Pan, were instead given a broken and severely depressed Lyra, who continually argues with Pan, right up until in a silent mood, he leaves her. As I was reading this, I had not long finished a course of therapy that had helped me come to terms with my own past and mental health, so seeing Lyra and Pan as wounded as they were carried a lot of extra grief that I could understand. I knew what it felt like to be at war with oneself and I could feel both of their pain in the difficult story. This was a more mature story than Northern Lights or even The Amber Spyglass, as such the themes were more mature and darker. It is a sad fact that young people suffer, often undiagnosed, with mental health problems and this book does not shy away from this fact, no matter how painful it can be. Desperate to see Lyra and Pan come back together as a whole person once again, I sped through the book, missing the finer detail and at the end was left heart broken and hanging onto a cliff with less hope than my favourite cartoon Coyote!

With my second reading of the book, I went more slowly and absorbed the prose and its meaning. I followed Lyra as she travelled, following her heart trying to locate Pan and meeting people along the way who had also lost or even due to horendous poverty, sold their Dæmons. The lore of the Dæmon has changed with this book. The bond can be broken, when not fully severed and a replacement can be found. If there is a sadder parable of our money obsessed society, then I am yet to read it. Hidden deep within the despair of Lyra and Pan, there is a beauty in the world and towards the end, we see Pan helping a child who has suffered a terrible loss. The child in the book is named after one of the victims of the Grenfell fire in London and in many ways, this is a beautiful eulogy to her.

As heart breaking as the book is, it continues to bring a taste of blood to the mouth as Lyra goes from place to place searching for Pan. The worst part of this journey is no doubt when Lyra is sexually assaulted on a train, by soldiers who have no respect for a woman, let alone a woman without a Dæmon. If you did not cry reading this book, then you are a stronger reader than I because I cried several times during both my first and second reads of this book. You may ask why, but the reason is simple, Lyra is our beloved heroine. She may have started out as a deceitful, unwashed brat, but she ended the story with a broken heart, but somehow still full of love and wisdom. In some regards, it is hard to correlate the exhausted, heart worn but hopeful Lyra of the Amber Spyglass with that of the closed off, angry Lyra of the Secret Commonwealth. Yet given the political nature of these books, I am sure that even the most disinterested of readers can feel the depth of despair for our modern times ringing like a funeral bell through out the prose. It has been nearly four years since we were left wondering if Lyra and Pan would reconcile and every day when I look up at my copies of these books, I feel a little pain in my heart.

So it was that in 2019, the BBC and HBO released their attempt to put His Dark Materials onto the big screen, well the big TV screen in my home anyway, with eight weekly episodes of the first book, cleverly combined with aspects of the second so that the meeting of Lyra and Will happened sooner than we would otherwise have got. Now it is cards on the table time and I have to be honest here. I did not go willingly into the show. I had a sore heart from the film and I desperately did not want to witness another botched attempt or see another young Lyra broken by process of telling her story. This time Lyra was portrayed by a young Dafne Keen, whose father portrayed the undeniably vile, Father MacPhail. I did not want to get my hopes up and was promptly treated to some things that as a dedicated reader of the books, I found strange or in some cases not fully truthful to the letter of the book. However I persevered and struggled through some aspects of the series such as the Gyptian culture which was explored far more visibly and audiably than I was expecting and come the end, I was left with mixed feelings. Dafne Keen is undoubtedly a very good Lyra, within what her script gives her. Amir Willson makes an interesting Will and seeing him as mixed race makes him a far more interesting person and does give an extra depth to some of his Mother's suffering. But it did not have the Lyra and Will I wanted. There was also the concerns over how they were going to film some of the later scenes, because as actors, both of them were still children when filming the series.

Series two came upon us quickly enough and was one episode short of the first series (or season for those of an American culture), but given the source material, some of which had already been covered in series one, this was not a surprise and it gave us again a few changes and differences. As with series one it was hard to fault the choices, given how hard it must be to make a show about something as expansive as war with God across the multiverse! I purchased the two seasons on DVD as soon as they became available (something that DisneyPlus really needs to think about for those of us with incomplete Clone Wars DVD sets!) and binge watched them through, enjoying them more and more with each viewing. I understood the changes and why they had been made, the show was utterly beautiful and the sets used were fantastic. The Dæmons were beautifully animated, with puppets used on set to make the interactions with their people more believable. Pan was wonderful, the Golden Monkey terrifying and Stelmaria was beautiful. I was at peace with the series and I was looking forwards to the third and final season.

The third season seemed to hit the airwaves almost unannounced. It almost felt as if the BBC were somehow ashamed of their beautiful series. I have been following Pullman for some time on Farcebook and the only update I saw from him was an advert for a re-release of the original trilogy and then an actual paper version of 'The Collectors', a short story about a very curious pair of artefacts from Lyra's world. I caught episode one and instantly felt the bad taste in my mouth of wrongness. Changes yet again, Mrs Coultier was hiding in a cottage on the coast and not a cave in the Himalayas. The young child who helps her was deaf and not Asian. Will did not meet the scary paedophile priest... Actually, that was probably a good thing! Asriel was jetting about gathering troops, rather than them answering his call to arms. All of these changes probably made the show easier to follow if you have not read the books, but as a close to obsessive reader of the books, some of the changes felt wrong.

However the BBC in their wisdom put the entire series on their i-Player service and I was able to sit through a couple of episodes, rather than wait weeks at a time to get where I wanted to be. (Again, Disney, I know why you do it, but one episode a week... Really?) The misery of Solstice, Christmas, Yule or whatever we choose to call this time of year, got in the way and despite having the joy of my friends around me, His Dark Materials got put to one side until I had a quiet day to go through it. That was when I caught the flu and lost my voice. Even as I type this, I am still not able to talk above a whisper and trying to do so, seems to make things worse. Getting old sucks.

So sat in bed, unable to speak, sick with a winter cold, I started to watch episodes three to eight and it was traumatic. There was a lot of changes and again I understand why some of them were done, because not every viewer will have torn the books apart the way I have over the years. However, enough remained the same that I could still follow the story and I did wonder at some of the changes made, until you think about how much visual effects cost and what the budget would have been for this whole show.

The actor Simone Kirby, portraying Mary Malone, was perfect and she has been since she first appeared in the series, so much so that I completely believed that she was Mary. Yet when it came to her major discoveries about Dust and the importance of the Mulefa and their world, so much was cut away, it was almost like a crude orchidectomy done with rusty scissors! Mary meets and then spends time with Atal, her friend among the Mulefa. They share time together, chat about the nature of life, the universe and everything... Sorry, wrong book. But Mary and Atal are important, it is together that the pair of them help Mary find the answer to Sraf, first in seeing Sraf and then in discovering why the trees are dying because of a lack of Sraf. Mary as the serpent must have knowledge to share with Eve, yet the time allotted to her on screen meant that a great deal of her story was trimmed away or flashed over in seconds and we never got to know Atal, one of the truly beautiful souls of the story.

The end of the second series left us with Mrs Coulter taking Lyra away in a trunk on a ship. Will had found and then lost his father while Lee Scorsby had died defending the very same man. We find Mrs Coulter hiding in her little house, Will arrives, they talk. He rescues Lyra during a raid by the Magisterium and while cutting an exit, the subtle knife breaks as Lyra's Mother pushes him to think of his own lost parent back in the human world. It is different enough to grind my gears, but close enough to keep me watching. The calls of Roger are hinted at, but never really clear and it is with some surprise that Lyra announces her quest to enter the world of the dead to find Roger to apologise for his death. Again we have the strange arguments between Lyra and Will, a conflict that never happened in the books. They believe in each other and as they journey, they are falling in love, not overcoming each other. These slightly argumentative scenes felt like sand in a gear box, things work, but you know damage is being done. Iorek agrees to mend the subtle knife, but the discussion between him and Will is almost nonexistant. The warning about the nature of the knife had none of the brevity that it has in the book, but the reforging of the blade was at least a pretty moment. The biggest problem though was that it was horribly rushed and yet they filled in the episodes with stuff that we did not need to see. Why did we need to see Asriel gathering an army... of mainly one man who he took an eternity to persuade, when in the book he raises his call to arms and they simply come. At the cost of important detail, they gave us chaff.

The land of the dead was bleak, sad and grim. Again there were differences, but until the boatman, nothing of consequence. Lyra meets her death, Pan is scared and Will remains stoic. That moment on the boat though, the first heart break between Pan and Lyra when she is told that Pan cannot enter the land of the dead. That was there, but the boatman was more human, which in some ways gave it a softer edge. Making the boatman a well dressed man in his early sixties took away the fear of the cloaked Charon, the creature that may have been a man, but could have been something far more aged and far, far worse. The betrayal of self as Pan is ripped from her soul and Will loses the Dæmon he never knew he had, is still heart breaking, but where in the book time is given to Pan attempting to keep Lyra with him, making her sacrifice all the more important, the show quickly edits past it. Again, time, technical effects and expense cannot compete with the imagery of a few words in a book. To even come close to the scope and the detail of the book, the show needed at least ten hour long episodes per book and a budget of billions. Such things were never going to be possible, so instead we can only be grateful for what we got and the river crossing was still heart breaking as Will and Lyra clung together in agony.

The land of the dead was truly haunting, the sad broken spirits of those trapped there, taunted and berated for every terrible thing they had done, by the impossibly ancient Harpies. The term Harpy comes from ancient Greek and Roman myths, being a form that is half woman and half bird. Basically a bird with the torso and face of a woman. What was presented here was so much more creepy, a scaly filthy tortoise like winged creature filled with hatred and bile. The scene of Lyra telling tall tales was cut for time, but we can assume that she had by this time learned that lying was bad for them. We did have some moments of true horror as she is forced to confront her loss of Pan and the awful fact that there is truly no way out of the land of the dead. The book makes a deliberate choice to have the spirits unable to touch, embrace or hug. Yet again, the horror of finance raised its head and we see actors with grey scale make up and lots of red eye shadow hugging Lyra. As lovely as it was to see Lyra reunited with Roger, the subtle difference gave this a more bleak, angry feel than the loss and love of the book. The difficulty for the production team was also the casting of children for the roles of er... children. Roger has clearly grown up and his buck toothed smile of a ten year old boy has been replaced by the teenage cool of a lad who is nearly a full grown man. They did as well as they could within the budget and Roger was there. Death has clearly broken his voice and made him a foot taller though!

The weaponisation of Mrs Coulter against Lyra, using the tuft of hair she took from Lyra's head was terrifying. Having written out some of the more helpful moments of the book, such as the Galivespians, the energy bomb was never not going to explode. Within the constraints of the TV show, they did it very well and the chasm that opens is destructive in ways that I never connected in the book. The Dæmon that flies above the opening and is sucked down, causing the death of Queen Ruta Skadi was tragic. She did not so much die as simply fall into nothingness and cease to exist. It was utterly brutal. The spectres raided the camp of Asriel and the defence against them was to have Mrs Coulter who had escaped once again from the Magisterium, having come and gone like a welcome guest between camps. In a moment of pure film magic, Ruth Wilson raised her hands and gave the spectres a force shove that Clone Wars ere Obi-Wan would have been proud of. The result was that the entire army of spectres evaporated, never to be seen again. Once again this must come down to cost. The spectres were beautiful in their oil like liquidity. Animating an army of them, fighting see through ghosts who have no Dæmon would have run into the millions of Dollars. So I forgive them for their use of the force, even if for a brief moment, Mrs Coulter became a Jedi!

The fight with Metatron, AKA the Regent of the Clouded Mountain, ruling in the name of the Authority was fabulous. The deception by Mrs Coulter was a dark moment in the book, but she carries it well, hiding what little goodness she has left to fool not a God, but a man who lusts after her. The fight in the show was almost as brutal, Asriel is not as broken as he should be, but with the love of his life, Mrs Coulter, they both drag the Regent into the abyss. As with Ruta Skadi, this is not death but something far, far worse. This of course leads to Lyra and Will finding the casket that contains the withered remains of the authority. In the book it is stated that cutting him free of his prison is an act of kindness for a being so ruined by age as to be insensible. With his atoms reaching the gentle air currents, the Authority is gone forever, along with his regent.

At this moment in the book, the two children find their lost Dæmons and Will cuts through into the world of the Mulefa, grabbing a Dæmon each, they jump through. It is at this moment that they realise that Will has grabbed Pan and Lyra has taken Will's unnamed Dæmon. The thrill of excitement, of something beautiful between them hits them both hard as Will seals the window after himself.

In the series, things are done differently and Will tells the Dæmons to jump through and they will follow on later. Sure enough a short while later they do jump through, but only after Lyra witnesses the death of the Mother, as the Golden Monkey turns to particles. I do not know why they felt that Lyra needed that moment of finality, because in some regards it felt cruel. Once in the world of the Mulefa, there is still a mild hostility between Lyra and Will. They have been through so much together, but do not have that trust of each other yet, which seems strange and almost heretical compared to the book. Their love does grow, but only after a few misjudged moments between them. The book explains that from the moment Mary finds them, she can see the love, the powerful bond between them. She knows that they must heal and save the worlds so does her job, she plays the serpent teaching them about growing up, finding a meaning in life and love. Again there was a slight change in the series from the book, but for me this one worked far better. Mary recalls how she knew that she could not be a Nun any more and it was when a woman showed her an act of love by passing her a simple sweet. This was a moment that awoke something in Mary and it is implied that Mary investigated this attraction. In the book, the tempter was a man and to be honest as a rainbow person, who knows how the Church at large feels about people like me, making Mary a lesbian or at least not fully heterosexual was the right move.

With rather a lot of narrative exposition, Lyra and Will learn that they must not only return to their own worlds, they cannot create new windows and all of the old ones must be sealed to prevent the loss of Dust into the endless void. In the book, Pan lets out a howl of pain that frightens small animals in their holes for ever. Defeated at last, Lyra cries, comforted only by the one soul who can do so, but who she must lose forever. The TV show does allow this to play out and it is painful to watch. The acting of Dafne Keen and Amir Wilson was superb and I genuinely believed their tears as my heart was broken.

The insight of Pullman when he wrote this scene is not to be underestimated. Lyra and Will are forced apart, their sacrifice is explicit. They could stay in the world of each other, but to do so is to lose health and to die, leaving one with the unbearable horror of watching their love die. Leaving the window open will bring an end to Dust and everyone dies. They sacrifice their love for each other to save those who inhabit every realm, including the world of the dead, for every soul that has ever existed can be free from the horror of purgatory and they do so, while their own hearts are torn apart.

Whenever I read the Amber Spyglass, I need a moment of silence when the last page is turned. It feels somehow reverential, as if I too have lost a part of my heart and the grief I feel is very real. It stirs in me every loss I have felt throughout my life, whether that be of parents, lovers, mentors or friends. Every fibre of pain is stirred, every wound cleaned out and shown love. There is however one loss that I dread with all of my being, a loss so great that every person in love fears it. Yet as Maarva Carassi Andor states so bravely to her Son (in the fantastic Disney Plus Series Andor), “that's just love.”

The themes of the book are truly epic, especially for a book aimed at youthful readers. The contemporaries of the time were the likes of Harry Potter, which I am sure touched some people's hearts. Like His Dark Materials, Potter was accused of turning children away from faith, but if it ever did, it was not through clever writing. With His Dark Materials, Pullman asks the young readers to question why they must bow down to theocracy. He tells them to give thought to dogmatic faith and he gives them a parable with which they can understand how religion can destroy love and hope and understanding. The big theme of the Magisterium is how they want to stifle conscious thought. When it takes the Vatican four hundred years to apologise for the destruction of a man who put forward the idea that the Earth is not the centre of the solar system, we can see where the ideas of a toxic theocratic system comes from. With every Holy War, with every hypocritical theologian and with every repressed adherent to religious law, we can see Pullman's point. His Dark Materials is a story of young people on an adventure, but it is also a story about the importance of innocence not corrupted by dogma, just as it is a story about fighting for the liberty to think for oneself. It is my firm belief that Pullman's work is an important piece of youth literature, it is also more than that and is worthy of the awards it has won. The TV show may not have stuck rigidly to the book, but the message remains the same and that is the important part. So I applaud the series, I think that it achieved great things and it did this despite the corruption that killed its big screen predecessor.

As for the cast of the TV series, not one of them did anything less than their best. The budget and the time constraints are nothing compared to the importance of the message and for that reverential quiet that we needed when the final titles stopped rolling. It genuinely took me almost an hour before I was capable of speech. My eyes were raw with tears and my heart ached as I lay in the arms of my wife, knowing that we are both mortal and one day, we to will enter the land of the dead. Thankfully, we know how to find our way to the exit. Thank you Lyra and William. Also thank you Philip Pullman for a piece of work that speaks directly to my heart.

[jayne-hecate-writer]

A couple of Christmas' ago, some kindly soul gave me a bottle of bubble bath shaped like a Stormtrooper. The Trooper's torso & thighs contained a viscous blue liquid that had a faintly toxic chemical smell. The Trooper was also glued to a hollow plastic base that was just large enough to prevent it toppling over. The white plastic of the Trooper's armour was half painted, but over time this had faded to a yellowish cream colour. Feeling somewhat sorry for the brave hero in white, I decided a make over was needed. The first stage was to empty & wash out the torso. Then the plastic was primed & painted, with a gloss coat to finish off, leaving our heroic figure looking parade ready and promoted with a shoulder cover. The base was coated with plaster mixed with white glue & pebbles and then painted to look boggy and muddy. Our brave hero was then coated in mud & filth, as if they had come through a battle on a filthy muddy planet. #starwars #stormtroopers #starwarsart #art #diorama #andor #hansolo #figurepainting #weathering #custommade #rogueone #the empire #galacticempire #stormtroopercorps https://www.instagram.com/p/CmXY3bIIUaT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Andor something completely different

Warning: Spoilers ahead about the Disney Plus Series Andor. Read at your peril.

For the past twelve weeks, Disney have trickle fed us the Star Wars series Andor, an attempt to create a prequel that will lead into the prequel story of Rogue One. a series that was entirely successful in its mission. With a diversity of moments from absolute euphoria, to almost bottomless despair, Andor hit the marks hard, showing us the development of Rebel Spy Cassian Andor, a womanising street thug who finds later absolution as a devoted Rebel Fighter. Along the way we met his family, witness the murder of his father at the hands of Imperial forces before finally seeing his Mother, Maarva inspire a whole town to rebel against the Empire.

The series started with the brilliant Diego Luna playing Cassian as an adult searching for his sister, a search takes him to a brothel, having heard a rumour that she may have been working as a sex worker, which was a first for Star Wars with the writers clearly taking a step up in the darker tone of the story. The images of the sex workers, though not explicit, would make for complex explanations for younger viewers, but as with Rogue One, the feeling here was that this version of Star Wars was never meant for younger viewers. The language used throughout the series also hinted at this, I cannot imagine Captain of the Ghost and Rebel hero, Hera Syndula uttering the word shit or calling the Empire bastards, thus making Andor special yet again. Interspersed though the first block of episodes, we also see Cassian as a boy, Cassa, living among a tribe of feral children, with no explanation of how they got there or a translation of the language they were speaking. We did not need the explanation though, the images on the screen were obvious from the start in this powerful three show story arc. The adults of the tribe had been taken and forced into slavery in the mine that was destroying the ecosystem of the planet. A damaged ship crash lands not far from the children's camp and they get ready to investigate, creating a war party with blow darts dipped in poison. Upon investigation of the crash site, the tribe's leader steps up to look inside the ship and is promptly gunned down in a brutal and senseless murder that is both shocking and painfully sad. Cassa, whose sister remained at the camp with the other much younger children leaves the distraught group as they return the body of their leader to their camp. Now alone, Cassa begins to explore the ship, only to encounter Maarva and Clem who, while on a salvage mission to gather parts from the wrecked ship, rescue him from the coming massacre. We do not see the murder of the children by Imperial forces, but later conversations between Maarva and Cassian explain well enough the depth of the evil perpetrated against them.

Fiona Shaw who plays Cassian's mother Maarva did so with both a gentleness of heart and a steel resolve. Now a veteran actor, having worked in theatre, movies and television since at the 1980s, I have never seen her portray a character with such absolute purity of heart or with such emotional power. To many she will always be the cruel aunt of Harry Potter, but from this moment she is cast in brick as the gentle, powerful, inspirational mother of our hero. With the death of Maarva later in the Andor series, we are left with a hole in our hearts and the credit for this feeling goes not just to the writing of the series, but to Shaw's often subtle but always beautiful acting. Seeing her, with tear filled eyes, tell Cassian to leave their home on the planet Ferex and that his worry for her was the cost of love, was a moment that will be burned into the psyche of Star Wars for decades to come. The line of “I will love him more than any wrong he can do”, utterly broke my heart and filled my eyes with tears, delivered as it was by Cassian's friend Brasso, played by Joplin Sibtain as he reported to Cassian the death of his mother.

The first murder we see Cassian commit was in the first episode and was a both brutal and painfully sad. As he walks away from the brothel disappointed by the lack of leads into the location of his sister, he is jumped by two corrupt Corporate Police Officers and in the scuffle, one of the officers is killed almost by accident. The fight is fast and shows Cassian to have the technique of a street brawler as he quickly disarms and downs both officers leaving the second and more senior officer begging for his life in a scene filled with darkness and rain, only for Cassian to shoot him at point blank range in the face with a blaster. With this despicable act, the scene really set the dark relentless tone for the series and this is something that I am going to keep referring to, the tone of each episode was of something considerably more adult and less silly than anything Star Wars have done since the duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan in the third movie, Revenge of the Sith.

The comparisons with other shows and movies in the Star Wars saga was inevitable and with the recent Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi series being fresh in the viewer's mind, it is easy to say that Star Wars is creating a new, darker feel for the Empire, not just the distant experience of a farm boy on an isolated planet in the outer rim. As with Kenobi, the tone of the show was one of darkness, the loss of the soul of the republic as the Empire crushes every citizen under foot. However unlike Kenobi, Andor does not step into the magic realm of space wizards and magical feats of the force. There might be subtle hints that one of the rebel leaders may have a Jedi past, but there is a strong lack of Force wielders and frankly, the show was all the stronger for this, giving the series the emotional weight of a harder edged Sci-Fi, rather than the soft swashbuckling fantasy of the original movies.

With the early episodes broken up into three episode story blocks, we are introduced to Luthen Rael, portrayed by the masterful Stellan Skarsgård, who is an organiser for the Rebel Alliance working alongside Senator Mon Mothma, played by the superb Genevieve O'Reilly, the future Rebel Leader. For those of us familiar with the animated Star Wars Rebels, we know that Mothma will eventually be forced to flee the senate to be rescued by Hera and her crew, which starts the building of the Rebel Alliance that we see in Rogue One. Here we see Mothma struggling with disclosure of her dangerous financial contributions to the Rebel Alliance, that ultimately leads her to give her daughter away in betrothal to the son of a gangster, hiding her manoeuvring under the guise of her husband's gambling addiction and debts that would make it appear that the money issues are entirely his fault. It was a clever, painful and dark move (written beautifully) from someone who we will come to know as a future leader of the Alliance. The strings are all being pulled, connecting characters with events that happened in the prequels and original movies and other series, all of which must take all of the computing power of the Star Wars story group.

The second arc of the series, or episodes four through six, was the raid on the Imperial vault at Aldhani, to steal eighty million credits from the payrole of the Empire. Again in any other story, the arc would be simple with the building of a crew for a heist, but yet again Star Wars played with the heart and soul that binds the story together. Luthen leads Cassian to his team leader and the as yet unknown, the cousin of Mon Mothma, Vel played by the charismatic Faye Marsay and her rather complicated band of rebels. Tucked away rather quietly in this tiny group of rebels is the character Karis Nemik, touchingly played by Alex Lawther as a young soulful dreamer, fired by his belief in liberty and freedom, themes that are cleverly explored in his discussions with an angry and introverted Cassian. Cassian's cynicism and anger often brushes the boy aside or tried to crush his optimism, but Nemik is a philosopher and writer and as he progresses, he creates a manifesto that will eventually be at the heart of the rebellion. The raid was an exciting story arc, with visuals of utter beauty with contrasting with the darkness and evil of the Empire. The crushing of the local population, the brutal destruction of their religious movement and the Imperial plans to eventually enslave them to work on another destructive mining operation, is all laid out albeit subtly and with enough heart to leave the viewer with the knowledge that the pilgrims at the Imperial base were murdered after the raid.

Cassian escapes from Aldhani piloting the stolen ship loaded with the Imperial credits, but as they flee, Nemik is critically hurt when crushed by a pallet loaded with credits. His death is a moment of reflection for Cassian, but this is one that we do not see because of his urgent need for escape and to rescue his ill mother and her droid, the beautiful B2 EMO. If ever there was a droid to melt the heart of the coldest and most cynical Star Wars fan, it is Bee. With his glitches and minor bullying by hounds in the first episode, Bee could be written off as worthless, but as with so many of the characters in this show, Bee has more heart than all of the Empire combined and will fight for what is right. It is sad to say it, but not even R2 or even BB8 can equal Bee for purity of spirit or just plain old cuteness.

The core of the first half of the series, is a discussion of integrity over cynicsm and asks the question of the characters, what are they going to do in the fight against tyranny? We see Cassian reinforce his apathy, as he shrugs off any responsibility, he tries to take his mother away from her life of cold misery on Ferex, only for her to explain the nature of evil in the Empire and then of their love for each other to him. He leaves, with tears in his eyes, pays a few debts as he visits old friends and is then gone, leaving chaos and carnage in his wake once again.

For many of us, agents of the Imperial Security Bureau are personified by Agent Kallus in Rebels, the man who serves the Empire despite being haunted by the Genocide of Lasan. The complexities of modern Star Wars are not to be dismissed, just because the story is animated rather than live action and it is through Rebels that we meet a host of important characters, in particular, we see once again ISB Colonel Wulff Yularen, who mentors Kallus only to be disappointed by him when Kallus defects to the Rebel Alliance. The ISB are a cold, brutal organisation who exist as enforcers among the ranks of the Empire as well as a secret police force among the greater galactic populace, in the fashion of the real world, former East German Stasi. With the Andor series, we are introduced to ISB Supervisor Dedra Meero, an ambitious officer pushing against the misogyny of the Empire as she battles her way to the top. She is cool, powerful and determined, her icy persona matched by her crisp uniform and carefully controlled blonde hair. At moments the viewers find themselves not only gleefully watching her take apart her rivals in the ISB, but actually hoping that she finds her man, the rebel Cassian Andor. However the arrogance and ineptitude of her colleagues and fellow supervisors is displayed throughout the series and it is apparent that the galaxy under the Empire is not a good place to be if you are a woman or non human. Denise Gough is fantastic in this role, the almost perfect antagonist to Diego Luna's Cassian and she is ferocious and at times fearless as she fights for what she believes is right. Her methods are cruel and brutal, she is quick to resort to torture and is more than happy to have people executed for what she perceives as crimes against the Empire. She makes the links between thefts of pieces of Imperial tech around the galaxy and then the raid on Aldhani, much to the annoyance of her fellow Supervisors, but to the pride of her mentor, Major Partagaz played by the joyful Anton Lesser. Thus begins the quest to locate and interrogate Cassian, all the while being unaware that he has already been arrested and transported to a shocking Imperial prison where he has been put to work as part of a team of slave labourers, building parts of the Death Star, parts that eventually turn out to be parts of the super weapon that destroy Alderaan.

There are so many characters in this show worthy of mention along side those already spoken of here, but how long do I want this piece to be? For starters we have the disgraced Corporate Security officer and stalker Syril Karn and his disdainful mother, played by Kyle Soller and Kathryn Hunter, a more beautiful and complicated pair have yet to be seen in Star Wars. We also have the seemingly pious but ultimately heart breaking Kino Loy played by the fabulous Andy Serkis. We meet Sgt Melshi for the first time, a man yet to join the Rebels, but determined to tell the galaxy what the Empire are doing to the citizens. There are moments of brevity, moments of heart racing anxiety and though out the whole second arc, we see Diego Luna with his face filled with the horror of what has happened to Cassian.

Some critics have complained about the slow steady pace of Andor, a pace that slowly, almost unobserved built up into a climax that was as powerful as anything ever done in Star Wars since Rogue One. Sadly, with one series down, we have only one series left which has only just gone into production. It feels like a very long wait for season two of this fantastic series, but if it is as powerful as season one, it will be worth the wait. Again we are almost forced to compare this show with the others in the Disney Plus era and even the all powerful The Mandalorian is going to struggle with the tone and intensity of Andor. We all know that Mando and Grogu are building into a beautiful Father and Son epic and I have already written in the past my views that it will be Mando that ties the sequel movies to the rest of the saga, when a somewhat more grown up Grogu is forced to leave Dinn Djarin, who has grown old, so that he can take up Jedi training with Rey Skywalker. No doubt the Ahsoka series will take us somewhere else, I already suspect that Thrawn is going to be an important and complicated character in the future, especially given how the latest books set Thrawn up as clever tactician, if political inept. It will be very easy to forgive Thrawn his war crimes when we remember that he is just a bit crap at politics and only joined the Empire in order to save the Chiss Ascendancy from the threat of the Grysks. You have no idea what I am talking about? You need to read Timothy Zahn's two Thrawn trilogies.

Yet no matter where Star Wars goes in the future, the best bit of Star Wars ever written thus far comes from a line or two in the first movie, when it discusses how Rebel Spies captured the plans for the Death Star, the planet killing super weapon that destroyed Leia Organa's home planet and was eventually blown up by future space wizard and recluse, Luke Skywalker. With Rogue one, we got a dark, gritty and painful movie, painful because in my home it is strongly recommended that the film be watched with a box of tissues close at hand for the third act, when viewers will likely cry their eyes out as each beloved character is killed off. Rogue One gave us Cassian, the complex, conflicted Rebel Intelligence officer. Series one of Andor shows us how he got there and it was just as dark, gritty and painful. Each week as I have tuned into the wonderful Geeknd live stream, I have joked that I award Andor points out of twelve because I am an Imperial at heart, but Andor has shown us all just how evil the Empire is in a new and more dramatic way, without the use of space wizards or wielding Force magic. It is true that we love the Jedi and the Sith, during a rather painful hospital procedure when I had fluids removed from my spine, it was reciting the Sith code that got me through the whole ordeal. I still love the character Asaaj Ventress more than any other in the saga, but as of now, sat next to her on her throne will be Cassian and his mother and her droid. The Andor family are beautiful, complicated, compassionate and most of all, so very human, even their droid. I will say once again something I have come to believe, the Andor show is the best piece of Star Wars since Dark Disciple, the novel that gave us the end of Ventress, written in tear inducing prose by the wonderful Christie Golden. If you read only one Star Wars book, read that one and then Watch Andor as it leads into Rogue One and then Rebels. If you have not cried by the end, then you are more stoic than I am capable of being.

Andor streaming now on Disney Plus.

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Grab your plasma pistol ready to read my two Vampyrican novels. Book two is now available in both paperback & e-book. You can find them on Amazon now on my author page. #kindle #kindleunlimited #creativewriting #newnovel #scifi #vampire #horrorfiction #newauthor #Vampyrican #paralleluniverse #multiversetheory #cyberpunkaesthetic #cyberpunk https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck8WDJpIPkc/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Holy ****... I've only gone and done a sequel!

A long time ago, in a lifetime very different to that which I have now, I wrote a novel. An actual, proper-ish novel (this is open to debate obviously, given the reception it received.) in which I sent a character I had created on a road trip into her past and that of her family. It was a violent, unpleasant and politically insensitive story, based on corrupt politics, vampires and murder for hire. I entitled this novel 'Leticia, Sunset Hunter' and was genuinely proud of what I had written.

My partner and I desperately tried to find a publisher or an agent to release the novel, but being the weird neuro-atypical freak that I am, I was barely able to believe in myself, let alone the power of my words. So after three hundred letters, with only one positive reply who never write back again, I called it a day and retreated into my shell, like a sad little snail, scared of the big wide world. The rejection felt like a cricket bat to the stomach, I had been judged harshly by the world of publishing and I did not take that judgement well.

Time went by and I remembered the words of my dear friend and mentor Mr Smith... “Have you looked into modern electronic publishing?” As an early adopter of the Apple Mac, Mr Smith was way ahead of me in terms of modern gadgets. He had iPods before anyone else had ePods! (sorry for the poor alphabetical pun!). He read his morning paper on the first generation iPad and knowing him, he was probably on first name terms with Steve Jobs. Sadly both of these men are now dead and in truth I greatly loved one of them and miss him to this day.

My first attempt at publishing was with a book of short stories. This was also my first attempt at editing a piece of my writing and I was abysmal at it. The short stories contained spelling mistakes, missed letters, lost words, changes in font and variable font size. It was a beautiful disaster, but I still loved it. This went up on Amazon Kindle and I sold at least three to well meaning friends, who let me down gently as to the quality of what they had paid for. As you would expect for such a service, Amazon took seventy percent of the profit and I received a few pence for each copy sold, which after a few months added up to the grand total of fifty three... Pence.

So releasing Leticia on Kindle was probably my best bet. I worked for months, preparing the story, working on the edits and slowly going insane. My therapist helped me deal with the feelings of failure with some kind words. “By publishing on Kindle, you are staying true to the purity of your own voice.” So publish her I did and the feelings of shame and self doubt grew like a tumour in my belly. Leticia was far from perfect and in truth I would write a very different book now, but I have to be true to the purity of my voice. The me of then who wrote Leticia, was desperate to be loved. So when I recently edited Leticia, I made sure that I was kind to the me of then and all I changed was the formatting mistakes and a couple of blindingly awful spelling or grammatical errors. I also gave Leticia a new cover, ready to be joined by her sequel, David.

When people have pets, they give them cute, lovable names (except for poor black kittens who often end up being named after something demonic), my cat for example has an adorable name. He is a sixteen year old ginger tabby called Jasper Doodahs and as I write this, he is curled up fast asleep between my ankles. Naming books is just as difficult as naming pets, if not more so. I can only imagine how many modern pets have been named Grogu or other Star Wars names, I know of at least one Ahsoka, who is a beautiful little silver tabby queen. The problem with books is that you cannot use names from films, it gets very confusing if you do and can be problematic when Lawyers are called in to ask you to stop. So I use human names for my books and here I present David : Dark Walker.

What is David about? Well, it picks up hours after the end of Leticia, with David on his way to meet Rosalind, Leticia's mother, when a woman from his long forgotten past reaches out to him. From there we have yet more travel, through this world and into others with violent and unpleasant outcomes and then right at the end, we lead into a final sequel. I wish that I could tell you more about the sequel, but as we speak, the plan is in its most basic form and nothing has been written other than a few introductory lines of text.

David is finally available now and is book two in the Vampyrican trilogy. At just over one hundred and twenty thousand words, you get around ten thousand words for roughly each pound you spend on my book. I started writing David in 2017 and since then we have had Brexit, a global pandemic, financial collapse, war in Europe and an awful lot of unnecessary deaths caused by the piss poor performance of politicians globally. None of this appears in David, well none of the real stuff anyway, but there is plenty of technocratic theocracy and maybe hints of cyber punk, with maybe a lot of love for and influence from my favourite movie of all time, Bladerunner.

What this means is that with my greater experience of being a writer now, I asked someone else to pass their eye across my final manuscript and they corrected a number of irritating mistakes for me. I still do not have the money to be able to pay an editor what they are worth to professionally work on my book, but this is hopefully a better step forwards with the reading experience for my readers. So I implore you, go and read my new novel, buy it on Kindle and/or paperback. If you live local to me, I can even sign a paperback for you. What I can tell you, should you wish to read my Vampyrican trilogy, you will be getting the purity of my voice, albeit a voice that has changed and matured over the years. I still love Leticia, but David is better and who knows, the final in the series might well be better again, when she lands on your kindle reader or bookshelf. Actually, there is a hint, book three has a girl's name and she is a character all of her own.

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Jasper Doodahs is very pleased with his new Goth album by the very lovely Vision Video, entitled Haunted Hours. He was also very happy to get some stickers too. Sadly Mummy said that he could not stick them on the wall in her office! https://www.instagram.com/p/Ckyb48xIqlG/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jayne-hecate-writer]

With great age comes great Lego. Slave 1 looks good, but the instructions are not great. The bad batch minifigs are awesome, but there is no Omega. Also, Boba's ship is smaller than the Mandalorian's N1, which messes with my head. Star Wars Lego ships are all weird scales. The TIE fighter that comes with Vader's Castle would work with the Solo Falcon, but everything else is weirdly sized. Also, I've run out of room & need a bigger flat just for my Lego! #legostarwars #thebadbatch #mandalorian #starwars #lego https://www.instagram.com/p/CkomHmrIFvU/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Star Wars thus far including all of the offshoots and fill ins, needed or not.

Ho-hum... Star Wars critique, always a good chance to say something controversial that sets off a snowball of hatred that gathers pace and victims along the way.

So Spoilers ahead... Read at your own peril.

I have just watched the Disney Plus series Tales of the Jedi and was left with mixed feelings. There is no doubt that it is a beautifully done series, with some scenes of real emotional resonance, but there were also some scenes that seemed contrived to a level that was almost silly. Let's start with a breakdown of the series and episode one, the birth of Ahsoka. Infant Ahsoka is strapped to her Mother's chest while the woman goes out hunting and also to teach her infant daughter about the realities of life and death. With the loud crack of a rifle that could not have been healthy for Ahsoka's ears (where ever they would be under her head tails), the woman takes down a creature that looks to be half deer and half kangaroo. With the slowly dying creature breathing it's last breaths, Mummy dearest takes her hunting knife and pierces the creature's heart, while making Ahsoka watch. While preparing the carcass of her kill, from the forest a large space tiger stalks them and after a brief fight, steals Ahsoka away as a tasty snack to be eaten away from her Mother. All does not go well for the creature and after licking it's wounds inflicted by the woman's knife, the animal snarls and steps forward to eat the child, whereupon the space tiger is suddenly tamed by the infant Jedi and returns the child to her parents... Who promptly report and then lose their daughter to a cult of religious maniacs with teachings so unhealthy, they are repeatedly betrayed by or to yet more fundamentalist nutjobs known as Sith lords. The joy of religion.

Which leads us nicely into the fall of the grumpy Jedi Knight, Count Dooku, when he sees first hand where the republic is failing it's people, because quite obviously seeing corruption and poverty in politics is all that it takes to drive an otherwise nice Jedi into the embrace of an evil maniac. I will admit that it was interesting seeing Dooku working with his young padowan Qui-Gon Jinn and then later seeing him along side his fellow Jedi Knight Mace Windu, but I am forced to ask, was this something that we really needed? But this was not the most ridiculous aspect of the story thus far, oh no, it is about to get a whole lot more silly. Having seen Dooku repel the attack of Yoda in Attack of the Clones, we get to see him standing off with Yaddle, a woman of the same species as Yoda (Grogu's Mummy? Oh come on, Have you not considered this given that this is Star Wars, where every character is unfathomably related rather tenuously to someone else in the story? It is like Hill-billy space wizards in this saga.) but with the ability to speak clearly in normal sentences. Does this imply that Yoda is perhaps a little brain addled or perhaps maintains his distinctive and often torturous speech pattern by choice, maybe just to be a dick? This is something that our friends at Robot Chicken have previously asked, when in a short skit they had a Clone Trooper asking Yoda to make his commands more precise to save time.

With Yaddle squished by a giant grinning, toothed door and then sliced in twain by Dooku's lightsabre, we move back again to Ahsoka. This is for her to take a combat test, a terribly important combat test no doubt given that there is a lot of the self aggrandised Jedi Council (A small point of irritation, why the fuck was Kanan and his Master Depa Billaba there to see Ahsoka take her test? Oh, she was on the Jedi Council too, but how does this not fuck with the Rebels time line of him meeting Ahsoka for the first time in the future?) there to see it. As always we see Anakin running late and when Ahsoka passes her test, he is his usual toxic self and can barely bring himself to offer her his congratulations on her achievement. Crybaby Anakin instead insists that he offers her some 'real training' in the form of a group of Clones shooting at her, the same Clones she then faces after Order 66. Hearing Jesse apologise to her for stunning her, was both hilarious and heart wrenching, especially when they cut to Ahsoka and Rex on the crashing Venator destroyer from the final show in the Clone Wars series.

I may sound a little harsh with this next statement, but to my mind this was not a scene we really needed in the cannon and the result was that this felt like them pandering to the question of how she was able to survive Order 66, even though we saw her fighting for her life about the doomed vessel. Yes, it was poignant, but did it do anything other than answer a question that was only ever asked by the most irritated of Clone Wars critics? The final episode of the Jedi Tales series presented us with Ahsoka at Padmé's funeral, which they imply was heavily policed by Clone Troopers, none of which we saw in the movie. When she is spotted by Bail Organa, she vanishes into the crowd, only for him to find her several seconds later. They have a brief discussion about fighting the Empire and we see the defeated and spiritually broken young woman, no doubt with major PTSD, setting off with Rex once again. I did wonder if we would see her spending a brief moment with the Bad Batch, but no, she flees to live on a farm that is being crushed by the Empire. But as stated in Kenobi, the Jedi hunt themselves and cannot help but use their force powers to help people and Ahsoka rescues a colleague from an agricultural accident, revealing her abilities to the locals. Obviously, a sullen and put upon young man (does Filoni feel guilty for enjoying so much male privilege that he feels the need to constantly point out that men are toxic snitches who will turn everyone into the Empire?) grasses Ahsoka up to the Empire who dispatch a fabulous and terrifying looking Inquisitor. However, before we could even begin to get our hopes up, he was almost immediately defeated by an unarmed Ahsoka. He was such a great looking character, he deserved more than the end of Maul like take down he was quickly given.

So what was the point of this show? We know that Ahsoka is Fulcrum in Rebels and that she refused to train Grogu in Mando, yet later told Rey that she had all of the Jedi in her during the ridiculous Rise of Skywalker. Maybe this small series was a prequel to her own show which is coming at some point soon in the future? Maybe this is to explain a possible future appearance in the fantastic Andor show? Or just maybe it was some enjoyable story telling by Filoni, about one of his most beloved characters? This is entirely possibly given that Filoni is being hailed as the saviour of Star Wars by many fans and thus he has been given almost a free reign to create whatever stories he likes and to be honest, I am entirely fine with this because whatever he does, he does it with his heart full of the love of Star Wars. Bless his little Cowboy hat. I did very much enjoy the humour of Rex, Jesse and the boys stood in a circle, shooting their collective loads into Ahsoka... Oh God, that has just created a vision in my head that I really did not want, nor can now get rid of. I think that I just brought up some sick into my mouth!

Ahsoka bukkake aside, it was just a bit of harmless fun. Andor however is in every way that a show can be, utterly perfect. If you disagree with me on this point it is because Andor was not made for you, it was made entirely for me and maybe one or two select fans. I swear to you, this show has everything I love. For example I love the slow burning build up in tension with each episode. I love the subtle Easter eggs dropped into some of the scenes. I really love the complete lack of laser sword wielding religious zealots, but most of all, I love Andor himself. He is flawed and angry and clearly gets himself into some very silly situations, but so what he is Cassian Andor, the dark and brooding Rebel Spy to be. It was in the opener of the series where we see him effectively murder two space rozzas, which was beautifully done. We meet the two cops, who were clearly corrupt, in a brothel and right away they are awful to Cassian, clearly hoping to use their power to get one over on some poor sap hoping to get laid. Cassian leaves and is followed out by the rotten rozzas whereupon he fights back and one of them is killed in the brawl. But as the surviving one knelt before Cassian, begging for his life, I felt my own heart stop and his death was fucking brutal. This is dark and gritty and dark, powerful stuff. This is also to my knowledge the first time that Star Wars has talked about sex workers, which is clearly a thriving business in the Galaxy far far away. Given all that we know about the human species and all of the associated quirks, kinks and weirdos, it is bound to happen that some man (so shoot me for being a misandrist!) somewhere is going to froth at the gusset at the chance to screw some space pussy. Mind you, if Asaaj Ventress arrived at my door looking for a hook up, no wedding ring on my finger would stop me!

Andor also gave us the first ever “SHIT!” rather than the more kid friendly “Poodoo”. The harsh defeated way the word was delivered by the actor in a lovely Scottish accent was again just perfect and this was not the only low grade swear word used in this series. If you use subtitles, as I do, you will have noticed that Cassian calls a broken piece of tech “crap”. There is also several uses of the word bastard or variations there of. But shit is a great word and if used correctly in a screen play, there are no other words that can portray such a sudden and catastrophic failure for a character. That one simple word was uttered and suddenly we knew that this character was right up the creek and very much without a paddle. Yes, yes, I know, Star Wars is for kids... So explain all of the murders, decapitations, torture, racism, violence and religious intolerance? Is that really suitable for nice family entertainment? If you said yes and can let that go without further comment, then a simple, well used and perfectly timed “Shit” is not only welcome, it is to be applauded.

What this current crop of Star Wars is doing though is tying the whole saga together and it is achieving this in ways that are often gentle, occasionally brutal and more often beautiful. Kenobi at moments was heart breaking, but towards the end deeply uplifting. The book of Boba Fett was visual chewing gum, but still a lot of fun. The fabulous Mandalorian storyline is clearly going to tie the original saga to the sequels and I am very happy for it to do that, I quite liked the sequels, well seven and eight mainly. We can all agree that Episode nine was a cluster fuck of a movie that felt more like a platform quest game than a well thought out movie, but it still had some really fun moments and our first real LGBT on screen moment. Which brings me back to Andor and their portrayal of a normal (post genocide of your entire family by a despotic regime!) lesbian relationship. Vel and Cinta are a lovely couple, both complex and loving towards each other. Yet having just watched Episode eight, we see them pushed apart again by the struggle against the Empire and I just know that definitely one or maybe both of them are going to come to a sad end. Broken hearts are a great way to fuel a rebellion.

With four episodes of Andor left to go, I am excited to see where they go next. Obviously it is going to end up with Andor working as a spy for the Rebellion and then his eventual sacrifice along with Jyn Urso. However, we are yet to see him release K2SO from Imperial bondage and we are yet to see him gain his fabulous U-Wing transport. So there is a lot of space for them to fill with story, which can only be a good thing, even if the outcome is so painfully sad for Cassian.

I have mentioned Kenobi in passing and it was a lovely series, completely stolen by the young girl portraying a child Leia. She was fantastic and it would greatly sadden me if we never see her again in role. There is not much more that Kenobi can say, but I am sure that if demand was there, they would provide. However, with Ahsoka still to come and likely put an end to the questions left by Rebels, we still have an awful lot of fabulous Star Wars to look forwards to, including the series Acolyte, which hints at a Dark Side protagonist... I cannot wait.

It is truly a wonderful time to be a Star Wars fan.