31st October 2025 - Ben Edge

Ben Edge at Avebury

I haven't had much to say the last couple of days.  Been listening to the new book by Philip Pullman the last of the trilogy about Lyra it is called 'The Rose Field'.  Pondering on shadows/spirits and dust and material beings and maybe avenging angels in the black space. 

But the 31st October has arrived, and as long as you don't open your door to that knock then visitations from the graveyard should be far and few.

So what turned up this morning?  Ben Edge an artist of the folklore of this island of Albion and his rather wonderful interpretation of the weird and wonderful that lies behind our folklore.  I know Liam will dismiss this artist as childish but at least it gives us a break from you know who, that orange topped man with the red tie.

But as someone who has watched the Druids parade around the stones in their white gowns his paintings  makes me smile.

Here is his 'Children of Albion' at the Fitzrovia Chapel,  the exhibition of which opens in November.  In the short video below you will see the rather large crowd who have gathered together to clean The White Horse of Uffington, who probably does stretch far back into prehistory, the token animal of a tribe.

 Happy Halloween everyone xxx

And as always a poem to be found.   John Hooker on the Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant.

Chalk

A memorial of its origins, chalk in barns and churches
moulders in rain and damp;petrified creatures swim
in its depths.

It is domestic, with the homeliness of an ancient
hearth exposed to the weather, pale with the ash of
countless primeval fires. Here the plough grates on an
urnfield, the green plover stands with crest erect on
a royal mound.

Chalk is the moon's stone; the skeleton is native to its
soil. It looks anaemic, but has submerged the type-sites
of successive cultures. Stone, bronze, iron; all are assimilated to
its nature;
and the hill-forts follow its curves.

These, surely, are the works of giants; temples
re-dedicated to the sky-god, spires fashioned for the
lords of bowmen;

Spoils of the worn idol, squat Venus of the mines.

Druids leave their shops in the midsummer solstice;
neophytes tread an antic measure to the antlered god.
Men who trespass are soon absorbed, horns laid beside
them in the ground. The burnt-out tank waits beside
the barrow.

The god is a graffito carved on the belly of the chalk,
his savage gesture subdued by the stuff of his creation.
He is taken up like a gaunt white doll by the round hills,
wrapped around by the long pale hair of the fields

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Edit.  The Children of Albion.  Article in the Guardian 28th Oct.2025