Mulling Around...

Glastonbury May Day 2025 - Part Two - Glastonbury Folk

 

Glastonbury, May Day 2025

Part One - The New Town Crier

Glastonbury Holiday

Having had to cancel our planned 2024 May Day celebrations, we finally started our May Day weekend away amongst some of the most beautiful sunshine I can remember for a long, long time.

 

Heading to Glastonbury

Glastonbury Tor

Our home for the next few days

The view from our holiday home

Blessings be.

April Lookback

April has definitely been a more chilled month project-wise. I did manage to get that surprise writing project I mentioned last month in hushed tones completed though. I can be a little more open about that now.now. Tara, Guy N. Smith's daughter asked me to provide the introduction to one of my favourite GNS books - Son of the Werewolf. Whilst extremely excited by the honour, I did get a little stressed and nervous about the proposition. But I hope I provided something she was happy to print alongside her Dad's excellent novel. 

Whilst on the topic of GNS, I also managed to collate all the content of the second Guy N Smith zine. My literary contribution o this is my very first attempt at a ghost story ( of sorts), which is based on Guy N Smith's story about a prison door he purchased back in the day. Tara was kind enough to send me a photo of said door, which you can see below:

For those very few people who have read my tale about the old prison door, you will see that I took a bit of artistic licence with the gaol door in my story.. But, aye, this is a work of pulp horror fiction. As well as featuring alongside a plethora of other Guy N. Smith fan fiction of the upcoming GNS zine, this short story will also appear in a slightly amended form as my first entry in my new Christmas ghost story strand... later in the year. Expect the chapbook closer to the Christmas season.

Anyway, that's it for my April diary update. May is already looking busy, so keep checking this blog regularly for updates...

Black Sky on a Sunny Day - Swansea

A Foxy Morning

A Little Sunny Reading Sesh

Teri

Teri, another garden nemisis of fudjcat: Don't know why, I find her a particularly friendly type:

 

Evening Tulips

I took a short wander through the garden this evening. And, wow, the tulips are really producing the colour right now, and certainly remain as the plant of the moment:

A Sight for Sore Eyes

 I have been a bit baddie over the last few days with my old eye problems. Apparently I should get my operation in about 12 more months! I saw the optician this morning as getting to see a doctor or consultant is next to impossible these days. Apparently the blood vessels in my 'good' eye burst as the it was overworked while my swollen eyelid kept my 'bad' eye closed for a day.

Anyway, it is starting to heal again - for now.

I do have some good eye news to share too, as I have added a few more eye talismans to my Glastonbury Speaking Tree Crassula ovata:

13th Armada Ghost Book

Feast your eyes upon the groovy 13th Armada Ghost Book, up there with Guy N Smith's Deadbeat as being next to impossible to purchase in the mid 2020's. I won't embarass myself by trying to calculate the time and number of dead ends it took before I finally located the book on the other side of the planet, in Australia!

I eventually found the book thru https://www.vialibri.net/. Unfortunately the person selling the antholgy had stated she would only post it within Australia. Frustrated once more, I contacted the seller who visited their post office and sent me a photograph off the shipping prices to the UK. I chose the cheapest of the postal services, paid the price and sealed the deal. I was now so close to this grail item. All the book needed to do now to join its brethen in rainy old Wales was to safely negotiate the vagaries of travelling around the globe through the Australian and British postal services.

Finally, just 2 weeks later, I received the package through my letter box:

Inside, you guessed it, I found this little treasure:

Disappointingly, the Peter Archer illustrations are low of scares or eerie atmosphere, but the stories titles are all new to me and I look forward to reading them all :)

12th Armada Ghost Book

 Isn't it always the way for book collectors? You start collecting cheap copies of a series, only to find that there are a couple you need for your collection that are as scarce as hen teeth! Such has been the case since starting my collection of Armada Ghost Books published in the 1970's and 80's.

A fellow collector warned me that the 12th Armada Book was the most difficult to get your grubby fingers on in the mid 2020's. With that knowledge, I purchased the one copy I ever seen offered for sale, but had to source it from Canada for an outlandish price (when Canadian postage fees were added to the equation).

Funnily enough, whilst costing me the most financially, this book wasn't the most difficult to source. The winner of that particular frustration goes to the next book in the season, which I will write about in my next blog post...

I wonder why these later editions are so difficult to find when others from the range are so easily found for a price between £5-10?

The 13th Armada Ghost Books takes us screaming into the 1980's with a luscious nightmarish cover:

Peter Archer is once again the artist for this collection of ghost stories, but as usual with this Armada series, most of the images he illustrates detail the more mundane aspects of the tale. In this particular book, only one scare drawing stands out:

I have not read any of the stories as yet, but the titles The Chess Set, The Cat Room and The Haunted Village hold enough intrigue to pique my interest:

11th Armada Ghost Book

The 11th Armada Ghost Book comes in x2 different cover edition. Both are great, but I think the style of the earlier edition (shown on your left in the pic below) is my favourite version:

Peter Archer produces his usual accomplished story illustrations, with a couple of real standouts amongst them (see below):

All in all another great addition to the series.

Lego W.i.Ps

X2 Lego horror builds I am working on: Guy N Smith's Hangman and Hammer's best movie - Vampire Circus:

The Lego Skull I have working on over the Easter weekend slipped and shattered across the living room in an explosion of tiny white bricks, just as I was setting down the completed model! I haven't got the heart to go through the instructions again so I am gonna rebuild from memory. I do not need the top of the head nor the back, so I can use those to elongate the skull's face and do some other detailing needed. Frustrating but, all well.