Getting Witchier, Radio and Moose.

I can't remember if I told you... at the Mensa AGM I was accosted by a gentleman, who had a friend who was starting up a Pagan Radio station. He thought I might be interested in it, so he gave his friend my e-mail and she got in touch. Well, we talked and I ended up offering to record some stuff that she might want to use. She sent me a little voice recorder and that's when things started to get tricky.I thought I would just read out some stuff I'd written and 'bingo!' it would be easy. No such luck. I wrote a couple of pages and discovered that not only did it only last less than five minutes when read out loud, but it was also delivered in a boring monotone, that no self-respecting radio presenter would ever get hired for using. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.I decided unscripted was better, and sat in my car one afternoon with the voice recorder. I managed to spend 15 minutes moaning about how the kids had set fire to my living room carpet in a pumpkin related disaster. Score! I sent it off and they were too polite to tell me it was awful.

Anyway, I couldn't bear to listen to myself, so I thought I'd record someone else. We went to the Druid ritual for Samhain at the Rollright Stones. Once again, public speaking was a disaster, as I fluffed the blessing of the food. Even my son heckled me. I'm really not cut out for being the showman. So I cadged and recorded an interview with the ArchDruidess after the ritual, which came out rather well. Score two! Get someone else to do the talking!
Finally, in the spirit of getting witchier (I think my cover has been completely blown now), my friend Kate asked me if I wanted to go to the Witchfest in London this weekend. Kate is totally non-witchy. She's a member of the law-enforcement community in her day job, and they don't come much more conservative than the police force. But Kate is smarter than the average bear, and doesn't make judgements rashly.
So, Saturday saw me getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a train to London for this Witchfest. I have to say, it was a fabulous day out. We went to a whole load of workshops and lectures, saw some Morris dancing and did some shopping at the stalls there. The famous Prof Ron Hutton gave a couple of talks on Ancient Pagan Britain and the way that Hekate has been protrayed over the centuaries. He was an entertaining speaker. The other cool thing, was that the Pagan Radio people had a stall there, so I finally got to put names to faces.
We also did a short workshop on animal totems, which included a meditation. I was expecting my usual bear to appear in the visualisation, but instead I got a moose. This confused me, afterall, the moose is not even a European animal. Nick looked up the meaning for me, and it seems it is all to do with courage and self-esteem - two areas I really need to work on. So here's me, having the courage to tell the world and his wife what I get up to. And no, I didn't wear my cloak, but a lot of people did. I was definitely under-dressed.