Away with the fairies....again...

I've been on a roll recently with the books I've been reading, each has excitedly led to another. My friend, knowing I've been reading Jeanette Winterson, recommended Angela Carter and this one seemed the obvious choice, being a book of retold fairy tales.
It really is wonderful book, the writing beautifully conjures up the dark and mysterious atmosphere that lies at the heart of fairy tales. Helen Simpson, in the introduction, wrote; "It is obvious that it was the landscapes and imagery of fairytales that fired her imagination - bloodstains and raven's feathers on snow, moonlight on a dust-grimed mirror, graveyards on Walpurgisnacht. The stories in The Bloody Chamber reverberate with deep and unmistakable imaginative pleasure."
Here's a taster, this is the first paragraph in the short story contained in the book called The Erl-King.
"The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russey slime of dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lancinating cold of the approach of winter that grips hold of your belly and squeezes it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush."
Kind of makes you glad it's springtime. I've also been enjoying the art of fairy tale books. Their seems to be quite a few resources on the web, the website linked from my sidebar being a particularly good one. Here are some that I've come across.









And to stick with the theme, almost in the realms of the fairy tale, today my wishes were granted when I managed to get a ticket to go to that magical city that appears for three days, only to disappear again into the mysterious Somerset countryside. In other words I bought a Glastonbury ticket. Eeeaaak! I'm doubly excited cause it not only means I'm going to the festival but that I'm going to see the Who! Woohoo!
All in all it's been a great weekend, I had a night out dancing on Friday, a hen party last night, today I planted some seeds (carrots, parsnips and leeks, it's an Earth/root day) watched an excellent film called 'Junebug', read a great book called 'The Jesus Mysteries; Was the original Jesus a Pagan God?' (which is very convincing) and although I should really be getting to bed with work tommorrow, this is only going to be a three day week and next week is a free holiday because the building closes, and so I'll get a little time to get down the plot (that is, if I haven't come out in chicken pox, but that's another story.)