A cold, rainy day here in New York, and not a whole lot to report. I started reading Fifth Business by Robertson Davies this morning, but I’m really not far enough along in it to have formed an opinion. I like it so far, though, and it comes well recommended, so we’ll see. It seemed sufficiently different from the last book I read.
But beyond that? Just cold and rainy.
Today’s Forgotten English calendar page is fun, though, offering “an excellent way to get a fairy” (at least according to a late 1600s manuscript in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum). It suggests that one
…get a broad, square crystal, in length and breadth three inches, and lay it in the blood of a hen three Wednesdays or three Fridays. Then take it out and wash it in Holy Water and fumigate it. Then take three hazel rods of a year’s growth, peel them fair and white, and write the fairy’s name (which you call three times) on every stick being made flat one side. Then bury them under some hill whereas you suppose fairies haunt the Wednesday before you call her; and the Friday following, call her three times at eight, or three, or ten of the clock. But when you call, be in Clean Life and turn thy face towards the east; and when you have her, bind her in that crystal.
Is that all? Well, tomorrow’s Wednesday, so I better get cracking!
Well, that book does serve as the bane of every Canadian high-schooler’s life. I wasn’t crazy about it, but something about it seems formative.