Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Should've):Love Life.

"I'm in love again. Been like this before. I'm in love again. This time's true I'm sure" - Love You More, Buzzcocks.

"By the time the average person ends up with the love of their life they will have been in seven relationships. Of those two are often long-term relationships while the rest are a mix of short term flings, casual dating, and one-night stands. The average person will also fall in love two of those times and have their heart broken twice as well"

At least that's what the unseen narrator, actually regular Mike Leigh collaborator Lesley Manville, tells us at the start of each of the ten roughly half hour episodes of Sam Boyd's Love Life (BBC1 and iPlayer), a series in which we follow Darby Carter (Anna Kendrick, last seen by this viewer in Chris Morris' The Day Shall Come) as she proves these statistics to be almost exactly correct.

The problem with this premise is that nobody is average and it's to the great credit of Boyd, his team, and the cast that Love Life, patronising and condescending narration that's nowhere near as arch as it likes to think it is and would be more at home on a children's wildlife documentary aside, itself is far from average.  

It captures, realistically and often movingly, the awkwardness of first kisses, first sexual encounters, first mornings in bed together, the first time you meet a new partner's friends, and that warm glow that comes with a new connection as relationships move into a happier and more contented phase. It's also not shy of showing the pain of break ups, the anxiety caused by ghosting, the hurting of rejection, the hollowness of heartbreak, and how we all eventually bounce back from these moments.

Love Life widens its remit to take in Darby's relationships with her friends Sara (Zoe Chao), Jim (Peter Vack), and Mallory (Sasha Compere) and her mother Claudia (Hope Davis) and these are all played out excellently as well. At least after a fashion. To begin with it seemed as if Sara and Mallory acted more as a Greek chorus, there to provide unnecessary exposition, than they did real friends with their own foibles, motivations, and idiosyncrasies.

Recent romantic dramas like Normal People (and even comedies like Dave) have made friends crucial to the action and to the narrative development of the leading characters and, thankfully, as Love Life developed so did the characters of Mallory, Jim, and, most of all, Sara who even, like Claudia, had a whole episode devoted to her, her love of the party lifestyle in the big city (Love Life is set in a vibrant pre-pandemic New York City), and her issues with her eventual rejection by Jim whose heart is set on a future built around suburbia, stability, and children.

This makes for an excellent side story but the bulk of the narrative is taken up by Darby's attempts to find, and sustain, lasting love in the big city. Anna Kendrick's great in the role. Relatably cute and always in great outfits, the nervous laughter, vague expressions, and the uncertainty of her youth slowly mature into the more confident, successful, and emotionally intelligent woman she becomes even if there's always a glimpse of the vulnerability at her core.

We see her dip behind a tree to take an anxiety poo in a friend's front yard, get horrendously and embarrassingly pissed at a boyfriend's father's wake, we see here watching Pornhub with a dildo, sitting on the face of a casual partner, claiming to be "too full to fuck" after a huge dinner, and lying to a potential suitor that she's moving to Cleveland so she won't have to go and see Andrew Dice Clay or eat Mexican food with him. We see how each different man in her life treats her and we see how she responds to both that treatment and to them as people. 

Sometimes she's the one getting hurt and sometimes she's the one doing the hurting - just as it is for everyone. She meets lover number one Augie Jeong (Jin Ha) in a karaoke bar and they duet on Leona Lewis' Bleeding Love. Augie's big into musical theatre and loves his mum but is he into Darby as much as she's into him? When he leaves for Washington DC to campaign for Obama and against Mitt Romney it seems that he isn't.

It's Darby's first heartbreak but, as with so many of us, the lessons she learns from this experience are not necessarily useful in helping her navigate future relationships. Including ones with her recently divorced boss Bradley Field (the superbly named Scoot McNairy) and Magnus Lund (Nick Thune), whose thick patterned sweater and vaguely hipsterish beard give him the air of the kind of stock dullard who fashions himself after woodsmen and Scandi-noir detectives.

Of course, Magnus proves to be anything but that and his and Darby's relationship is one of the longer lasting ones in Love Life. Lund's a chef, quite an angry chef, who sends Darby flowers, makes her nice food, and cares for her. She wants kids (two or three, enough to fit in a car) but Magnus ups the ante and suggests a brood of six. Enough for a much larger car and one he'd like to drive them all to the south in to start a new life.

Their differences eventually prove insoluble and we get to witness what we already know, that the most passionate relationships often end in the most horrible and upsetting ways. While the relationships with Magnus Lund, Augie, and, later, the polite but cheeky Londoner Grant (Kingsley Ben-Adir) are played out with a sense of equality, some of Darby's earlier relationships come undone because of clear power imbalances.

 

A young Darby living in a large tasteful house full of art and wine bottles is spending money she doesn't have on clothes to impress her older lover but the age gap, her insecurity and her inexperience do for her and, on the other side of that coin, her brief fling with Danny Two Phones (Gus Halper) seems doomed to failure from the off as the spiteful nickname suggests. Not just because Danny called Darby 'my little Thumbelina' or because he's so intense but also because he's still obsessed with an ex-girlfriend he broke up with three years ago.

A cruel lesson is learned when Darby dumps Danny. Her ego is finally boosted. We see how it was first damaged in flashback scenes of a Thanksgiving break at boarding school where a fifteen year old Darby (played by Courtney Grosbeck) has her teenage heart broken by the theatrical Luke Ducharme (Griffin Gluck) who thinks it's 'sick' that she's from California, the home of The O.C.

Young Luke and Darby make out to John Mayer, and they perform together in a production of Cats but when he cheats on her with her unbearably solipsistic room mate she lies to her friends she has cancer to win their sympathy and when the truth comes out she travels home alone and shamed and Luke goes back to Corpus Christi only to reappear in her life many years later (this time played by John Gallagher Jr) for a brief fling and a night out to see Hamilton.

Luke makes Darby feel listened to, Bradley makes her feel a high flyer (but also that she's somehow inadequate), and Danny makes her feel superior while her relationships with Augie, Magnus, and Grant play out, as mentioned earlier, more like those between equal partners. Yet planted in the foundation of each of these romances is the seed of its destruction. 

Or is it? You'll have to watch Love Life to find out if Darby does find happiness and love in the end but it's no spoiler to tell you it is, as it is for most of us, a long and sometimes arduous - but also fun and exciting - journey she takes in trying to get there. Despite the occasional inaccurate observation, and what seems like product placement for Fjallraven Kanken, Love Life creates a map of the terrain of the human heart that looks remarkably similar to the ones we all carry inside of us.

It's painful to see people talk themselves out of happiness because of their own insecurities and the series perfectly illustrates the sense of anxiety we all feel when we're unsure of a person's intentions, whether or not they're going to kiss us, whether or not they're going to leave us, and whether or not that expression on their face means they're preparing to say hello or goodbye.

We see how difficult relationships with parents (Darby is fully aware she turns into the most obnoxious fourteen year old version of herself whenever she spends extended time with her mother) inform the way we handle our own adult relationships and we see how friendships become strained when we grow older and our lives take divergent paths. The storyline regarding a friend who resolutely refuses to mend their ways and improve their behaviour is one that resonated only too clearly for me. 

With a superb soundtrack that included The Fall's C.R.E.E.P., Arthur Russell's This Is How We Walk On The Moon, The National's This Is The Last Time, Caribou's Can't Do Without You, Justice Vs Simian's We Are Your Friends, TV On The Radio's I Was A Lover, and Fetty Wap's 679 it felt, at times, as if this drama could have been played out in my own, or one of my friend's, front rooms but it felt like that too because, despite the glamorous locations and Kendrick's Hollywood presence, it always seemed very real. These people were believable, their situations were believable, and their actions were, ultimately, believable. I believed in it, invested in, and eventually I was rewarded for that. Which, in some ways, is what we all want. Both from a television programme and a relationship.

 

Knobs and Knockers.

"The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living" - Cicero.

What do we imagine when we think of seances? Thanks to movies like Beetlejuice, The Others, What Lies Beneath, and even Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey our idea of what a seance is these days is somewhat Hollywood and, unsurprisingly as the bulk of films featuring seances are horror movies, they're often quite scary or spooky.

But in the Victorian heyday of seances it was quite a different story. An 1873 newspaper report about a seance tells of singing, prayer, invisible friends, and a spirit called Sam requesting that all the accordions in the room were tied down to the furniture before then playing one in what was reported as a most melodious of styles.

Seances, in their Victorian iterations, were one part revivalist meeting, one part magic show, and one part party. Men would wear suits and ladies would wear posh frocks to attend. Quite different from the attire I was dressed in when I laid on my bed in Tadley and tuned in to last Monday's online (you know why) London Fortean Society talk, Calling the Spirits - A History of Seances.

A talk that seemed likely to cover much of the same ground as Dr Romany Reagan's The Victorian Seance:From the Occult to the Gin Parlour at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub last February but would, hopefully, be different enough to warrant both attending and writing about. Which it proved to be. With our host Scott presenting, aided by the excellent Conway Hall, from his garden shed in Lewisham, our speaker, Lisa Morton, Zoomed in from the far more glamorous, and no doubt warmer, location of southern California.

Lisa spoke of how, before seances, (supposed) communion with the dead had been a solitary activity partaken of by witches and necromancers and featured in both Greek (Homer's Odyssey) and Roman literature. In the Hebrew Bible King Saul, the first king of Israel, consults The Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of prophet Samuel so that he can seek his counsel in the upcoming, and disastrous - as foretold by Samuel, battle against the Philistines.

Less than a century later when the United Kingdom of Israel was ruled over by Solomon the witches and middle men were cut out and Solomon consulted his own grimoires to summon up the spirits. For the next two thousand years this was how communion with the dead, though rarely even considered, was imagined. Necromancers standing in circles repeating the same incantation three times was our ancestor's standard and accepted imagining of how we had conversations with spirits.

The Renaissance era didn't so much as see an end to that as much as it witnessed a juicing of it. It was the start of the time of the great necromancing conmen. The 16c Worcester born occultist, and assistant to John Dee, Edward Kelley was one such man. Kelley had had both his ears removed as a punishment for counterfeiting and forgery but that didn't stop him convincing Dee he could use crystal-gazers to contact the dead and it didn't stop Dee from believing him.

With a magical powder and a book of spells he'd supposedly discovered in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, Kelley toured his medicine show and became hugely successful and massively wealthy as a result. Kelley, like Dee, was also a keen alchemist and travelled to Bohemia where he was knighted by Rudolph II. 

Things appeared to deteriorate quickly in their relationship as soon after Kelley was arrested on Rudolf's order and imprisoned in Krivoklat Castle outside Prague. Ostensibly for the murder of an official named Jiri Hunkler in a duel but it was suspected that Kelley had been incarcerated so that he could not leave the country before he produced any gold. On his release he failed, unsurprisingly, to turn base metals to gold and was put in prison again. This time in Hnevin Castle in Most where Kelley died, still in his early forties.

 

Two hundred years later the German born doctor, and friend of Mozart, Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in France and introduced the French people to his belief that there was an "invisible super fine fluid" that surrounded each and every body in the entire universe and that this fluid, or force, could have powerful healing qualities. Mesmer named it 'animal magnetism' but so interlinked was he with his theories many came to know it as mesmerism. A mesmerism that begat hypnotism and went on to birth the very word 'seance'.

The invention of spiritualism by the Fox sisters in Rochester, New York in 1848 (an event covered in my previous blog about Dr Reagan's talk - link above) took place at an apposite time in human history and found a willing, and susceptible, audience who, with belief in mainstream religion fading, were, perhaps trying to fill that, cliche warning, God shaped hole in their lives.

Soon, across America, there was a craze for superstar mediums. Many of them, like Agnes Guppy-Volckman, Florence Cook, and the abstract art pioneer Georgiana Houghton (whose Serpentine Gallery show I visited and wrote about back in 2016) were women and their shows would consist of levitating objects, instruments that played themselves, and production of ectoplasm. Far from replacing religion, Spiritualism had become a religion. A showbiz religion for the new age of entertainment.

But though the shows were fun they were also taken very seriously. Many believed that science could, and would, prove Spiritualism to be the one true religion even at a time when it had been remarked that Florence Cook's spirit, known as Katie King, looked remarkably like Florence herself who was supposedly hid in a cupboard so as not to upset Katie!

Hmmm! In 1871, at Ashley House in Westminster, the Scottish clairvoyant, medium, psychic, and, let's not put too fine a point on this, fraudster Daniel Dunglas Home was seen to enter into a trance, step outside a seventy foot high window and levitate for some time before swinging back in to the room via an adjacent window. Many believed his psychic powers had made him able to do this. Others suspected it was a trick and the dark night he chose to perform this act only hardened theirs (and my) belief towards this.

These levitations and spiritualist shows, as well as psychics making claims they could read the minds of the living, were the material of great debate and in 1882 The Society for Psychical Research was formed. Now known as a skeptical organisation the SPR was initially formed as an alliance between those who hoped to prove scientifically that spiritualism and communion with the dead was real and those who wished to debunk. They were to work together for the common good to find out the truth behind these claims.

In the early 1900s both the SPR and the general public started to wise up. In 1878 Francis Monk became the first person in England to be tried under the Vagrancy Act of 1824 for his nomadic lifestyle of mentalist shows and the Fox sisters had long admitted their act was fraudulent. People didn't want to believe their confession, too much had been invested into Spiritualism, then but fifty years later things were different.

The story of Spiritualism didn't end there though. When World War I brought about the loss of so many loved ones on the battlefields there was a demand, and many happy to supply that demand, from some of the bereaved for communication with those that had passed. Spirit communication was back in vogue and this time it came with a new gadget - the ouija board.

They were sold, initially, as parlour games but once the Catholic church, predictably, denounced them they soon gained more prestige. Budapest born Harry Houdini was one who'd started out as a believer in Spiritualism but by the 1920s he'd turned to debunking fraudulent psychics and mediums. A career that inspired the likes of Penn & Teller, Derren Brown, and the recently departed James Randi in their work.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini's friend, remained convinced of the authenticity of various mediums and, in 1922, after Doyle's wife had started practising mediumship, him and Houdini fell out. At least Louisa Doyle's stage act didn't, like some others, involve her using her surgically enhanced vagina to hide fake ectoplasm. The French medium Eva Carriere, keen to prove she had not resorted to this trick, had an assistant finger her live on stage before and after performances to show she was 'empty'!

You'd think Carriere's shows would be the ones making the front pages but the story that really caught the public attention was the trial of the fraudulent medium, and Fortean favourite, Helen Duncan. The trial took place in 1944, during World War II, and was so sensational it briefly replaced the war on the front pages of the papers. Much to the annoyance, apparently, of Winston Churchill.

Duncan, whose act consisted of bringing up fake ectoplasm made of cheesecloth with a photograph of a face cut out from a magazine attached to it - which sounds brilliantly crap, had apparently predicted the sinking of the HMS Barham by a Nazi submarine. An event which cost 862 lives and one which was hushed up for three months presumably so as not to depress people or deter the war effort at a crucial time.

Families of the lost were, however, informed of the sinking and with 862 lost that amounts to several thousand people. As Duncan had been appearing in Portsmouth during the time it's not impossible to believe that one of these people informed her of the event - especially when you consider she promised she could make contact with the dead. In fact it's far easier to believe this event than it is to believe Duncan had any real psychic powers. 

But that didn't stop her being one of the last people ever tried under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 and being sentenced to six months in prison. When she died twelve years later some were suspicious but before she was even sent to jail she was so obese she could barely move and suffered serious heart problems. You do the maths.

Some now still seek historical pardoning and though that's an irrelevance with somebody who died sixty-four years ago I think a better idea would be to admit she was a fraud rather than a witch. Frauds as useless as Duncan are rare now but they've not gone away. They've simply been replaced by ever more elegant and convincing modern versions. You know who they are and I won't do them the service of naming them.

Lisa Morton's talk was an interesting forty-five minute journey through the history of seances and spiritualism, as promised, and if didn't answer any questions regarding why so many people continue to believe in this patent bullshit then that's not necessarily the remit of the London Fortean Society. The Skeptics groups can pick up the slack on that.

A Q&A took in sexual healing, Freud, Jung, medium detectives both in fact and fiction, the Welsh mining industry, and Federico Fellini and it rounded off a fab evening which began with knockers (the Fox sisters knocking on their bedposts in Rochester) and ended with knobs (Uri Geller and the like). Next month Stacy Hackner is with the LFS to talk about Paleo-fantasy and Ancient Alien Contact and I'll be taking a break from writing about that one not because it's not interesting (it is) but because I've already attended, and written, about that talk (at London Skeptics in Camden last January). If you've any interest in this kind of stuff, though, you should log on.

"Knock knock"

"Is anybody there?"

"No, of course not" 

So sad:about Us.

"Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving but how can they know it's time for them to go? Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming. I have no thought of time for who knows where the time goes?" - Who Knows Where The Time Goes, Fairport Convention.

"Apologies mean nothing when the damage is done. But I can't switch off my loving like you can't switch off the sun" - So Sad About Us, The Who.

A greying middle aged man wrestles with a cardboard box at a municipal recycling centre while clutching his distressed and lined forehead with a pasty arm freckled with greying hairs and adorned with a now forgotten watch that must once have been his pride and joy. A fragment, a snapshot, in the life of a man who's had his whole world pulled from underneath him following his wife's request for a divorce and his child's growing up.

Empty nest syndrome! It's a real thing. It's not something I've suffered from or ever will do (I have no children, my nest is always empty) but it is something I've witnessed happen around me and it's something that Geoffrey Sax (director) and David Nicholls (writer) captured perfectly and beautifully in their recent four part drama Us on BBC1.

But Us was about far more than empty nest syndrome. This sweet and gentle, yet hugely powerful, marital breakup drama set against the backdrop of a grand tour of Europe also tackled themes of growing up, identity, alienation, sexual awakening, regret, and loss. It did, on many occasions, regular readers will not be surprised to learn, make me cry.

The drama begins with the artistic, free spirited, empathetic Connie Petersen (Saskia Reeves) politely requesting not just a divorce from the stilted, practical, business minded Douglas (Tom Hollander) but a change and a new start too. For both of them. It's remarkable in the fairly humdrum way such a major life event is delivered and the series' deft handling of the issue progresses in a way quite different from previous divorce dramas I've watched. This is not Kramer Vs Kramer.

 

 

The story develops both forwards, as we witness Douglas and Connie embark on their European tour with their son Albie (Tom Taylor captures almost perfectly that teenage feeling of awkwardness and discovery), and backwards as we flash back to revisit poignant moments in the lives of young Douglas (Iain de Caestecker) and young Connie (Gina Bramhill). Often played out in the mind of Douglas as he lies awake at night pondering the decisions and choices he's made in the past. Pondering, in fact, the very nature of his self.

 

 

We see their first meeting:- Connie:- bohemian, drug taking, sporting a black leather jacket and a beautiful blonde bob, Douglas:- nerdy, gauche, straight, sensible, and decked out in a suit complete with a wool tie. We see them on nights out with Connie's friends, Douglas eager to leave, Connie keen to continue the party, we see them dancing to Always by Erasure at their wedding reception, we see them receive the happy news they're to become parents of a girl, and we witness the heartbreaking anguish as the baby, Jane, is born prematurely early and dies before she ever leaves hospital.

Jane is but one of many ghosts who not so much haunt Douglas and Connie's relationship as linger in the background and most of them are explored in this wonderful drama. But often it's the little things about their personalities that are the most telling. Douglas makes dad jokes and says dad things, he refuses to look at maps when he's lost, he takes a fun quiz too seriously and demands a recount, he talks about leaving early to 'beat the crowds' and how much things cost, and, cough, worries about not doing his ten thousand steps each day.

He lacks spontaneity and he's, not to put too fine a point on it, not a lot of fun. Connie loves him but she's concerned about entering the 'afternoon nap' phase of her life and wants more than Douglas does from what life they both have left. Douglas, now that Albie's moving on, looks forward to going to the dump. A place he calls, only partially tongue in cheek, 'a fortress of solitude'.

Albie, too, has got stuff going on. A promising photographer with a Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever poster on his bedroom wall, he's inherited his mum's love for culture but he struggles to find connection with his father and, despite both his parents attempt to protect him from the news of their impending separation, he has a keen sense of being caught in the crossfire. At seventeen years old, all this is happening in what appears to be his first summer of sexual awakening.

A summer that is being spent, in Albie's words, on a school trip but with just him and two teachers. Handsome, blond, and tall, looking to me like a young Russell Howard, he hooks up with feisty busker Kat (Thaddea Graham) who becomes overly familiar with Douglas and Connie, pilfers rolls and preserves from the hotel buffet much to Douglas' annoyance, and entertains tourists with a fair to middling rendition of Ewan MacColl's Dirty Old Town. Unlike Albie, she does not lack in confidence.

 

As Albie lives out his youth and slowly comes round to the fact that his father is neither a monster nor a model - just another person, like him, trying to do his best, Douglas and Connie occasionally try to relive theirs. But no amount of kissing and canoodling and zipping round the picture postcard perfect streets of Paris on scooters can prevent them dredging up their memories, delving into the emotional detritus of their life, and, ultimately, facing the reckoning that slowly but surely enters into all but the most shallow lives.

 

We see Douglas pondering alone and sad in various upmarket European hotels and beauty spots and we see him trying to save both his relationships with Connie and Albie as he hotfoots it from Paris to Amsterdam and on to Venice, Siena, Barclelona, Sitges, and finally back home in anonymous suburban England where the deneoument of Us appears doomed to play out.

 

On his increasingly frantic journey Douglas manages to lose his luggage on a train in Empoli, get horrendously sun burnt, sleep in an Italian police cell, and get painfully stung by jellyfish in the Balearic Sea. But he also runs into a kindred spirit in the Danish dentist Freja (Sofie Grabol). Freja's in Venice 'celebrating' her divorce, literally eating her dinner in an empty restaurant, after her dentist husband left her for their hygienist and a life of eternal flossing in Copenhagen.

 

Douglas and Freja discover 'lonely tourism' works better when experienced together and amusingly, and touchingly, discuss what activities work well alone (cinema, theatre) and which don't (zoos, the circus, paintballing, karaoke). They both share a sadness and a sense of rejection but with Douglas clearly still in love with Connie is it even possible they could share a romance?

Screening at a time of the worst global pandemic for a century it's easy to be envious of the glamorous hotels we can't stay in at the moment and the international locations we can't visit at the moment (the shots of Barcelona look particularly swoonsome and the film makers never miss a chance to film a scene in the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum) but every shot of the canals of Amsterdam and Venice and every beautiful Vermeer, Canaletto, Gericault, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Arcimboldo, stunning though they are, always plays backdrop to what, at heart, is an all too familiar story of a family struggling to stay together.

Us made me realise how much I've missed being able to travel this year (though I was fortunate to enjoy two lovely weekends in Wales either side of lockdown) but, more than that, it shone a light on more lasting concerns in my life. As Douglas and Connie sat side by side in bed reading their books it dawned on me such moments had not been part of my life for over a decade now and I became nostalgic not for the past but for the future I once imagined I might have.

 

The ageing faces of Douglas and Connie appeared to me, at first, as much older than they were supposed to be but, like me, they're in their fifties (a fact which is painfully highlighted by the appearance of Eva Herzigova's 1994 'HELLO BOYS' Wonderbra poster on a wall in the background and the sound of Portishead's Roads at a party in the flashback scenes) and that had me thinking about my own advancing years, the decisions I've taken along this road to nowhere we call life, and my own mortality.

 

The story of the lost child, Jane, reminded me of losing my brother and hit home painfully hard and as the credits rolled Sandy Denny sang Fairport Convention's Who Knows Where The Time Goes and the power of the programme and the sheer magnitude and huge depth of emotions that come with being a living, breathing, feeling, loving person filled my body with a bittersweet mixture of sadness and joy.

 

 

You hold a magnifying glass over any life, no matter how ordinary it may appear, and look for long enough and what you'll see will be extraordinary. Extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily sad, and extraordinarily complex. All lives are unique but they are also all intertwined and united not just in experience but in sentiment and memory. 

 

Spending four hours in the company of Douglas, Connie, and Albie was like looking through that magnifying glass. Not with a scientific or inquiring mind but with a passionate, empathetic beating heart. We look at these people looking back at their lives at the same time as they move forwards in them and we can't help but do the same with our own lives. Even if, right now, we don't get to go on a grand tour of Europe to do so. When we cannot travel on planes and boats we travel instead in our hearts and minds. Culture is the vehicle in which we choose to make these journeys.

Hairy On The Inside:Hungry Like The Werewolf.

"Howling in shadows, living in a lunar spell. He finds his heaven spewing from the mouth of hell. And when he finds who he's looking for listen in awe and you'll hear him bark at the moon" - Bark at the Moon, Ozzy Osbourne.

Werewolves have been sadly neglected of late. They've not been getting their due and that's a damned shame because they're one of my favourite monsters. Obviously zombies, serial killers, and Frankenstein's monster are all great but there's something about the hairy handed gents that ticks all the boxes for me. Organisations like the London Fortean Society, Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, and SELFS have hosted talks on witches, vampires, fairies (twice), and mermaids (three times) but, since I've been attending - at least, there's been nothing on werewolves at all.

Until now that is. Werewolves haven't always wiled away their moonlit nights in obscurity. Back in the forties Lon Chaney Jr was appearing as a Wolf Man, alongside Bela Lugosi and Claude Rains, in a film of the same name. Twenty three years later, in Face of the Screaming Werewolf, he reappeared as a mummified version, and in the eighties you could barely move without being mauled by American Werewolves in London or Teen Wolves. 1984's Wolf saw Jack Nicholson and James Spader hunting down deer, howling, and generally menacing poor Michelle Pfeiffer.

My favourite werewolf programme is 1980's Children of the Full Moon. Part of the excellent Hammer House of Horror tv series, I probably saw this three or four years after it was first broadcast and it scared the absolute shit out of me. Rewatching it on YouTube a few years back I could see that some of the effects were a bit ropey but the memories of watching Christoper Cazenove, Diana Dors, and a hairy faced axeman peering through a bedroom window of a remote and spooky mansion as an impressionable teenager still sent chills up my back. Typing this now, the chills are back.

Only a few of these fictional werewolves appeared in last week's SELFS talk about the folkloric history of werewolves and, sadly, there was no riffing on Warren Zevon's 1977 classic Werewolves of London with its tales of eating a big dish of beef chow mein in Lee Ho Fook's, drinking a pina colada in Trader Vic's, and mutilating little old ladies late at night. But that didn't stop it being a rather splendid evening. As most evenings with SELFS tend to be.

Presented online (for obvious reasons) via Zoom and a YouTube slideshow, the evening began with our host George explaining the literal meaning of the word werewolf - man-wolf. The French prefer the word loup-garou. Loup being a wolf and garou being a man who transforms himself into an animal. The Greek derived term lycanthrope means wolf-person allowing the women to get involved. A rare treat it seems as werewolves do seem to be primarily male.

It was speculated that prehistoric hunters would disguise themselves in wolf pelts to hunt buffalo, the early theologian Augustine of Hippo claimed the devil lacked the ability to turn a man into a wolf but that Satan was able to make a man both look and think like a wolf. In the 11th century King Cnut spoke of werewolves and there were rumours that King John, who ruled England from 1199-1216, actually was one.

In 8AD, Ovid's Metamorphoses told of Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, killing his own son (he had fifty sons so he could spare one) Nyctimus and serving his flesh up to Zeus, the king of Gods, to test his claim to omniscience. Understandably displeased at this culinary cuntishness, Zeus restored Nyctimus to life and turned Lycaon into a wolf. 

"What big eyes you have grandma" 

"All the better to see with you"

Was the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood a wolf in disguise or was she, in fact, the real grandmother who had transformed into a werewolf? A shapeshifter. Rare female werewolves were said to be 'hairy on the inside' but most werewolf tales differ only marginally over time. The 1C Roman author Petronius, in his Satyricon, told of a friend who took all his clothes off, turned into a wolf, and ran around a graveyard before 'worrying' some sheep. It doesn't sound too far from the escapades of the American werewolf in London.

In Auvergne, France, in 1588, a huntsman reported being attacked by a wolf. During the attack he had somehow managed to cut off one of the wolf's paws which he later showed to an acquaintance. The paw mutated into a woman's hand complete with a wedding ring and when the acquaintance returned home he found his wife dead in the kitchen. Where her hand used to be there was nothing but a bloody stump.

Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 made claims that wolves would sometimes snatch both adults and children from their beds and eat them. Kramer called this an act of God who had summoned evil spirits to punish us humans for our sins. God can be a right bastard.

In 1621, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy described a form of 'wolf madness' that involved howling men with hollow eyes whose insanity was so fevered they were unable to be persuaded that they were not wolves. Among other clinical and neuroscientific theories for this mania, rabies has been mooted as a likely diagnosis.

The last authenticated werewolf trial in France took place in 1847. Sergeant Francois Bertrand, then still a teenager, was arrested and jailed for one year for desecration of cemeteries and necrophilia (he'd dig up dead bodies, masturbate over them, dissect them, and then bury them again). His deeds were discovered when locals heard dogs howling in terror, discovered coffins prised open and corpses that had been gnawed at. 

Bertrand, or the Vampire of Montparnasse as he became known (blurring the already thin line between vampires and werewolves), claimed he was driven by a force that made him feel he'd been turned into a ravenous animal and as a child he was fixated with eating human flesh after sunset. Despite all this his colleagues said he was a great guy and after he served his sentence he moved to Le Havre and lived out an uneventful life as a mailman and lighthouse keeper. The appetite for human flesh, apparently, having been sated.

Latvia, like France, seems a hotspot for werewolves and the trial of Hans the Werewolf in 1651 is typical of medieval Latvia where paganism was still practiced in defiance of Christianity long after the nation had converted. Baltic peasantry accused people of being werewolves over petty jealousies in a manner not dissimilar to witch hunts of the time and the authorities would always be keen to juice that accusation into one of Satanism.

Hans confirmed he believed himself to be a beast when under transmutation and the court took this to be evidence of Satanic magic and the fact that Hans said a 'man in black' had given him the body of a wolf was further proof that this was the work of Old Nick. As a Satanist, Hans faced the death penalty but there were other werewolves believed to be operating in Latvia at the time and rumour even had it that they would visit Hell three times a year to ensure a good harvest. Or possibly so Beelzebub could carry out an appraisal on them.

An appraisal system for werewolves would be difficult to operate. While there are some clear KPIs there seems to be no consistent reason for them appearing, no specific time of year or even, it was suggested, time of day. I'm not sure I'm on board with that last point as to my knowledge, and I've watched the Thriller video in its entirety, werewolves definitely seem to prefer nights. Nights with full moons usually. Good for getting naked under.

Some see belief in, or superstition regarding, werewolves as representative of our fascination with liminal spaces and hybrids. Werewolves are a hybrid of man and the unknown, a mix of the material and the immaterial and the 16c Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus believed that man had two spirits. A human one and an animal one. After their life had ended, Parcelsus warmed to his theme, those that had given in to sin and carnality would be turned into wolves or ghosts and forced, it seems, to linger eternally in purgatory. Worrying sheep no doubt.

Similarly, others believed werewolves to be the spirits of dead epileptics or cataleptics but none of that explains the behaviour of Peter Stumpp, the Werewolf of Bedburg, who was executed on the Halloween night of 1589 by 'breaking'. His flesh was torn from his body with red hot pincers as he was attached to a wheel. Next his arms and legs were removed before all his bones were broken to prevent him crawling out of the grave. To finish the job they chopped his head off and burnt his remains on a pyre.

It's recorded as one of the most brutal executions of all time but his crimes, confessed to under extreme torture, make pretty grisly, if likely untrue, reading. He was accused, and found guilty, of werewolfery, witchcraft, killing and eating fourteen children, ripping two unborn babies from their pregnant mother's wombs and swallowing them before describing them as 'dainty morsels', having an incestuous relationship with his own daughter (who, shockingly, was sentenced to death alongside him for this), eating his own son's brain, and having sexual intercourse with a succubus sent to him by the Devil.

The German werewolf stories seem to be the most gruesome of all so it's probably best not to give birth to a werewolf in Germany. Luckily there's a method of ensuring that doesn't happen. If you've had six children and they're all girls - don't have a seventh in case she's female too. Seven daughters born in succession, it was said, ensured that one would become a werewolf.

In Greece it was believed that being born on Christmas Day would make you a werewolf but in the Nordic countries you can't be born a werewolf, you have to become one. In Finland it's said grandmothers are particularly susceptible to lycanthropy and can poison children with their fingernails and in Norway and Sweden a person who wishes to transform into a werewolf has to perform a bizarre midnight ritual of drinking and headbanging. 

Perhaps that explains some of the more outre antics of bands like Burzum and Bathory. If you're not into the whole Monsters of Rock thing a shortcut to werewolfdom can be found by the simpler, though more unpleasant, task of eating a wolf's brain. In Russia you were neither born a werewolf nor could you compel yourself to be one. It was something that was done to you. Russian mountain legend had it that St Peter and St Paul had the power to punish greedy and selfish people by turning them into wolves.

If that's true we can expect to hear Vladimir Putin howling from within the walls of the Kremlin some time soon. The howling and the hairy faces are easy ways to spot werewolves but there is a danger these may just be ordinary wolves. How do we tell the difference?

There are some instructions. Wolves tend to travel in packs, werewolves solo. Wolves avoid humans but werewolves actively seek them out for very obvious purposes. If you find yourself the target of such a beast what can you do? What recourse do you have?

Firstly, try not to go out in a full moon in the first place but if you have to carry a five pointed star, a glass of holy water, and/or a gun with a silver bullet. Calling a werewolf by its human name upsets and discombobulates it and buys you precious time though making the sign of the cross may be even more effective. Most of all, though, stay on the path.

Opinion as to whether or not exorcism works with werewolves is divided though there are many who believe, I'm writing this like it's actual real science for some reason, conversion to Christianity is effective but possibly the most bizarre protection method comes from the bayou in the deep south of the USA.

The loup-garou of the bayou is said to own a boat the size of an aircraft but is scared of frogs but if you don't have a green amphibian handy, and they're hard to keep hold of, a sieve will suffice. If holidaying in Louisiana hang a sieve outside your door and any lurking loup-garou will be distracted by its compulsion to count the holes. Because loup-garous of the south, it seems, all suffer from arithmomania.  

Having gone through the folkloric history of werewolves, regional variations, how to identify them and how to protect ourselves from them the evening was coming to an end so we ran through a few fictional werewolves and had a brief Q&A that took in Stephen King, Dracula (a werewolf as well as a vampire), Psycho, The Howling, Company of Wolves, Ginger Snaps, Dog Soldiers, Rik Mayall, Bad Moon Rising, the Southend Werewolf Bill Ramsey, huskies, exorcisms in Connecticut, and our old friend and SELFS favourite James I of England/VI of Scotland.

Even 'enchanted girdles' cropped up. It had been a great talk, as ever, and by the time it had finished it was pitch black outside and I was tempted to take all my clothes off and allow my inner loup-garou some free expression beneath the light of a silvery moon. Alas, I was distracted by a sieve but it's halloween very soon and now my plan to go trick or treating on a pumpkin spacehopper dressed up as a Covid spore can't happen due to the latest coronavirus restrictions I can at least bark at the moon. Even if biting people is probably considered a high risk activity right now. 

Happy hallowe'en. Awwwoooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!