I hear that the UK’s oldest witch has just died at the age of 92. She really should have hung on a few more weeks and coincided with Hallowe’en. I didn’t know we had any kind of register of witches to tell us who is the oldest. Surely there are other old crones out there unheard of by the mass media, just working away at their spells. Anyway, Patricia Crowther was known as a “high priestess” and in the 1970s she and her husband, Arnold Crowther, co-created A Spell of Witchcraft, a BBC Radio Sheffield series that is credited with introducing modern witchcraft to a wider audience. Goodness!
She was a follower of the Wicca pagan religion, developed by Gerald Gardner, who in the 1950s took over a witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man and is credited with rescuing the practice from obscurity. How strange that someone felt the need to ‘rescue’ witchcraft!
Before she was a properly established witch, she was a professional entertainer and dancer working in theatre. She also performed a puppet and magic show for children. Would a witch have been allowed to continue working around children in the modern hyper safety-conscious modern world? It’s debatable. And witchcraft was always there in her background it seems. Interviewed in the 1990s she said her husband had taken part in “operation cone of power”, a ritual to stop Britain being invaded. “Hitler was expected on our shores at any time,” she said. “They did not throw white powder but worked in the New Forest, chanting: ‘You cannot cross the sea / Not able to come,’ repeated over and over and raising the power through the dance.”
How reassuring it is to know that the witches were on our side!
Maybe we don’t have a national register of witches; it’s not really the kind of thing you put down as your profession on job applications and other such forms. But we have all been registered in different ways and now there is talk of introducing digital ID cards. Here’s some information from Wikipedia about ID cards:
“The National Registration Act 1939 was an Act of parliament in the United Kingdom. The initial National Registration Bill was introduced to Parliament as an emergency measure at the start of the Second World War. The act provided for the establishment of a constantly-maintained national register of the civilian population of the United Kingdom and the Isle of Man, and for the issuance of identity cards based on data held in the register, and required civilians to present their identity cards on demand to police officers and other authorised persons.
On 21 February 1952, it ceased to be necessary to carry an identity card, and the Act itself formally expired on 22 May 1952. The last person prosecuted under the Act was Harry Willcock who had refused to produce his identity card for a police officer in December 1950. Even after the National Registration system was abandoned in 1952, the National Registration number persisted, being used within the National Health Service, for voter registration, and for the National Insurance system.”
And now a whole lot of debate is going on about the pros and cons of ID cards in general (quite a good idea in my opinion) and digital ID cards in particular in this age of hackers, stolen data, and THE STATE knowing all your secrets! We shall see!
Tony Blair wanted to reintroduce ID cards when he was prime minister but the idea was abandoned. Now it is being suggested that the very same Tony Blair:
“The White House is backing a plan that would see Tony Blair head a temporary administration of the Gaza Strip – initially without the direct involvement of the Palestinian Authority (PA), according to Israeli media reports.
Under the proposal, Blair would lead a body called the Gaza International Transitional Authority (Gita) that would have a mandate to be Gaza’s “supreme political and legal authority” for as long as five years.”
Once again, we shall see!
Acronyms are strange and interesting. Was the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act so called because it could become the Dream Act, a name linking the idea of immigration to the old one of the American Dream? The internet tells me that it was a legislative proposal that would grant temporary conditional residency, with the right to work, for illegal immigrants who entered the United States as minors — and, if they later satisfy further qualifications, they would attain permanent residency.
I get the impression that ICE is putting an end to that idea. Dreamers, as the minors referred to are known as, are being arrested and detained just like other immigrants. And some of them are dying in custody:
“Deaths occurring in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have reached at least 16 since January amid increasing mass detention across the country and growing concerns over conditions.
On Sunday, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old Mexican national and former “Dreamer” – those given protections after being brought to the US as undocumented children in the past - died after being held at an Ice facility in Adelanto, California, according to a statement from the federal agency.
Ayala-Uribe’s death marked the 15th detention death officially reported by Ice, part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January.”
I don’t think any of this is the work of good witches!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment