Sir Thomas More by Hals Holbein (Accessed via Wikipedia ) During lockdown, we had Time. Remember that? I was in my probationary year of teaching: almost certainly among the most exhausting years for any profession. All my time had been taken up with school work, and I regularly stayed at school until after 6pm, having arrived there at eight in the morning. Now, children, this is not sustainable and, very soon, I decided I didn’t like working where I was. Then I realised that I didn’t like teaching at all. But, in fact, neither was particularly true: I just needed to be true to myself and to say no, which would give me the ability to manage my work/life balance in a more appropriate way. What does this have to do with historical fiction, I hear you say? Well, during March 2020, we went into lockdown and suddenly I went from working ten-hour-days to ten-hour-weeks. I met up with my class on Google Meet, I put work up for them on a meticulously designed Google Classroom, but I just h...
“I was visiting a friend in the borders one Michaelmas and we happened upon a hiring fair. A place called Hazeldine. I found a charming boy to be a page for you, Mother. Whatever happened to him?”
- I found a relevant quote from Dance With Me, our next release, which is coming out on 22nd October this year!
Michaelmas is a great day for inspiration and storytelling.
Traditionally, it was one of the days when hiring was conducted, and the school term started. All these opportunities that people had to gather together and share stories about whatever had happened since the last time they saw each other. (We’ve got less of those opportunities this year, but technology still allows us to share our stories and news with people further afield.)
You can read all about St Michael chasing the devil to Earth in Susan’s latest blog post. The feast day actually belongs to St Michael and all angels, especially his fellow archangels – Gabriel and Raphael. Some traditions observe a fifth – Uriel. There was another one too, of course, the aforementioned devil, under his original guise of Lucifer. We don’t celebrate him quite so much.
St Michael is usually portrayed as a warrior and is never really pictured or sculpted without his sword. It was this sword with which he finally defeated Lucifer. It was also this sword which Pope Gregory I saw St Michael wielding atop Hadrian’s Mausoleum, since named Castel Sant’Angelo.
Gregory was walking through Rome during a plague epidemic in the sixth century, when he saw a vision of the archangel sheathing his sword. The pope took this as a sign that the plague would soon be over, which – as it happens – was absolutely correct. This story came flooding back to me when I saw the news that we may be due the strongest geomagnetic storm for over a year on 29th September 2020. Here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, and we may be treated to a fantastic display of aurora borealis on 29th September! Are we witnessing the twenty-first century equivalent of Pope Gregory’s vision?!
We will be eating goose tomorrow (find out why here) and then – hopefully – waiting until it gets dark before we head out to look for the northern lights. We don’t have to wait long for the dark now: winter is coming, with all its sights, sounds, tastes and memories. And on Thursday we will be into Halloween Month, when the veil is thin, and the voices of the dead are not always beyond our reach. We are moving into the harvest-time for stories. And, with all these strange happenings around us this year, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the muse isn’t that bit more tangible than she has been before.
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