You may remember our delicious Scottish-themed cocktail: Caledon , which we shared on Christmas Eve in 2024. This remains one of our most popular blog posts, so we thought we would share another one for you on this All Hallow's Eve! With that in mind, I am pleased to introduce you to: The Raighvan Park , inspired by Judith Crow's novella, The Folly at Raighvan Park, which you can find here . Here are your step by step instructions for creating this gothic beverage (have we just invented the gothtail ?!) It's deliciously dark, as you might expect, with a hint of the upper-class style of the novella. You will need: 1. Port 2. Patron Xo Cafe (you could use any other coffee liqueur) 3. Soda water with lime 4. Ginger ale 5. Pepsi Max 6. Liquorice Time to put them all together... 1. Pour one shot of coffee liqueur into a large wine glass. 2. Add one shot of port. Remember, a gothic gentleman loves his port! 3. Now onto the non-alcoholic additions... include two shots of soda wat...
My brief for this blog was to make it spooky - it being nearly Halloween. I then trawled the internet for the best historical spooky tv series and found one - The Living and the Dead - which really piqued my interest. The main character, played by Colin Morgan of Merlin fame, is a farmer who is driven to explore what happens after death. It was made for the BBC in 2016.Unfortunately, for some reason I have not been able to fathom, it is not available on iPlayer. So, there went that idea.
That left me back at square one, with the Historical and Spooky guidelines not really helping. None of the others caught my interest quite enough. Perhaps, after I'd found The Living and the Dead, I didn't really feel like anything else was going to be as good. So Virginia suggested Ghosts.
Ghosts?
Spooky - of course. Historical - not really!
But she pointed out that there is a multi-timeline which happens in the series, as we continue to discover more and more about the individual ghosts and what led to their very personal unfinished business.
Although it makes perfect sense to see the series as Halloween viewing, for me it will always belong in May. On my birthday, in fact. That's because, when I turned 30 during full lockdown in 2020, we celebrated the day by watching back-to-back episodes. After that, each birthday we'd watch the next series, until the series finished and that tradition ended on my 34th birthday.
This really links to one of the most fascinating things about Ghosts: that everyone who watches it makes a personal connection. Friends and family who had also watched the episodes, would warn of a "really sad one" coming up and, when I watched it, I would find a completely different one tugged at my heartstrings.
Of course, all the ghosts have sad backstories: that's why they're ghosts in the first place! The series (and, in fact, much of popular culture) puts great weight on the idea that people become ghosts because they have unfinished business. Unfinished business almost certainly means something which is a good way south of jolly.
The backstory which most tugged at my heartstrings was Kitty's. She was an annoying little soul - especially for a teacher who spent most of their time surrounded by little children exactly like her! But the other ghosts' obsession with the idea that she had been murdered really made me think about the conclusions people jump to.
As a writer, it also made me think about twists. I love twists. Virginia is the master (mistress?) of them. I am not so much. I get so interested in the twist that I want to develop it and develop it until the only reason why someone would be surprised by it was because it was so blindingly obvious already!
But it also made me think about the definition of a twist. Is it an anti-climax if a story ends sweetly instead of scarily? Having just read the longlisted stories for the Crowvus Christmas Ghost Story Competition, I was so pleased to find a mixture of the gentle and the eerie. Sometimes, perhaps a twist can just be - as it was for Kitty - the fact that life and circumstance are harsh enough. Sometimes people don't need to be.
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