My Familiar

I think I have mentioned here before that I think I must be a witch. Eerie things happen often in my life, good eerie things, but eerie things nonetheless.

And I am more than happy to be a bit witchy, because now is a good time to make such a confession. I may have been more reluctant a few hundred years ago, when I would have been doomed to meet a fiery end, and confess or not, I think they’d have found me out.

The more I ponder on the mediaeval period, the more fascinated I become, but also, I get cross. Cross that Anne Boleyn faced a farce of a trial. Irate that people could be executed in their hundreds because they may not have been patrons of whichever religion was “in” at the time. Frustrated that medicine was essentially quackery, and the law was totally unfair. But the thing that makes me most cross is the persecution of women that was so a la mode then – the witch hunts.

I am no expert on History, but I know a bit. And the thing that hammers home to me just how pointlessly cruel the whole witch persecution trend was, is the TV programme, Ghosts. One of said ghosts is the spirit of a simple country woman, a poor peasant, who found herself, when living, on the wrong side of convention. That was her crime.

From Ghosts, I deduce therefore that the historical persecution of women was nothing more than mysogyny, fear, ageism, ignorance and cruelty all rolled into an abhorrent form of torturous, mudersome bullying that was widely accepted as “the norm” in the past.

Horrific when you stop to think about it.

And so I count my blessings that I am not typing this in 1535, because even now, in our “more accepting” society, I do not sit under the radar of normality. I have weird ideas, I speak my mind, I wear odd things, I do odd things. On top of that, sometimes I see things that aren’t there, I conjure stuff up and I am followed around by uncanny coincidences all the time. And I am fast approaching an age where women would typically have been outed as witches in centuries past; in our culture, youth is able to decorate a lot of things that maturity can exaggerate for the worse. Which is sad.

My obsession (empathy) with witches started when I was very little, when I analyse it. My absolute favourite books were about Dorrie, the Little Witch by Patricia Coombs. My mum would take me to the library and I would pore through the book boxes in the hope of finding one of the series, and if I was lucky (which I often was, eerily) I would sit and read the book through, rapt, and then get its ticket stamped at the wooden desk by the stern librarian, before hauling my quarry home.

I speed-read The Witches by Roald Dahl when I was in Class Three (aged about 8), it gripped me so much, and when the film came out in 1990, it did not disappoint, even though Dahl most definitely is not pro-witch.

Then there was The Worst Witch film – the one with old Frank-N-Furter in it; I must have watched it a zillion times, hankering after a working broomstick of my own and falling slightly in love with Fairuza Balk (what a name!) as we both realised that growing up isn’t easy.

Simon and the Witch was another classic – oh to be Simon and have a witch friend! And when I finally went to secondary school, I’d stake out the library, waiting for “Witches” by Colin Hawkins to be returned, when I’d grab it. Whilst everyone else was reading Forever by Judy Blume, I was researching. That book felt like an instruction manual on how to identify (or how to be) a witch oneself. I learned about cauldrons, spells and familiars. I loved it.

Now, as my maturity is beginning to exaggerate my lack of convention in a way that is no longer appealingly quirky, I think I am just going to have to own my eccentricity and accept my faults. I don’t have to worry about coven finders and burning stakes, so why the hell not? My mission is to try to be unapologetically myself. To fight against it is just hard work. If I am a witch, so be it. And to add to the argument, I now appear to have a familiar of my own.

Wherever I go now, there is a funny little being trotting along beside me. He has a curly tail, big shoulders, no neck and a tiny head, a tooth that permanently protrudes from his lip and over-long claws. He sheds hair, has halitosis and expels noxious fumes. He snores, he howls, and he barks at the telly. He is a dog, but he looks a bit like a big toad with fur, except when he wears his orange jumper, and then he resembles a pumpkin. He is my little friend, and his name is Angus.

I feel an explanation is probably appropriate at this point.

But, I am not going to give one. I can’t. How this little embodiment of contradiction came to be in my life is nothing short of magical, given my previous dog parent failings, and I can’t really explain it. Suffice to say, he has helped me more than he will ever know, and he’s my little sidekick. My smelly, old, ugly, loyal, little mongrel.

The familiar to my witch.

Ooops, I seem to have a cat, too.

(Well, maybe two cats.)