This is my Blog, which is the place where I announce new published works or reflect on current works in progress. It is also the place where I will occasionally write reviews of theatre shows I have seen or gigs I have been too. Less often, I will use this space to write about things in the news that annoy me or even write long essays about just how much I love all of the movies in the Star Wars universe (yes including episode one!).  


If you are feeling particularly brave, you can scroll down to the bottom of this page to read a brief biography about me too. You don't have to do so, but it might be nice to know a little more about the person whose books you are reading. 

Jayne Hecate Writer

Jayne is a writer of fiction and reader of political philosophy. She also has the dirtiest sense of humour of anyone she knows.

Happy New Year?…

As twenty twenty three passes into twenty twenty four, we can all sit back and reflect on where we have come as a society, marvel at the changes we have made for the better as things have improved for everyone, to ensure that they can live happy, worry free lives…

This is of course utter nonsense. Things have not got better, if anything, things have got considerably worse and many families in the UK are facing an uncertain future, filled with fear and misery. With heating bills rising, rents out of control even if you can find somewhere to live and medical waiting lists moving from months into years for essential health care. From this, we can only conclude that Britain is failing. The old Etonian schoolboys who have run the country for the last decade and a half have lined their own pockets, sold essential services to their friends and stolen the hopes and dreams of the poor. Food bank usage is higher than ever and of course, Brexit has been a huge, wonderful success… Opps sorry, I mean a catastrophic failure that we could all see coming, but somehow the likes of Farage and Johnson convinced the masses that a future separate from our biggest trading partners was the best option for us.

Why am I writing this now? I have kept quiet on my views for long enough. In twenty twenty three, I turned fifty. I never thought I would make it to fifty, I had always thought that I would have died in some exciting mountaineering accident, my mangled body slowing rotting in the high altitude sunshine, having dropped from an indeterminate ledge upon which I was having an epic climb. But arthritis and injury put a stop to that dream! Instead I am stuck indoors, riddled with pain and losing my mobility and independence, while living in fear of the next PIP assessment form that is going to drop through my door and force me to justify my existence.

I realise now that my hope for a happy peaceful future has evaporated. I am terrified of getting tooth ache, because I have no access to dental care. If I have an injury that needs medical attention, the NHS is so stripped of money, I will just sit on a waiting list to see a specialist Doctor who probably died of stress related alcoholism or Covid some time ago and may not have been replaced yet. I am not alone in these fears, so many others here in the UK have these fears and I cannot see a bright future for anyone here, except the very richest, most of which are already multimillionaires. Our current Prime Minister is richer than the King, meanwhile his wife has dealings with companies that are alleged to have made huge profits from Government involvement or even corruption. We all know that the Government are corrupt, but the media has carefully taken the hatchet to the anyone who would oppose them, leaving us with an opposition party who recently praised the work of Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher. The woman who destroyed the mining industry before it was cool to do so and also sold off our water and energy infrastructure, who took us back to the dark ages of the rich owning everything the poor rely upon to live. Currently, we have an unelected member of the cabinet, put there by making him a member of the house of lords, a completely unelected body who include people like Andrew Lloyd Webber and even Jeffrey Archer, of Weston Super Mare (some of us remember the scandal that involved him while he was in Government. Oh, they were such happy days, back when a political scandal meant that the minister was caught having intimate relations with someone he/she/they were not married too!). I am even getting e-Mails from Lord Michael Hesseltine, telling me that we have the same views on important political issues, such as Brexit and membership of the EU. OK, well only on that issue.

So what is my hope for twenty twenty four? It is this. I hope that nothing happens to me or my wife, because I do not know how I will pay the rent on my home. I hope that I do not need dental care or surgery. I hope that my car, that helps me with my daily mobility, does not fail the MOT in January. I hope that my Daughter and her partner can find a home of their own. I hope that my friends can find stability and freedom from debt. I hope that my seventeen year old cat makes it for another year . Finally, I hope that my arthritic hands can keep going as I explore my art and my writing. See? I do have hope after all.

My dear friends, I hope that the coming year brings you much needed peace and restorative rest, so we can face the horrors of our society and fight to put them right. I hope that we can remove these overly entitled bigots and old Etonian schoolboys from power and put in place a better, more egalitarian Government who don’t want to ship desperate, hurting people off to the country that is still recovering from a horrific genocide of it’s own people.

But if all of these hopes fail, you will find me on a mountain, real or metaphysical, praying to the spirit of nature to take me back home and away from this hellscape I have landed in… Oh yeah, I should mention that shouldn’t I? Twenty twenty three was the year that I discovered that I had swapped universes, travelled across the metaphysical barrier between realities and landed in this unrelenting hellscape of far right politics and revolting nationalism. I should have guessed really, after all, what kind of lunatic would vote Boris Johnson into power or believe the lies and evil of Donald Trump? The world feels like a computer game, being played for laughs by a teenager who wants to see how evil a society can become before it implodes! Surely, at any moment, the points score is going to be so low that we are going to be wiped out by environmental disaster, while fighting global warfare started by underendowed oligarchs or simply failing to reach the next level in the game. I know how this works, I used to play Theme Hospital and occasionally I put the most evil and corrupt characters in charge, just for the giggles. Oh Heck… None of this is real. What kind of reality would allow for a fourth Matrix movie or make Darth Vader the sympathetic character we all feel sorry for?

Good luck my friends, I hope that despite it all, the coming year brings you the things you need to make your life safe, happy and peaceful. If it doesn’t, then come and find me on the mountain and we can shout at the sky together.

With love always, Jayney XXX

December 31st 2023

The Hasbro AT-AT project

Our dear friend Neil arrived at our door one day, with the ultimate gift that any Star Wars loving kid from the 80s would want, a three and a half inch tall Hasbro Scout Trooper, with opening helmet, complete with an AT-AT Imperial Walker!

These items had been rescued from a skip and as such were incredibly dirty. However, Neil could see that these items would be of great value to the Star Wars fan in me and so he handed them over accepting only a hug in return. The odyssey of the Imperial Walker was about to start as it sat on a shelf in my office, ready to be given the Jayney treatment. The weeks went by, slowly becoming months and every time I looked at the walker, I could see the damage, the missing parts and the broken sound module. Finally, I put a post on Facebook asking my friends what I should do with it and the resounding reply was that I needed to give it the Jayney treatment and resto-mod it to within an inch of it’s armoured life.

Step one was to strip it down and scrub away the filth that it had gathered, clearly sat in someone’s loft before entering a skip to be scrapped. It saddens me that someone would throw a toy like this away when it could be played with by a child who would love it, but I am sure that the Rebel Alliance would approve of it being scrapped! However, as a confirmed adherent to the Dark Side, I could not allow such a thing to happen to Imperial property and accepted my fate. The cleaning went surprisingly well and under the filth was a very good condition body, with only minor damage to the legs that was easily fixable. The biggest problem however was the missing chin mounted heavy blaster cannons. With some on-line research I found out that this was the Endor Edition Walker, released in 2006 and in it’s incomplete state was next to worthless, making it the perfect candidate for what I was planning. Replacement blasters were available, but at just under twenty pounds per side, I was not keen and started to look into constructing my own. Here I went down a strange and unusual path delving into the depths of Spru-Goo, sculpting and chemistry.

Wobbly time slip time… Wooo! On the 7th of February of this year, I took some old model sprues and chopped them up into small sections and dumped the lot into an old cherry jar. I then poured on a bottle of acetone based nail varnish remover and screwed on the lid good and tight, not only to keep the smell in, but to prevent spillage if it got knocked over when I left it to work its magic on my shelf for months. The styrene reacted with the acetone and over time melted in the liquid, forming a strange rubber like compound that could be easily sculpted by gloved hands.

When it came to making the chin blasters, I needed a nice curved shape to hold the barrel and my home made Spru-Goo worked a treat. I scooped out the goo from the jar and laid it out on a work mat and started to roll and shape the spongy mass into shape, carefully folding it into layers that gave it a good thick base to work with. When I was finished, I was left with a smooth, one centimetre thick patty of styrene and I left this on a shelf to cure. As the acetone evaporated from the styrene, forming into a strong, rigid plastic once again. It took three days for the Spru-Goo to become workable and then I was able to saw, file and sand it into the shapes I needed to make the barrel holder. Then it was back to the cardboard supply and then e-Bay. I needed a pair of blaster barrels and during my investigations I had found someone who was 3D printing barrels for the original Kenner AT-AT from the early eighties. These although completely useless for my AT-AT were very, very cheap at only £2.50 including the postage and they took less than a month to arrive thanks to sitting in the local sorting office for three weeks due to a major staff shortage and restructuring by post Office management that has still to be resolved.

When I started to build up the blasters, using the Spru-Goo, the 3D printed barrels and some cardboard, I used the bottoms of some vitamin bottles to make the plasma generating chambers and then made a discovery. The 3D printed barrels were hollow, meaning that I could drill out the ends and install some LEDs directly into them to give them the muzzle flash of a firing weapon. The electronics was the easy bit, but shaping the rigid structure of the cannon to hold them was a little more tiresome. It slowly came together and I was left with something I liked, if looking a little more industrial and weapon like that the smooth sculpted original that had been lost. Being made of a mix of materials though, the cannons needed something to pull them all together. The 3D printed barrels visible ridge lines of the printing and although they were smooth to the touch I still didn’t like it. I decided to seal the lot with UV resin, a product I have been using more and more of late and have really come to like. So using a small brush, I painted a thin layer of resin all over the complete cannon assembly and got out my UV torch to start fixing the resin… which failed to set. There was simply not enough power in the torch to set the amount of resin I had ended up using and the result was that the resin remained tacky and unpleasant to handle. I finally left it under a sheet of tin foil with the torch switched on until the batteries finally failed, but each cannon remained sticky and wet. In a fit of rage, while sat bored in a hospital waiting room waiting for wifey to come back from an MRI, I scanned Amazon Prime and found the answer to my problem (purely the setting of the resin, my other problems are to discuss another day!). A huge, plug in, resin curing lamp so powerful that it came with a warning about it being dangerous to the eyes and skin! The next day it arrived and I began baking the tacky cannons until they were glassy smooth and everything was coated with a firm, strong layer of plastic. Unfortunately, it was too shiny for the paint and I had to lightly sand it back to give it a key for the paint to stick too before using my airbrush to give each cannon a coat of gunmetal grey.

With the paint on the cannons drying, I turned my attention to the head of the walker and set about making the modifications to the carriers for the chin cannons. This was deeply infuriating and just when I thought I had it all set, the gears would jump, the sliding plates would slip and the whole lot would stop working. Luckily, I have the power of the Dark Side and thus was able to hold all of the pieces together, like a lightsabre under construction before I finally got it to work as I wanted. I cut away the wiring for the useless wheat seed bulbs that came with the unit and replaced it all with the wiring for the LEDs. I also took a razor saw to the horribly printed windscreen of the beast and cut away this awful looking piece of plastic. Using a pin vice, I was able to drill about twenty tiny, half millimetre holes in the cockpit control desk for the optical fibres I wanted to use. Again, the UV resin and curing lamp came to my rescue. I have in the past tried to secure the optical fibres with super glue, hot glue and plastic glue and all of these attempts have been less that successful. UV resin however is optically clear, easy to apply and cures in less than ten minutes with no damage to the fibres. I was able to bunch the fibres and then use resin again to attach LEDs to the other end of the braid. Optical fibres are great and being flexible are easy to use because the light travels along the inside through internal reflection, allowing the light source to be some distance away from the output end, without issue. So bending the woven fibres around inside the head, I was able to hide the LEDs in the base, away from the cockpit. I then lit the cockpit interior with a menacing red light to give the newly fitted windscreen the appropriate evil red glow, just like in the movies.

The wiring was a little more complicated because there is already quite a large wiring loom fitted as standard to the AT-AT and when it arrived with me, something was very wrong with the sound module and failed to work, even when new batteries were fitted. The only option I had was to open the module up and see if I could find the cause of the failure. Removing it from the superstructure of the walker was a royal pain in the arse and I was quickly left with a pile of parts, held together with the long strands of wire that had been fed through small access holes in the plastic parts. Without wanting to rip through it all, my testing had to be done with the parts in place, which was annoyingly awkward at times as bit fell from my work top or got caught around the cat who had wandered past. However, I quickly found the source of the problem, several cracked joints and a fault in the battery box. Cutting away the wiring felt like a bad move, but what choice did I have? It was already broken, if I failed to fix it, nothing was lost. The fault with the battery box however is still present and when changing batteries, the lid must not be screwed forcefully into place because it will damage the box and break the connection to the power lead. I suspect that somewhere in the past, the battery box screw was over tightened and damaged the housing. However, while I had it apart, I also took my razor saw to the housing of the battery box and fitted a hidden switch, which cannot be seen, even with the hold door open. If you did not know it was there, you would never know about the extra cockpit functions I added. Putting the sound module back together, I accidentally pressed one of the activation buttons and was presented with the noise of the walker slowly stepping on Luke’s speeder, from Episode Five, The Empire Strikes Back. The other buttons also worked, as did the chin cannons and the sound module sounded great, if rather loud.

Final assembly and paint was the bit I was looking forwards to. Painting something to look factory fresh and clean is all well and good, but everything in the Star Wars universe is grotty. Ships have oil stains, dirty marks and carbon scoring from blaster fire. The smooth grey paint of the AT-AT just looked too fresh and so I raided the paint drawer for the box of texture paints that live at the back. Texture paint is a new thing to me, but having used it for this, I will undoubtedly use it again, despite my having got it almost everywhere including on my lap top screen! The feet of the walker are now covered in mud and sand, all of which came from the box of texture paints. Weathering is most exciting part of any build and for this one, I wanted it to look abused and filthy. I splattered the chassis with crusty dirt, oil stains, rust stains and filth from wading through water. I used roughly six colour washes and stains to give the effect and what I was left with looked OK, but it also still had that shine of fresh paint. It is hard to explain, but freshly applied texture paint is just too clean and dries with a slight sparkle. What kind of filth shines in the sun, I ask you? The wrong kind…

I used a flat matt varnish from Army Painter to finish the model and then left it to dry for four days before I touched it again. The effect is fabulous and I am now very happy with the result.

There is just one problem. The model is roughly sixty centimetres long, twenty centimetres wide and fifty centimetres tall and thus is too big for my office. The obvious answer is that the AT-AT needs to go, but where? This is where you come in. If you would like a one off, Jayney Magicked, Hasbro Imperial Walker, I am prepared to sell the great beast, although I might just keep the little Scout Trooper, because he’s cute and I may have other plans for him…

Seriously though, the Walker is now for sale. I am aware that having put over thirty hours into the restoration and rebuild, I am never going to get that time back, but this is not the reason for doing what I do. As a disabled person who has lost her hobbies and her career, I have little else to fill my free time. However, the paint and parts used are not cheap and if I can cover the cost of them, that would be helpful. If you are interested, do please make me an offer and I can deliver it locally (around Weston Super Mud) or mail it anywhere else in the world. With all of painting and modifications, this Walker is now more of a display piece than a playable toy, so it is unsuitable for a youngster to fill with their figures and take it into battle in the sandpit in the garden. However, with care, the older child in us all can have a bit of fun with it. I remain unconvinced by the Hasbro figure scale, given that according to the Star Wars Vehicle manual I have read (thanks to Carol’s Mom for that one, last Christmas) the cockpit should house three or more people. The cargo and crew deck in the main body should be two levels, with storage for two speeder bikes, however, if you put a three and half inch figure in there, you will be lucky to get two in the head and three more in the body, with no room for even a single speeder. I imagine that if the Walker were in true three and half inch scale, it would be close to four feet in height and weight more than is safe to risk falling onto a child playing with it!

As always, I am indebted to those who helped me with this project. Carol has made a fabulous video of the finished model and taken some lovely photos of it too.

My close friend Ginny supplied the air brush that I have been abusing with all sorts of paints and of course there is Neil who supplied the AT-AT. Finally, thank you to everyone on Farcebook who encouraged me to undertake this restoration project. I hope that you approve of my work… If not, tough titties, I have done it now!

August 26th 2023

Chieftain tanks are my happy place

I grew up in Germany in the 1980s, a time of the cold war, Chernobyl and the Chieftain tank. Sadly, only one of these things has turned into something fun to play with at the weekend.

I have loved the Chieftain tank since childhood and had more than one chance to crawl across one, while still an overly excited pre-teen, visiting the Tank Museum in Bovington. Obviously, as soon as I hit my teenage years, I immediately stopped loving something as loud, obnoxious and heavy as a tank and instead got into music, namely Heavy Metal music.

Along with my love of Heavy Metal music, came my delight in the peace movement and even now aged horribly close to fifty, I am still involved in the peace movement, albeit, while wishing that I had the disposable income and large area of unused farmland upon which I could dabble in my interest in Chieftain tanks.

As we all know, the venerable old Chieftain had something of an Achilles heel out back, in the form the Leyland L60 engine. However, when it did work, the nineteen litre, opposing piston, two stroke multi-fuel engine had a glorious howl to it, despite being chronically underpowered for the vehicle it was propelling. Luckily the pack was easy to pull out and replace while in the field… Every cloud etc.

You can now buy your own Chieftain tank, providing that you have £60K to play with. However you also need a thousand pounds to fill the tank, every time you want to go for a drive of more than half a mile. If you want to know more about this kind of thing, why not go and have a look at the Mr Hewes YouTube channel. If you love tanks, you will not be disappointed.

Now of late, I have of course got into my art in a big way and when I say a big way, I now have a room in the house entirely dedicated to my making art. I have some of my art displayed in our home and the wife even likes some of it! However, I have wanted to make a Chieftain Tank Diorama for a while now and always put it off because of the cost of a decent sized set. Now obviously, the kindly folk at Google would never listen in to my conversations through their monitoring devices in my phones and computers, so it was by pure chance that they displayed to me one day, a whole host of cheap model tanks… It would have been rude to ignore it, so I snapped up a Tamiya 1/35 scale model set for a penny short of £17. The bastard Post Office added their own stab in the back for delivery and four days later, it arrived in my disgustingly sweaty paws. Thus, the plan came together and I got my magic bucket out of the shed. I cut the wood for a base and dropped it in the bucket. I also slapped in some ripped up newspaper and a bottle of glue, then tickled the lot with a paintbrush and then dropped in the bits of tank. I put the lid on the bucket, gave it a hearty shake as I said the magic words (do you really think that I am going to tell you my magic words?) and what do you know? A load of spilled paint, sticky glue, broken plastic and ripped up newspaper fell out of the bucket!

So with a new model set delivered to my desk and the magic bucket on toilet cleaning duty, I set about doing it properly. The base was a piece of off cut chipboard donated by a friend. The newspaper came from my Mother in law, while Wifypoozles supplied the PVA glue. Knowing the dimensions of the tank, I was able to map out the diorama and then start designing the landscape. I knew that I wanted a rocky bank and a drainage ditch either side of the vehicle, with a fence and some grass. Using a cardboard tube and flower arranging foam, I quickly modelled the bank and then using a drill and a Dremel I cut the ditch into the base board.

The base board was then coated with newspaper and a mix of paint and PVA, sealing the tube and foam into place. I also placed a couple of pretty stones and a larger rock into place to give me a rocky bank with an exposed rock face.

With the base dry, it was time to add the soil and substrate, for which I used a mix of builders sand, gravel and pebbles, mixed with PVA. It took a couple of days to dry, but when it did, it was as hard as rock. Using my airbrush, I gave it a quick coat of burnt umber paint, which just deepened the already very brown of the sand and gravel. I used some lichen that had fallen from one of our trees to simulate bushes and shrubs and used some sheet grass from a model railway to make the grassy tufts I wanted at the edge of my gravel road.

I used cocktail sticks and super glue to knock up a fence and then found the measurements for a stile and added one of them too. A quick on line check sourced an army range sign warning about the dangers of picking up used ordnance.

With the base done, I turned to the model tank and began the construction with painting and building of twelve road wheels, two front guide wheels, two rear sprockets and six return rollers. Five hours later, each wheel was assembled, painted and ready for fitting to the bogies. By the end of day one on the tank build, I had assembled the lower hull, with tracks.

Day two saw me make a start on the upper section of the tank, also known as the Glacis Plate and engine deck. This took barely more than an hour and the boxes looked great assembled and fitted. Moving onto the turret was where things got complicated as several tiny parts needed to be located and fitted. The crew doors had to be functional, so that if I decided to use them, I could add the figures for a heads out driving of the vehicle. I also had to fit the barrel lock, which again had to be functional to allow the main gun to be locked into the rearward position. With all of these parts functional, it was fun to add the first coats of paint, a dark green acrylic ink designed for use with an air brush. With the dark green base coat of the plastic, it needed only thin coverage to give the wanted effect, however as the paint dried, it took on the usual glossy finish, totally unsuitable for NATO camouflage. Luckily, when I bought the model set, I also purchased a bottle of clear mat varnish.

Some parts of the set were extremely well made and thus it went together beautifully, not needing anything more than a light sanding to remove moulding marks. Sat on the shelf behind me in my room was two jars of experimental spru-goo and not once did I need it. However some parts were quite poorly made. Actually, that is unfair. The plastic tow cables were brittle and did not lay like real steel cable, so I raided the mountain bike spares and pulled out a stainless steel brake cable, which I unwound to find the wire core. At point eight of a millimetre, this was the exact size to replace the plastic tow cables. However the eyelets that connect the cable to the tank were another story. Using some of the spru-goo, I attempted to model some eyelets. However at the time of writing, the spru-goo has not yet reached full hardness. So with a heavy heart, I cut the eyelets off of the plastic tow cable and with a micro-drill, made a 0.5mm hole and then enlarged it to just under one millimetre. This was just big enough for take a tight fitting steel cable and thus the tow cables were made.

The final pieces to be assembled were the crew and in the instruction guide, all three of the crew are to be painted as white European men. This grated against my more egalitarian heart and so when I started to paint the figures, I painted the tank Commander with a skin tone that matched a photograph of Grand Tour level cyclist, Biniam Girmay, the first Black African cyclist to win a stage in a grand tour. The young man is an extremely talented professional cyclist, who was unfortunately taken out of the 2022 Gyro d'Italia after winning a stage, when the cork from a podium celebration bottle hit him in the eye.

With my crew painted, I fitted them and then decided that they needed a back story, so here it is. The Driver is a Gay man, out and proud. The Gunner is a Trans Man, brave and strong and then the Commander is a young Black man. The sad truth is that during the years of service for this vehicle, it is extremely unlikely that such people would ever get into the army, let alone command of a main battle tank.

Thus my project came to an end, with a large stone holding the tank hull down to the base board as I waited for the glue to dry. So while I wait for the glues, paints and resins to harden, I must find another project to distract me from the unending pain I suffer every day. I know, I will design and scratch build from paper stock an entire model of my motorbike! I am a fucking idiot.

July 21st 2023

Mountains… revisited

As a former climber, mountaineer and maniac for mountain sports, it was a joy to come back to the mountains once again, this time in a completely new way.

My dedication to mountain sports was prematurely stopped by illness and disability and so I sort of came to the conclusion that I would never see the mountains again. However, a strange series of events, the love of my friends and family and a determination to give it a shot, led to my return to the Snowdonia mountain range after a gap of twenty years. Obviously this came with a cost and that was in pain and suffering. My body has taken the hit surprisingly well, with only one minor meltdown and a complete failure to comply with my demands. However, this is why we have pain killers and comfortable beds.

The trip started with strapping my faithful friend, Sylvie my Suzuki SV650 to a trailer on the back of my car.


With some glorious company in the form my wife, her daughter and her daughter’s girlfriend, we set off on an adventure. Well once all of the annoying mechanical problems had been fixed! We won’t go into them here, but let us just say that my patience has been truly tested.

Our adventure took us to North Wales, a place that I loved with a lot of climbing passion back in my twenties and thirties. This year I turn fifty and to be honest I am not sure how I feel about this. I am clearly no spring chicken, but I resent the idea that I am old, I still have toys, albeit big shiny silver ones and I am still very silly with my toys.

Carol rode from our home in Somerset to Wales on her trusty Kawasaki ZRX1100, a true beautiful beast of a bike and Alice rode her Kawasaki GTR1400, a machine that is a mix of sports bike and comfy sofa. The ride up was fun, but the wind on the bridge across the Severn was terrifying. The poor little car felt like it was going to be thrown off at any time.

We arrived safely at a beautiful little farm and set up base camp in a converted grain store. The roof was hilariously low and sloping, but inside it had a basic luxury that was joyous. We unloaded Sylvie and prepared for the week ahead. Our first ride out was a gentle local ride, taking in my old play ground of Tremadog. I spent many happy (and some terrifying) moments on the climbs at Tremadog and enjoyed camping in the field behind Eric’s Café. To my utter horror Eric’s has gone, replaced by some modern, electronic self service, anti-climber hipster shit hole. With security cameras, huge warning signs and strict private property notices, it has become a hugely unwelcoming place and with a heavy heart we quickly left.

The following day was the big ride out, the trip to Snowdon itself. More correctly known as Yr Wyddfa, the mountain is the second highest in the UK, being around 1030 metres above sea level. I have spent many happy hours playing in this region, climbing some of the classic lines and basically living in the moment. To return on my motorbike with my beautiful family wiped away those frivolous memories and gave me new, happier and more peaceful ones.

The ride was glorious, the roads were hard work, but I loved every second of it, even when I got beyond exhausted and moved into migraine territory. The last ten miles was the hardest, most demanding motorcycle riding I have ever done due to how poorly I was feeling and there were moments when I simply had to grit my teeth and hope for the best as I twisted my throttle and went for an over take. Once back at the house, I boiled over into a grotty, shivering, crying mess and after swallowing incredibly strong painkillers, retired to bed.

I have no regrets, the riding was amazing, even though it caused me a lot of pain. Sylvie was faultless and my little family were beautiful. So despite the pain, I could not be happier. I no longer have this chasm of grief in my heart for the mountains. Instead, I have softer, kinder and happier memories of being truly at peace with myself in an environment that I truly love.





All photo’s have been provided by my partner Carol, for which I am very grateful. A feature length Youtube video will no doubt follow soon given that both Carol and Alice are film makers of some talent. Until then, just know this. No matter what happens from now, in this moment, I am truly happy.

July 6th 2023

Goth Dad and Vision Video Live in Bristol

With the global state of LGBTQ+ rights being rather shite at the moment, it is occasionally nice to come across something that affirms the right for rainbow people to simply exist and I found one of these things recently and was then rather taken with the character of Goth Dad.

Dusty Gannon created the character for Tictok and Instagram with the intent to share a message of kindness and support to young Goth kids and to be honest, us older Goth kids too. The words of kindness he shared were beautiful and I started to look for more of his kindness and wisdom in the short films and quickly discovered that Goth Dad was the singer of the American Goth band Vision Video.

For many years it has been easier to say to folks who meet me for the first time that I am a Goth, rather than trying to explain the intricacies of Heavy Metal culture. After all my first love is extreme metal, mainly in the form of Black Metal from bands such as Emperor, Enslaved and Akercocke. Already I can see that some of you want to discuss the differences between Black Metal Art, Viking Black Metal and Blackened Death Metal, but lets just make it easy and stick it all under the easily pigeonholed title of “Fokkin Goffic!” to quote the abusive thugs who enjoyed shouting at me as I wandered the dark streets of Plymouth in the late 1990s, before they swapped to “Fokkin Tranny!” Ahh, the vigorous repartee of the average urban 1990s thug, draped in his Burberry tracksuit while smoking Happy Shopper fags!

So back to my original point, I will identify as Gothic when asked, because I tend to wear a lot of black, often with funny make up and appear somehow Vampiric. The fact is though that I do enjoy the occasional Goth band, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Fields of the Nephilim, The Sisters of Mercy and The Cure. Pictures of You, by The Cure is one of the most beautiful songs ever written and everything ever sung by Siouxsie Sioux is pure magic. However Fields of the Nephilim have that dark post apocalyptic feel that makes me want to curl up and die in blissful soundscapes, with the track ‘Trees come down’ being my particular favourite. So when I found Vision Video, a fairly minor pop Goth band from America, I was happy to give them a listen. What I heard combined the wisdom of Goth Dad with the sadness of American societal despair at school shootings, huge economic inequality, almost constant war and a lack of health care into something beautiful. Despite the poppy sounding music, the themes have a serious message and strong heart, especially when the content of the song drops into the personal experiences of the singer’s military service in Afghanistan.

I bought the first album, 'Inked in Red’ almost instantly and played it nearly constantly. It reminded of the the very best parts of The Cure, mixed with the best parts of Siouxsie and with hints of Joy Division thrown in too. It remains a beautiful little record, with several high lights among the tracks. However the track Kandahar mixes beauty with a deep rage over the horror of the war in Afghanistan and the slaughter of those caught between the combatants. Let us not hide from the truth here, history will judge this era harshly, for the rampant capitalism that funded wars for oil in the Middle East, which then resulted in the deaths of many innocents. Meanwhile there was significant Governmental funding of groups such the Taliban who were set up and trained by the CIA in their early days, to fight against Soviet interests in the region. After twenty years of war, the West pulled out Afghanistan, leaving it to the clutches of the fundamentalist Islamic Government, who promptly took away the rights of women and girls before starting to complain that running a country was a lot harder and far more work than they had expected!

This leaves the world now as a fucked up mess and let us not hide from the main cause of this as the super rich companies still fight for the right to mine coal, while burning mega tonnes of what they already have dug up and filling the atmosphere with filth. Meanwhile, you are being chastised for not putting out your plastic and glass recycling in separate boxes (I read Environmental Science for my degree and it was heart breaking learning that with enough time the Earth will rebalance just fine, it’s just unfortunate that our species probably won’t make it!).

Vision Video as a band is not just about Goth Dad. Keyboard player Emily Fredock has a powerful voice as well as being a great musician and when she sings, you can hear her anger coming out too, despite the gentle pop sounds of the music. Combining with Dusty on vocals and guitar, Dan Geller on bass and Jason Fusco on drums, they make some truly joyous sounding music, but with those dark edges that Gothic music demands. None of it is offensive despite the sad imagery each song creates and it is fairly clear that these people will not be burning down any churches, murdering rival musicians in fights over who is the most evil or burying their stage clothes so they can feel the pull of the grave when they perform… All infamous tropes Black Metal has been guilty of in the past. The first. However, as a small Goth band in America, I never thought that I would get to see them… and then came the announcement, that they were to be support for the March Violets on a limited EU and UK tour.

I purchased my tickets that afternoon, despite knowing next to nothing about the March Violets, for the show on a ship in Bristol docks, The Thekla. Having seen some very good shows on the Thekla, I knew that that it would be intimate, with beautiful sound and a small crowd. I purchased two tickets, one for me and one for my friend Jan, my companion for the slightly more odd gigs, such as when we went to see the Kunts in Bristol, or when we went to see Richard Herring live in Wells, or when we went to see Richard Herring interview Kunt in London! I had played 'Inked in Red’ to Jan and she quickly grew to love it. So she was quite excited to be going to see Vision Video.

A few days before the gig, we were told that Vision Video would be on early and it was advisable for us to get there in plenty of time for the show or risk missing them. However, the weekend before the show, Jan and I found ourselves broken down in Keynsham where we had gone to play with Lego on a steam train. The alternator in my car had failed and I had driven into the car park of Bitten Steam Railway with no power steering, nor any ABS brake assist, air conditioning, music or dashboard lights. It was thanks to a fairly new battery that we got there at all, but the journey back home again on the back of an RAC van, driven by Rob the kindest mechanic I have ever met. Luckily for me, my darling wifey Carol was on the case before I even got home and she quickly ordered replacement parts and also said that a new serpentine belt would be a good idea and promptly ordered one of those too. By Tuesday my car was back in good health and ready for our trip to Bristol on Wednesday evening. When we arrived at the venue, forty minutes before the doors (hatches?) on The Thekla opened, we sat in glorious sunshine listening to my favourite punk band, Alice Donut. As soon as the (as it turned out) roller shutters opened on the ship, we queued up and were inside within five minutes, only to come face to face with a poster of band times. Somewhere along the way, we had been viciously lied to! Vision Video were due on about twenty minutes later than we anticipated…

Jan and I headed inside the ship and quickly discovered that the floors were remarkably uneven. I had not noticed this before, but on this occasion I really struggled with the venue and found it difficult to keep a steady footing. I wobbled about like Bambi on ice and we eventually found our way down into the stage area (hold?) of the ship. Away from the heat of the day, it was deliciously cool and the DJ was playing some suitably gentle Goth themed music, some of which I recognised but most of which I did not. Like I say, I am mainly a metal head, I just look like a goth to the untrained eye. The first act on stage was electronic musician Kristeen Young and she reminded me of a mix of Diamanda Galas and Kate Bush, with powerful grinding rock backing and her voice that was capable of violent roars and shrill squeals. It was impressive, she was clearly hugely talented and very good at her art, but I did not gel with it and lamented that with her incredible vocal talents, she desperately needed to front a powerful Black Metal band, rather than playing a keyboard based rock music. However, I was probably alone in this thought because she had a lot of fans among the crowd who surged in to watch her perform.

I took the time to grab a t-shirt from the Vision Video merch stand and caused a laugh from the softly spoken American woman behind the desk when I asked for a size suitable for a fat bitch like me. Jan just shook her head knowing that I had said something objectionable, without actually hearing my words.

Finally Vision Video took to the stage and the four piece are just as beautiful on stage as they are on you tube or album. It was fairly clear that they were playing to a crowd who were on their side and I was not alone in singing along to some of the tracks from 'Inked in Red’, although I did not hear much if any from the second album 'Haunted Hours’.

The songs were beautifully performed, both Dusty and Emily sang with their usual power, despite having spent several weeks on tour in both Europe and back home in America.

But all too quickly it came to the last two songs and that was when we got to see the heartfelt politics of the band as Dusty gave us a spoken word introduction that laid out all that is wrong in modern American society. He talked about wealth inequality, gun violence, health care provision, warfare and human rights and he did so with the undisguised disgust of someone who has seen the horrors of fighting a war. It was utterly heart breaking and yet also uplifting because surrounded by others of the same opinion, it gave all of us hope that by standing together we could change some of these awful things. With the speech over, they launched into 'Organised Murder’ and it felt justified to be dancing to such angry and heartfelt words. With the final song done, they walked off stage to the whooping, yelling and applause of a very happy crowd, despite the sadly short play time. This is not to denigrate their performance time which was just over thirty five minutes. The truth was that I could have listened to them play each album twice and then the special new tracks from the as yet untitled new album. It was a very different experience for me, for a start the front of the stage did not turn into a violent maelstrom of a mosh pit. The dance floor was a remarkably gentle place, while still being energetic and fun.

With the band finished, Jan and I retreated to the seating area and then the toilets and had a chat. We had hoped to get to say hello to the band, which has happened a couple of times on the merch stand when I have seen bands on the Thekla, but sadly this was not to be. We chatted and I complained about the low lampshade that I had hit my head on when we had sat down earlier. The March Violets took to the stage and when I had recovered enough energy, Jan and I descended the stairs to check them out. The March Violets have been touring and producing albums for over forty years, but each song was new to me and to be honest it was not really my thing. It was very clearly being enjoyed by the crowd, but for me, it lacked the brutality of metal or the heart of Vision Video. It was perfectly good, electronic, new wave music from the eighties and I was a child for the eighties and did not turn eighteen until 1991. I had also not been exposed to a lot of music during my childhood, which looking back saddens me now because music is such a huge part of my life these days. However we did not have MP3 players with the sort of data compression needed to carry a whole album collection in my pocket when I was kid. Modern technology utterly spoils us these days, given how easy it is to access my music collection, take photos of bands and browse the internet from the small computer in my pocket that also allows me to call out for fried chicken whenever the whim takes me (thanks Ginny, for convincing me that smart phones were great. I never leave the house without it now!).

Feeling slightly sad that we had missed the chance to say hello to the band, while also feeling unsteady on my feet and remarkably energised at having seen the band, we decided to leave slightly early, meaning getting home at better time and not getting caught by the rush at the end. Slowly and unsteadily I climbed the stairs, with Jan behind me worried that I was going to fall and we reached the top, turned the corner and almost barged into Goth Dad himself, Dusty!

Dusty was everything you hope that a rock star will be. He was generous with his time, he was happy to sign albums and even pose for photos with fans. But the best of all, the politics and the heart are all real for him. The standing up for and caring about LGBTQ+ young people is real. The caring about the state of the world and his wisdom are all real. I wish that I could remember his exact words, sadly I was too star struck to take it all in, but it went something like this. “Those Motherfuckers in power are all old and they are fighting as they die out. Eventually they will be gone and the world will get better as the young people see them for what they were.” I could have cried. It was at that moment that Emily strode along the deck and said hello. We had obviously kidnapped Dusty and she had come to find him, the poor lad was probably on his way to the loo when we nearly crashed into him. But they both stood with us for photos, signed albums and Emily even talked to Jan about cats. These two people, gave me hope. Fuck, I feel old saying that. Now when Jan and I write about faerie warriors in our Winscombe books, it is just possible that we had unknowingly based one or two of them on Dusty and Emily.

I have said it before when I had the pleasure of spending some time teaching art to my friend’s daughter, the insight of the youth is what is going to save our world and it will be safer in their hands than it ever was in ours. They will take the goodness from us and the vileness of our hate will fade away, acceptance and kindness will rise, maybe even the religion will fade away too? The world will be 'woke’ and when you look at what woke means, a woke society will be a good society where minorities are protected, where institutional racism is dismantled and egalitarianism takes over. Fuck me, I am a fucking dreamer. At my darkest moments, all I can see is a foul dystopian end to humanity as global warming destroys the human safe climate and brings an end to the Anthropocene. As I think of this, I think of my nieces, of my friend’s children, of my own children and grandchild and ache for a better world for them and for all young people. I want the youth of the future to feel safe to be true to themselves, to be accepted for being a rainbow person. I want the distinction of being LGBTQ+ to be minor to how we live our lives, just like eye colour is or how tall we are. Maybe, in his own small way, Goth Dad and the band Vision Video can add to that better future?

June 8th 2023

So who is Jayne Hecate?

Jayne Hecate is a collective of evil thoughts 

coalesced into one very wicked person!

Jayne Hecate just happens to be a published author, who lives in the nice bit of the South West of England,where the sea is brown and the beach is mainly mud. 

She is a keen movie buff, loves a good book and will eat pizza for every meal if allowed. If that were not enough, Jayne also spends far too much time playing Scrabble and eating cakes cooked by her wife. Oh yeah, Jayne is an advocate of gay rights.

Jayne has few hobbies, most recently she discovered that she enjoys making replica props. When there is nothing else to do, she will sit at her desk and build Lego trucks until her fingers give out. Yet, when her ancient rotten bones allow, she likes to ride her motorbike as fast as possible, for as long as possible. She uses many of these influences in her writing and bases many of her stories on the experiences that she has had. 

 

Jayne on her Suzuki SV650
When not writing, Jayne is an advocate of human rights for all, with ideals that state that all people should have access to clean drinking water and a safe roof over their heads. Jayne is a proponent of the ideas of anti-war and anti-fascism, but then it is hard not to be when you consider all people to be equal and worthy of respect. Jayne believes that mental health is just as important as physical health and has a great deal of respect for those individuals who work in mental health. Having been a user of these services, Jayne is thankful every day for the strength and courage given to her by these medical professionals. Due to this belief Jayne is a strong advocate of the British NHS and strongly believes that it needs saving from the greedy eyes of the capitalist Governments who want to place it in private hands. 
Jayne holds an Honours degree in Environmental Science, is a qualified teacher of Outdoor Education and likes to read almost as much as she likes to write. Although since discovering the Kindle, she has rarely been seen above a duvet with out one clutched in her bony arthritic hands. Often known to be self critical to the point of combustion, she is peculiar in more ways than can be listed on a single website and is utterly devoted to her partner and her cat. 

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