I was recently interviewed by Daniel Bautz of the Grand Dark Conspiracy (‘Exploring the Unexplained, the Unseen, the Unknown’) on WQTT out of Ohio, the matter in hand being that pesky issue of the zombie apocalypse.
Specifically I was talking about Zombies from History, and how when the apocalypse does arrive, rather than wait
for that dull salesman from No.27 to eat you, why not step and seek and destroy some of history’s big guns?
The talk ranged wide and indeed far, taking in the likelihood of the author receiving abusive tweets from disgruntled readers during the apocalypse (‘Dude! Henry VIII wasn’t where you’d said he would be!’) to the exploding corpse
of William the Conqueror. We also covered records of belief in the walking dead from archaeological evidence and medieval chronicles. All in all, zombie fun central.
You can still listen to the podcast here. My thanks to Sunny Lambert and Daniel Bautz of the Grand Dark
Conspiracy.
That fine institution The Spooky Isles has one of my witterings up today, the subject being the extraordinary (and
unique) Maggie Wall witchcraft monument in Dunning, Perthshire Scotland. Appropriately, it’s part of their Spooky Scotland week.
The piece is based on my book Maggie Wall – The Witch Who Never Was and the title itself may give you a clue
about my conclusions regarding this amazing site, the only historical monument to a named witch in the country.
You can check out the piece here, and while you’re there scope out some of the other goodies on the site. My
thanks to MJ Steel Collins.
Like many ex-pats living in France, I am often amazed at the inattentive and selfish driving seen on the roads on a daily basis. I’ve now focused my road rage into a snarky article for the English-language publication
The Local in France. My own version of Le Highway Code for the French – everything from how to run a
wheelchair user off the road to a philosophical digression on the invisibility of zebra crossings, complete with a
Napoleonic subtext – can be found here.
Thanks to Ben McPartland of The Local.
Le Canard Gascon is a monthly magazine that covers food, culture, business, politics, history and events in this
part of southwest France (Gascony). Edition 54, January-February 2014, has a full page feature on me and my
work, under the title of ‘British Zombies’.
Described as ‘Le spécialiste de l’étrange’ (specialist in the strange) who writes about the paranormal, witchcraft,
ghosts and zombies, I am credited with including in my work a ‘certain British humour’ that ‘our neighbours across the Channel practice with such excellence.’ Merci. The article also claims that the Holder household is ‘a veritable
chaos of books’. Oh, such lies – the other day I managed to find the sofa without having to move more than fifty
volumes. Pfff!
You can read the article online (in French, of course) here. My thanks to Monsieur Jean-Louis le Breton, leading
light of Le Canard Gascon.