Yesterday, got an email from a loony. A genuine one – he directed me to his web page, which set out all the reasons why he believed himself to be telepathic, a prophet, persecuted by MI5 and the police, guided by angels – and was possibly also a manifestation of Christ.
I didn’t reply.
This morning, on a pagan forum, I saw a post from somebody, asking for information about an obscure deity. I googled and discovered it was one of Satan’s minions, named as such in some ancient list of Christian demonology. I posted as much. The poster quickly replied, to the effect: “I know all that, I’ve read the grimoire, the illustration in it looked exactly like the creature that appeared to me when I was lying paralyzed in bed a few years ago. I’m trying to find out what it wants me for.” (I’m paraphrasing her words, so as to preserve her anonymity – Google’s bots are everywhere) her Livejournal link was in her sig, so I went and had a look – she was being treated for bi-polar disease.
Uh-huhhh… I clicked off the thread and mentally backed away.
I seem to attract these people – I used to get regular emails from somebody convinced she was Maid Marion in a previous lifetime and, before email, got letters from people who raved about Atlantis and Arachne and the Illuminati conspiracy.

Funny – B never seems to encounter these people. There again, he always gets gets bitten half to death in the midge season, whereas the little biters never go near me. Is there a correlation?

Thought I’d have a bit of a relax this morning – go off to the village to get my newspaper, than have breakfast and read said newspaper at leisure.
But of course, it hasn’t worked out that way. While I was in the village, I remembered that I hadn’t done any work on the Astrological Association events diary page last month – and that I should have uploaded the new page by this morning. So, it was back to the computer for a couple of hours, digging up and adding group meetings and conferences, and trying to add more to the 2006 Diary.
And correcting mistakes – I’d put in at least a couple of astrology group meetings in the wrong month. Argh. This is the weekend of the humungous annual AA Conference, full of local group organisers who are likely to be checking the Diary page for their events.
But I’ve uploaded the corrected and extended (to April 2006) page – luckily, nobody seemed to have noticed the mistakes, even though they were up there on the website for over a month. Tomorrow, I’ll do some more work on the page, but for now, I deserve a break!

If you’re viewing this in Internet Explorer, I’m still having problems with IE’s blasted CSS positioning bugs. Which is why it’s looking rather odd to you.
I’ll get it sorted eventually. But in the meantime, switch to Firefox and see the way it’s supposed to look!

The picture in the head isn’t mine. It’s a stock image of some Scottish hills that I’ve put through Photoshop – colour-saturation, texturing, filters, lighting effects, cropping, stretching. It’s not the view that I’ve got from here – we’re amongst the hills, but not that high up – but I’ve a friend living about five miles away who does have pretty much that view from her house. Every visit to her place inspires intense envy in me – I want her house! It’s gloriously isolated, with the last half-mile to it just a rutted track through the fields.
Isolation, though, has its price; it’s almost impossible for her to get anything delivered to the house, since only cars and small vans can get along that final stretch – she has an arrangement with the occupant of the nearest house to drop off parcels there, but I don’t know how she gets her wood and coal delivered. It’s a good three miles to the nearest shop, surgery, bus-route and post office; amazingly, she doesn’t have a car.
But I’d still like to live there all the same. Or at least have her view.

Son won’t be moving into his new place until the week after next. He couldn’t get the deposit together in time; his old workplace messed him around and has only now got around to paying him the month’s salary they owe him, and he’s still waiting for his JSA money to come through. His money will finally be through next week so that he will be able to pay the deposit and first month’s rent that’s required, but now the letting agent has gone off on a fortnight’s holiday and there is apparently nobody in the office who can do her job while she’s away!
But he’s a lot happier now – and he’s even stepped up his job-hunting.

Decided on a new blog title.
It’s taken from the directions that we give to visitors so that they can find us: “Turn left at the bridge, straight through the village, we’re half a mile on the left.”

Now that it’s got a new look, I think this blog needs a new title as well. Oh, Bloggitt! was a neat enough little joke a year ago when I thought it up, but I’m now getting bored with it. Besides, there’s another blog out there called Bloggitt. It’s in Italian so I’ve no idea what it’s about, but I want my blog title to be unique anyway.
The new title has to have some sense of locality, I feel, without being too place-specific. I’d thought up a couple of suitable names this morning, but Google’s Blogsearch tells me View From The Hills is already taken by a US blog; and Southwest by North (from being in SW Scotland), is too close to a Yorkshire blog named North by South West.
I’ve one or two other ideas – I’ll take a walk down to the village and let things stew.

…is boring.
I’m laying out the calender pages of the Elfin Diary for 2007 – all the dates, all the important events, all the daily astrological info, all the daily Sun and Moon times….. Urrrgghhhh…..
I’m also doing the 2006 events page for the Oakleaf Circle site. It’s still all-HTML and I now remember why I need a CMS for it.
Errrrkkk…. need diversion….. want to read interesting sites….. mmmmm….. surfing……

For many pagan women like myself, the accepted story of the Jewish Goddess Lilith is one that we like to tell again and again. Adam’s first wife, she was cast out of Eden for refusing to be subordinate to him; in the wilderness, she mated with demons and had many children; God sent His angels to murder her children; Lilith then vowed she would extract vengance upon God and His creations for ever more by killing human babies. The ultimate Bitch-Goddess, the ultimate Betrayed Female, the ultimate Cast-off Wife, the ultimate Vengeful Mother, the ultimate Feminist Standing Alone Against the ultimate Patriarch- she ticks a lot of boxes.
As I said, she was a Jewish deity, one of the Goddesses that Judaism got rid of. And when Her story became well-known in the 1970s and 1980s, she became a heroine of the matriarchial movement, which pursued the idea that the earliest human tribes had been woman-centered, peaceful, intuitive, agrarian Goddess-worshippers in tune with Mother Earth; these societies had then been wiped out by an invasion of nasty, aggressive male-led patriarchal tribes, who had slaughtered the preistessess, destroyed the sacred groves, and forced women into child-bearing slavery.
(Personally, I always had my doubts about that idea – just where did that evil patriarchial tribe spring from? – and when I started reading up on history, archeaology and prehistory, my doubts were confirmed. The whole idea anyway reeked of that religious mythology which held that Humanity once resided in an innocent Edenic state, devoid of any knowledge of Evil – then something or other came along and spoiled everything. The dangerous corollory of that concept is that all that is needed to return Humanity to that blessed state is to get rid of something – gays, heretics, Jews, blacks, Americans, vivisection, whatever. It was the product of wishful thinking by 19thC feminists, Romantics and neopagans, and mistakes made by Victorian ethnologists and historians. Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality by Philip G. Davis goes into this very thoroughly.)
And now it seems that Lilith may not have been the ancient Jewish Goddess-turned-demon that we thought she was. I’ve just been pointed at this article: Looking For Lillith, which says Lilith, far from being ancient, was probably dreamed up by a 10thC Jewish satirist.

Ah well – that won’t stop the women pagans I know from naming their cats and their daughters after Her. And She was never one of my favourite Goddesses anyway. In fact, I don’t think I have one, unless it some mean-tempered, bent-back old Crone who lives alone and likes frightening the littlies. That’s more my type of Goddess.