Toad Hall Recall
I've become weirdly obsessed with Alan Garner's purchase of his house, Toad Hall. Garner is the celebrated author of The Owl Service , among many, many others. He's a very good writer and is still working at 91. He lives in Alderley Edge which is now the playground of footballers and soap actors - a Northern celebrity enclave, where the likes of me couldn't afford a flat white never mind a flat. Posh Spice used to live there. It's that sort of place, a glitzy Hollyoaks. But that wasn't always the case. In the past it was a simple rural village full of simple rural villagers: craftsmen, farmers, people being ducked in ponds, the terrified victims of a skimmington, full of tradition, ritual, legend. The full folk horror scenario, like everywhere was before rich people turned up and ruined it. Garner's family had lived in the area since the fourteenth century. Garner, born in 1934, was the first of his family to go to university, briefly at Oxford. He returne...
