How to Be a Human - front cover

 


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The Great Dragon Audition

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For several years now, I have wondered about getting a Nativity scene.  There are all sorts of versions around, from a range of sizes and styles available in cathedral gift shops to a tiny Mexican folk art version that I once saw in a gift shop.  Books on handicrafts offer patterns to make your very own woollen ‘Knitivity’. When I’ve raised the subject with PDB11 , his answer has always been: ‘What I’d really like to have is a dragon Nativity.’   It’s not that he thinks that Jesus was a dragon, even in a fantasy universe , but just that, as a Christian who likes fantasy fiction involving dragons, he would like to combine the two ideas. A web search for ‘dragon Nativity’ brought up three main results.   Firstly, there are a number   of essays  arguing that you should include a dragon in Nativity scenes, in reference to the allegorical poem in Revelation 15 picturing Satan as a dragon attempting to eat Jesus. I did once have a go at making a Christmas ...
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Call Me Temple Cloud

Somerset has wonderfully evocative place names. You could people a fantasy novel with them.   Probably Rodney Stoke is an ordinary, rather nerdy man until he stumbles into a parallel universe, where he is befriended by the mysterious Ben Noel Hill and his huge, hairy friends Yarley and Chew Magna.   There are exotic monsters, such as Vobsters and Mendips. I think this world would have several religious traditions.   There is the established church in which the sinister Bishop Sutton is garnering power.   The Bacchanalian, sometimes violent rites of the Goat Church are presided over by bearded, horned priests, irreverently known as the Beardly Batch.   But the most mystical form of devotion is found in the way of the Temple Cloud. In real life, the village of Temple Cloud, in north-east Somerset, was probably named Cloud after someone called Cloda, and later ‘Temple Cloud’ after the Knights Templar who held the manor of Cloud in the 13 th century.  ...
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