The Mab Edited by Matt Brown and Eloise Williams, Illustrated by Max Low

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The Mabinogi sits at the edge of my cultural awareness, that these ancient Welsh tales exist I know, what they contain I don’t.

The Mab was a joyful introduction – each tales is told in both English and Welsh – so this is a slim volume to contain two tellings of each story.

It is enriched by Max Low’s illustrations, the full page illustration at the start of each tale sets the tone, these are witty and whimsical retellings – although I feel the Mabinogi’s heart was always witty and whimsical even if at times scholars have squeezed that out.

Each tale is a handful of pages, making them accessible.

I felt prompted to read 1907 ‘The Children’s Library’ edition of Tales From The Mabinogion which has sat on my bookshelf since coming off Gran’s – it uses as many (albeit smaller) pages to tale just one of the tales as The Mab needs to cover the whole ground. The language used is, I think, deliberately archaic – the use of Thy and Thou had fallen out of normal speech and is used here to suggest formality despite in reality being the familiar rather than the formal way to address another.

Queer as Folklore by Sacha Coward

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As ‘Queer’ people we are almost always denied a history – we are told our existence was vomited from some woke orifice in the last few years. Sacha Coward shows that the stories people have been telling forever have included stories about ‘queer’ people.

There is tension around the word queer – it is not a word that sits entirely comfortably with me but I find it useful and open ended so I am increasingly using it.

But I think the real point is that we can go beyond the current claiming of rainbow branded unicorns and claim the angry and the ugly – we don’t have to be pretty to be valid.

I seem to be in a moment when the myths are more interesting and more real than anything I am going to get scrolling the socials...

Edging the City, A Journey Round the Border of Cardiff by Peter Finch

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I got this off the “to be read” pile where it has been for about 18 months a couple of weeks ago as I was going to be sending time in Cardiff – I didn’t see much of the City as work commitments kept my tied up in the City Centre. Therefore this wander around the edge of the City was mental exercise.

It put me in mind of Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts which I read back in 2012, and used as a prompt for the Northern Leg Liturgies in 2013.

What is it that keeps drawing me back to these explorations of the edge? A lot of this could be put down to growing up in Barnet with a lot of ‘edgeland’ spaces around me.

I think it is also interesting the ways the Peter Finch uses the character of the border to have conversations with, and about, the centre. The way that the City presents itself at certain parts of its border, and absences itself at others says a lot.

Is this a ‘COVID’ book – yes and no – yes because the walking took place in the tail of the restrictions, in some places it was a more lonely walk that it would be in ‘normal’ times, and attention to the local was one of the things the global pandemic, briefly, gifted us. But it is not confined by COVID – if it gets a second print run I think it is unlikely that COVID will be in the first sentence of the blurb on the back – other conversations about the validity of borders in our changing geopolitics might come to the fore instead.