Comedian Robin Ince once said it was impossible for people under forty to experience nostalgia. Real nostalgia meant pain, he argued, a gut-aching, punch in the chest, yearning for home, youth, and a life that no longer existed. Nostalgia was the feeling you had when, having come face to face with the unalterable fact of ageing and mortality, you recognised the things you’d lost, and desperately wanted them back. The under-forties hadn’t yet the distance from their youth to be truly get nostalgia, Ince reasoned. When the under-forties think they’re experiencing nostalgia, he said, they’re just remembering stuff. He’s got a point. While it might make for a decent pub chat, the loss of Pigeon Streetand Mallett’s Mallet hasn’t left me with any inconsolable yearnings. I don’t ache for the days back when Snickers were called Marathons and nobody knew you shouldn’t make school dinners exclusively from hydrogenated trans fats. They’re just fond memories. But there’s a film which, for a lot of us, is more than just a fond memory. A film which, if we under-forties can experience nostalgia, is our generation’s Proustian ticket straight back to childhood. For over thirty years, Jim Henson’s 1986 Labyrinth has been lodged like a bullet in our collective brain. So, following the pearl anniversary of its cinematic release, we ask: what’s all the fuss about?
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I'm a fantasy writer and on this site you'll not only find samples of my work but also articles concerning folklore, myth and legend, reviews of movies, books and graphic novels and much else besides (including the occasional short story - you lucky people!).
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The Inn at the Edge of the World
The Witch of Wicken Fen
The Seasons
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Lords of Midsummer
The festival centered upon the summer solstice – known as Midsummer Day or Litha – was an auspicious time for ancient peoples. It was at Midsummer that the Holly King, God of the Waning Year, was believed to encounter and vanquish the Oak King, thereby succeeding in usurping the reign of the year. In Celtic mythology the […]
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Drums of Autumn
As September fades towards its dying embers, it is almost impossible to escape the thought that summer is but a memory and that the autumn season is upon us. This is a cause of sorrow for many and, accordingly, in art autumn is a season that is traditionally associated with melancholy. In Keats’ poem To Autumn, […]
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Rites of Spring
In the words of Emily Dickinson: “A little madness in the spring be wholesome even for the king” and, indeed, all over the world this season seems to be perpetually associated with madness, magic and mysticism. In the western world, spring is associated with two festivals in particular: May Day and Beltane. Traditionally an occasion […]
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Winter is Coming
Now that it is almost October it’s impossible for me to keep those famous, ominous words, first uttered in book one of George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, out of my mind: ‘Winter is coming’. The landscape of A Game of Thrones is irresistibly marked by the clash between winter and […]
Recent Posts
- Into the Labyrinth
- Saga of the Swamp Thing
- Realm of the Rising Sun
- Legends of the Dark Knight
- A Touch of Frost
- A Charmed Life: Diana Wynne Jones
- After the King: Tolkien’s heirs
- Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics
- Faith and Fantasy: American Gods
- The House on the Borderland
- The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock
- H G Wells, The Time Traveller
- The Weird and Wonderful World of Disney
- The Extraordinary Journeys of Jules Verne
- The Witch of Wicken Fen
- An Interview with William Horwood
- Spirits of the Sacred Skies
- The Fantasy World of Christmas
- Philadelphia by Night
- Samhain, Feast of the Dead
- The Realm of Ice and Fire
- Celtic Otherworlds
- The Wolf in the Attic
- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
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