Hatpins. . of course! now, no longer

Just made the best tomato soup in the world ever. Just buy shitloads of cheap toms, pop in boiling water for a min so the skins split, get the skins off, chop 'em, put to one side.
Fry up an onion and a couple of garlic cloves, add a couple of pints of veg stock and simmer with the toms and fresh chopped basil, salt and ground pepper. Process, leave to stand, and re-heat as needed. It's slimming and taste-tastic!
Thought you might like to know.
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Julie just texted me and she's watching a video called Fairytale, about the Cottingley Faeries. It's one of my old videos I was going to throw out, but I'm glad she watched it. It's a heavily romanticised account of the goings on in Cottingley Beck, where the supposed 'fairy' photographs were taken about ninety years ago.
Basically, the story is, two cousins borrow their Dad's camera, and the photos they took became famous, and Sherlock Holmes author Conan Doyle, himself a believer in the Victorian fad of 'seances', wrote a book about it. I have the reprint, it's one of my favourite books.
I got interested in the subject after I read Joe Cooper's book on the whole thing on holiday in Salisbury many years ago. I found it fascinating, and my interest peaked with a visit to Cottingley eight years ago. I found the house where the girls lived, and found the beck where they took the famous photos. I took photos myself, but I should have gone alone. The girl with me didn't share the interest, and I was conscious of her thinking me silly. Some places you should just go alone, with yer thoughts. .
Anyway, here are the famous photos. Or a few of them. The girls who took the photos said they were genuine right up the seventies, when they did at last admit they were cut out of cardboard and stood up with hat-pins.
But even then, one lady stressed the one photo was real, and said that yes, even though the photos were fake, there were fairies at Cottingley Beck.

And the whole story touches on many things that intrigue me. People's quickness to believe what they want to believe, and the very idea that faeries, pixies, goblins, leprechauns, nature sprites or whatever, may actually exist.
Not sure they do, but like ghosts, I believe people see them.
And have you ever read any Sherlock Holmes? They are fantastically clever books, great reading. Yet Conan Doyle was into the whole thing hook line and sinker! Even his adventure books became podiums for his beliefs in para-science. Why did the genius writer with the analytic mind come to champion the two girls with the strange photos from Yorkshire?

When you see a magician do tricks, (I do a bit myself and I used to go to the Wolverhampton Magic Circle meetings often), you can either enter into the 'spirit' of the thing, and enjoy the puzzlement, or you can treat it as a challenge. As if someone is trying to get one over on you. I like to think I do the former. It's the Fortean way. Enjoying strangeness isn't a sign of gullibility to me, it's the sign of a healthy imagination. +

And lastly, (and I type this as our efforts to find life on other planets are leaping forward), people believe in a lot more weirder shit than faeries. . I hear the 'sky god' myth is still doing well these days (I had to get that pop in, didn't I?).