I read the news today, oh boy!

[dc]

The Sunday Times is out today, with the bit about Witchfest in it. It could have been so much worse.

At Witchfest, some of us were a bit bemused by the Geddes-Wards’ talk on fairies. Or faeries, rather. In Scottish folklore, you see, fairies are not the sort of creatures you want taking any interest in you, and you certainly wouldn’t go inviting them into, well, any space where you were. However, I can now see the great usefulness of having that sort of talk: you get a man, a woman, and two kids, all in crushed velvet, etc., and you clearly have a much more photogenic scene than anything involving a big, beardy guy with a staff. I feel like someone just turned up with the “get out of jail free” cards.

The article itself is not too bad, although at no point am I accurately quoted. Some stuff attributed to me I did say, but it has been edited in such a way that the meaning is more or less altered. I did not mention Harry fucking Potter! On the other hand, I was not so worried about what the reporter would write as what the editor and sub-editor would get up to.

Yep, they fucked us. Well, me, anyway. The intro paragraph has a fairly sarcastic ring to it, but what made me yelp was the Inside box on the front page of the Ecosse section. It says: Witch doctor: A former medic is one of Scotland’s top wizards.

Oh, fucking fuck fuckity-fuck FUCK!

(Do I need to mention that I heard no one use the word wizard all day? That I told them I would not even use the word witch to describe myself? That I made no claims to being the top anything?)

The basic text, as I say, is not too bad, but it suffers from the usual thing of a reporter who does not actually know the subject trying to get it right, and not quite doing it. I have never seen any newspaper report about anything I knew about which did not suffer from the same thing, so I guess this counts as a reasonably fair article. It certainly lacks one annoying feature which used to be a staple of such reports: the balancing comment from a member of a mainstream religion (or, a load of bigoted bollocks from the more extreme clergy of the Church of Scotland).

From a different perspective, Thor and Clutha both get mentioned, as does Óðinn (who will no doubt be pleased), so that in itself is good.

Comments

[tanngrisnir.livejournal.com]

Yes, the way what I said got slightly mangled was pretty much what I expected. It was only the sub-editors’ contributions (nothing to do with the reporter) which made me fume.