Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

Product Information

Sometimes the thing we think we're the most sure about actually turns out to be our biggest mistake.

Reading the stories brought the sense of being trapped in a room, slowly, but very surely, filling up with water. You think: this can't be happening. Meanwhile, hold your breath against the certainty it surely is. " Cynan Jones Ten Hag has proved no Ronaldo is no problem among his early big wins in the job. Ten Hag era ushers in a wide-scale restructure of club

Select a format:

I wanted to love this, oh God, did I. It was Virago and it was a beautiful cover and it was Halloween… so I bought it. And now I have thoughts.

When you talk about discipline, it's about that. He's very clear, so there's no way you can escape from that. Even if you don't understand English you can understand the way he wants to play, so I think that is really important for us.Like me, Smith is in her 40s and came of age in the 1990s, when notions of female equality and empowerment were watered-down, commodified and draped in irony. It took until the early 2010s for high-profile women to be able to publicly embrace feminism without being derided as killjoys, misandrists, or both. But, in recent years, our view of feminism, what it means, who it is for and how it should conduct itself has become fractured and, as Smith tells it, battle lines have been drawn: on one side, Gen X women who say their sex is inextricably connected to their biology, who want to preserve single-sex spaces and who find themselves denigrated as Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists); on the other, the younger smashers of the gender binary who believe a person’s sex is unimportant and who, Smith maintains, cannot accept that one day they will be middle-aged and have to deal with this crap too. The group then explains that they are being pursued by a hag. Their leader, Mayrina has been hexed, and they need assistance. Mayrina is upstairs, and has been transformed into a sheep. She can be talked to using Speak with Animals and shares that a doll is what's causing her transformation, or her diary can be read, which also references a doll. The women are often accused of being witches. Through the years the women are sometimes treated poorly by the villagers living near Glasgow.

This is especially possible in an age where, as Smith points out, we tend to see our bodies as customisable meat suits that are meant to reflect our true selves, and “few people think their true self looks like a middle-aged woman”. Around twenty years ago, I remember observing with horror my mother’s elbows; they were dry and wrinkly, like those of most adults, and in contrast to my own perfectly smooth child-limbs. My elbows will never be like that, I thought. My logic, I think, went something like this: I would hate for my elbows to look like that, so how could they, when I would hate it so much? Similarly, we can tell ourselves that we couldn’t bear to be seen as ugly, stupid and irrelevant, and so we surely won’t be. By extension, then, if older women are seen that way, then it must be that they can bear it, perhaps because it is an accurate assessment. The Ten Hag era has coincided with a wide-scale restructure of the club, with every department being shed of people that had been too safe in jobs with excessive power despite not being best in class. Told in alternating time lines: the days of the Cailleach, the time of Alice, tho hers fast forwards a lot, and the days of all those between. Generations of daughters, born with a gift they would have to forget, tattooed with the sign to remind, filled the Scottish hills and the herbs that grow upon them. Alice can see things. She knows what is going to happen in someone’s life. She does not realize she is a daughter of the Cailleach or the hag. No one has taught her or made her understand her destiny.

A book, a course and a podcast

The hag victims couldn't forgive us for hurting their leader Mayrina - now we share the same resentment they reserved for the hag.