Cardinal Cox, the peripatetic poet of Peterborough, has penned a fulsome missive thanking me for promoting his works on this here blogospheric communiboard. I seek no thanks - poets deserve praise because poets are ill-rewarded. (When T.S. Eliot died he was still doing two paper rounds, you know. Fact.) Anyway, amid the general niceness, the Cardinal adds the following anecdote, of interest to all aficionados of the ghostly tale. It concerns an author who was also the Big Cheese - or possibly Canon - of Peterborough.
'Also this weekend I met a little old lady who, as a young girl, went to tea with E.G. Swain; her brother was a chorister and she was the only girl to go with the choir to these teas. She especially remembered the big round table that the tea was set out on, and if you wanted something from the other side, Canon Swain would rotate the table until the desired food came round. I met her at a tour around the cemetery that I used to be poet for. She mentioned that she'd found her great-grandparents' grave in the cemetery, but that there wasa grave at the Cathedral she was looking for, but that no-one there knew where it was. I just asked whose grave, and when she said Canon Swain I drew her a map of how to find his slab. Going to let her have a spare copy of the Aquarius (I think it was) paperback edition of his tales.'
The Cardinal rightly observes that this charming anecdote is a nice news item for the blog. He also asks if I'm going to the World Horror Con in Brighton next year? The answer, I regret to say, is no. It's a bit pricey and - to be honest - I never seem to get much out of these things. I'm too shy to go around introducing myself to people, especially since ST is such a small mag.
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