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  • How the Trump administration’s “shock and awe” approach has resulted in its litigation being shockingly awful 22nd April 2025
  • How the United States constitutional crisis is intensifying 17th April 2025
  • A note about injunctions in the context of the Abrego Garcia case 14th April 2025
  • How Trump is misusing emergency powers in his tariffs policy 10th April 2025
  • How Trump’s tariffs can be a Force Majeure event for some contracts 7th April 2025
  • The significance of the Wisconsin court election result 2nd April 2025
  • “But what if…?” – constitutional commentary in an age of anxiety 31st March 2025
  • A significant defeat for the Trump government in the federal court of appeal 27th March 2025
  • Reckoning the legal and practical significance of the United States deportations case 25th March 2025
  • Making sense of the Trump-Roberts exchange about impeachment 19th March 2025
  • Understanding what went on in court yesterday in the US deportations case 18th March 2025
  • “Oopsie” – the word that means the United States has now tipped into a constitutional crisis 17th March 2025
  • Oh Canada 16th March 2025
  • Thinking about a revolution 5th March 2025
  • The fog of lawlessness: what we can see – and what we cannot see – in the current confusions in the United States 25th February 2025
  • The president who believes himself a king 23rd February 2025
  • Making sense of what is happening in the United States 18th February 2025
  • The paradox of the Billionaires saying that Court Orders have no value, for without Court Orders there could not be Billionaires 11th February 2025
  • Why Donald Trump is not really “transactional” but anti-transactional 4th February 2025
  • From constitutional drama to constitutional crisis? 1st February 2025
  • Solving the puzzle of why the case of Prince Harry and Lord Watson against News Group Newspapers came to its sudden end 25th January 2025
  • Looking critically at Trump’s flurry of Executive Orders: why we should watch what is done, and not to be distracted by what is said 21st January 2025
  • A third and final post about the ‘Lettuce before Action’ of Elizabeth Truss 18th January 2025
  • Why the Truss “lettuce before action” is worse than you thought – and it has a worrying implication for free speech 17th January 2025
  • Of Indictments and Impeachments, and of Donald Trump – two similar words for two distinct things 16th January 2025
  • Why did the DoJ prosecution of Trump run out of time? 14th January 2025
  • Spiteful governments and simple contract law, a weak threatening letter, and a warning of a regulatory battle ahead 13th January 2025
  • A close look at Truss’s legal threat to Starmer – a glorious but seemingly hopeless cease-and-desist letter 9th January 2025
  • How the lore of New Year defeated the law of New Year – how the English state gave up on insisting the new year started on 25 March 1st January 2025
  • Some of President Carter’s judges can still judge, 44 years later – and so we can see how long Trump’s new nominees will be on the bench 31st December 2024
  • “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” – the story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending 20th December 2024
  • An argument about Assisting Dying – matters of life and death need to be properly regulated by law, and not by official discretion 28th November 2024
  • The illiberalism yet to come: two things not to do, and one thing to do – suggestions on how to avoid mental and emotional exhaustion 18th November 2024
  • New stories for old – making sense of a political-constitutional rupture 14th November 2024
  • The shapes of things to come – some thoughts and speculations on the possibilities of what can happen next 8th November 2024
  • A postcard from the day after an election: capturing a further political-constitutional moment 6th November 2024
  • A postcard from the day of an election – capturing a political-constitutional moment 5th November 2024
  • “…as a matter of law, the house is haunted” – a quick Hallowe’en post about law and lore 31st October 2024
  • Prisons and prisons-of-the-mind – how the biggest barrier to prisons reform is public opinion 28th October 2024
  • A blow against the “alternative remedies” excuse: the UK Supreme Court makes it far harder for regulators to avoid performing their public law duties 22nd October 2024
  • What explains the timing and manner of the Chagos Islands sovereignty deal? 20th October 2024
  • Happy birthday, Supreme Court: the fifteenth anniversary of the United Kingdom’s highest court 1st October 2024
  • Words on the screen – the rise and (relative) fall of text-based social media: why journalists and lawyers on social media may not feel so special again 30th September 2024
  • Political accountability vs policy accountability: how our system of politics and government is geared to avoid or evade accountability for policy 24th September 2024
  • On writing – and not writing – about miscarriages of justice 23rd September 2024
  • Miscarriages of Justice: the Oliver Campbell case 21st September 2024
  • How Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris and Walz is a masterpiece of persuasive prose: a songwriter’s practical lesson in written advocacy 11th September 2024
  • Supporting Donald Trump is too much for Richard Cheney 7th September 2024
  • A miscarriage of justice is normally a systems failure, and not because of any conspiracy – the cock-up theory usually explains when things go wrong 30th August 2024
  • Update – what is coming up. 29th August 2024
  • Shamima Begum – and ‘de jure’ vs ‘de facto’ statelessness 21st August 2024
  • Lucy Letby and miscarriages of justice: some words of caution on why we should always be alert to the possibilities of miscarriages of justice 19th August 2024
  • This week’s skirmish between the European Commission and X 17th August 2024
  • What Elon Musk perhaps gets wrong about civil wars being ‘inevitable’ – It is in the nature of civil wars that they are not often predictable 7th August 2024
  • How the criminal justice system deals with a riot 5th August 2024
  • The Lucy Letby case: some thoughts and observations: what should happen when a defence does not put in their own expert evidence (for good reason or bad)? 26th July 2024
  • And out the other side? The possible return of serious people doing serious things in law and policy 10th July 2024
  • What if a parliamentary candidate did not exist? The latest odd constitutional law question which nobody has really thought of asking before 9th July 2024
  • The task before James Timpson: the significance of this welcome appointment – and two of the obstacles that he needs to overcome 8th July 2024
  • How the Met police may be erring in its political insider betting investigation – and why we should be wary of extending “misconduct of public office” to parliamentary matters, even in nod-along cases 28th June 2024
  • What you need to know about commercial regulation, in the sports sector and elsewhere – for there is compliance and there is “compliance” 25th June 2024
  • Seven changes for a better constitution? Some interesting proposals from some good people. 24th June 2024
  • The wrong gong 22nd June 2024
  • The public service of an “Enemy of the People” 22nd June 2024
  • Of majorities and “super-majorities” 21st June 2024
  • The strange omission in the Conservative manifesto: why is there no commitment to repeal the Human Rights Act? 12th June 2024
  • The predicted governing party implosion in historical and constitutional context 11th June 2024
  • Donald Trump is convicted – but it is now the judicial system that may need a good defence strategy 1st June 2024
  • The unwelcome weaponisation of police complaints as part of ordinary politics 31st May 2024
  • Thoughts on the calling of a general election – and on whether our constitutional excitements are coming to an end 29th May 2024
  • Another inquiry report, another massive public policy failure revealed 21st May 2024
  • On how regulating the media is hard – if not impossible – and on why reviving the Leveson Inquiry may not be the best basis for seeing what regulations are now needed 4th May 2024
  • Trump’s case – a view from an English legal perspective 24th April 2024
  • Law and lore, and state failure – the quiet collapse of the county court system in England and Wales 22nd April 2024
  • How the civil justice system forced Hugh Grant to settle – and why an alternative to that system is difficult to conceive 17th April 2024
  • Unpacking the remarkable witness statement of Johnny Mercer – a closer look at the extraordinary evidence put before the Afghan war crimes tribunal 25th March 2024
  • The curious incident of the Afghanistan war crimes statutory inquiry being set up 21st March 2024
  • A close look at the Donelan libel settlement: how did a minister make her department feel exposed to expensive legal liability? 8th March 2024
  • A close look at the law and policy of holding a Northern Ireland border poll – and how the law may shape what will be an essentially political decision 10th February 2024
  • How the government is seeking to change the law on Rwanda so as to disregard the facts 30th January 2024
  • How the next general election in the United Kingdom is now less than a year away 29th January 2024
  • Could the Post Office sue its own former directors and advisers regarding the Horizon scandal? 16th January 2024
  • How the legal system made it so easy for the Post Office to destroy the lives of the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses – and how the legal system then made it so hard for them to obtain justice 12th January 2024
  • The coming year: how the parameters of the constitution will shape the politics of 2024 1st January 2024
  • The coming constitutional excitements in the United States 31st December 2023
  • What is often left unsaid in complaints about pesky human rights law and pesky human rights lawyers 15th December 2023
  • A role-reversal? – a footnote to yesterday’s post 1st December 2023
  • The three elements of the Rwanda judgment that show how the United Kingdom government is now boxed in 30th November 2023
  • On yesterday’s Supreme Court judgment on the Rwanda policy 16th November 2023
  • The courts have already deflated the Rwanda policy, regardless of the Supreme Court judgment next Wednesday 10th November 2023
  • The extraordinary newspaper column of the Home Secretary – and its implications 9th November 2023
  • Drafts of history – how the Covid Inquiry, like the Leveson Inquiry, is securing evidence for historians that would otherwise be lost 1st November 2023
  • Proportionality is an incomplete legal concept 25th October 2023
  • Commissioner Breton writes a letter: a post in praise of the one-page formal document 11th October 2023
  • “Computer says guilty” – an introduction to the evidential presumption that computers are operating correctly 30th September 2023
  • COMING UP 23rd September 2023
  • Whatever happened to ‘the best-governed city in the world’? – some footnotes to the article at Prospect on the Birmingham city insolvency 9th September 2023
  • One year on from one thing, sixteen months on from another thing… 8th September 2023
  • What is a section 114 Notice? 7th September 2023
  • Constitutionalism vs constitutionalism – how liberal constitutionalists sometimes misunderstand illiberal constitutionalism 24th August 2023
  • Performative justice and coercion: thinking about coercing convicted defendants to hear their sentences 21st August 2023
  • Of impeachments and indictments – how many of the criminal indictments against Trump are a function of the failure of the impeachment process 15th August 2023
  • A note of caution for those clapping and cheering at the latest indictment of Donald Trump 8th August 2023
  • Witch-hunt (noun) 2nd August 2023
  • Sir Keir Starmer and the Litigation Turn of Mind 31st July 2023

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Category: Artificial Intelligence

Spiteful governments and simple contract law, a weak threatening letter, and a warning of a regulatory battle ahead

13th January 2025

Some things from last week you may have missed.

*

The weekly constitutional

Last week I expected my blogging to centre around a post I was preparing for Prospect, where my regular contribution is to branded as a ‘weekly constitutional’.

This pleasing badge implies a weekly meander – but it will be one based on a recent (or non-recent) published case report. The aim is to use that judgment or other decision to show how law and action work – and do not work – in practice.

The first ‘weekly constitutional’ was about a significant United Kingdom Supreme Court decision that was handed down in November but which got almost no press attention (the main honourable exception was in the estimable Byline Times).

In the unanimous decision the Supreme Court justices undid a grossly spiteful attack by the then coalition government on public sector trades unions not by resorting to elaborate employment law provisions, but by applying a contract law rule so simple it is the stuff of the first weeks of any law degree.

I liked doing that post – please read it here – and I hope you will follow the ‘weekly constitutional’ post. I will post here and alert you to them, perhaps expanding on certain points.

But that post got rather drowned by the attention received by two other things that I wrote last week.

*

‘Lettuce before Action’

I so wish I had thought of the above line, but it was coined by the peerless Paul Magrath, whose weekly law email is a must-read – you can subscribe here.

This is about, of course, the antics of a former Prime Minister – and indeed a former Lord High Chancellor – in sending a legal letter to the current Prime Minister.

A letter so weak it may well be the weakest threatening letter ever sent by a United Kingdom law firm.

The ‘close reading’ post I did – here – was done very quickly and promptly, and indeed so promptly that I even had to set out why as a matter of copyright and confidentiality I was entitled to publish the letter so as to comment on it.

Since the publication, the former Prime Minister has been widely ridiculed for this misfired missive – but I think there may be something more worth saying about the letter – and so I may do a post with further reflections.

*

Back in the salmon pink

Last week I was also invited to write something about about social media regulation for the Financial Times.

It is always lovely to write for what – in my biased but honest opinion – is the best newspaper, though it is always terrifyingly daunting to be published alongside proper commentators.

(Lucy Kellaway is my all-time favourite columnist in any newspaper anywhere.)

So I wrote one thing, about the inherent difficulties about regulating social media – some of which will be familiar to long-term readers here.

And is often the case, new ideas come out once you actually start something, and so I wrote a second thing about what I say as the rational drivers behind what Meta announced last week. This was based on actually listening carefully to what Mark Zuckerberg has said in his broadcast – and then reading that prepared statement even more carefully (which led to the all-important satisfying “Aha!” moment).

The two pieces were then banged into one longer piece with an overall, hopefully coherent structure.

And the resulting ‘essay’ was published in the print edition and online on Saturday.

For reasons of topicality, more than the quality of the writing, the piece became very popular.

The Bluesky stats for the article matched my Brexit posts on Twitter at the height of Brexit when I had five times as many followers.

The piece was even briefly one of the top five read FT.com pieces globally.

The sensation of this happening is not altogether pleasant.

But perhaps the one merit of the piece was that it offered an explanation for something which seemed otherwise hard to explain in rational terms.

Essentially the argument offered by the piece was:

(a) Meta has an interest in switching to a more confrontational approach with irksome foreign regulators, especially in the European Union,

(b) Meta now has an opportunity to do this because of the reelection of Donald Trump to the United States presidency,

but (c) this does not show strength but weakness, for in those foreign jurisdictions, the platforms know the respective state has the ultimate power of legal recognition.

And so this is why Meta now needs a strategic ally in the US government – and everything else follows from that.

This seemed obvious from Zuckerberg’s statement – but because it was slipped in a point number six after five rather attention-grabbing other points, but did not get the attention it should have had.

*

Litigation and regulatory strategies are fascinating – in particular, where the surface theatrics of impulsiveness, hypocrisy and recklessness misdirect onlookers into thinking the underlying commercial (or political) objectives are similarly irrational.

Even Liz Truss’s letter makes sense – but solely from a political-media perspective, and not any legal perspective.

Perhaps I should write that further piece on that letter, if only to use that ‘Lettuce before Action’ line as a title.

*

Posted on 13th January 202513th January 2025Categories Artificial Intelligence, Blogging and bloggers, Close readings, Communications and Media & Law and Policy, European Union Law and Policy, Regulatory law, Supreme Court, UK Supreme Court, United Kingdom Law and Policy, Words and Things16 Comments on Spiteful governments and simple contract law, a weak threatening letter, and a warning of a regulatory battle ahead

“Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” – the story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending

The day before the Winter Solstice, 2024

This post is about finally finding a book from one’s youth forty years later – and after nearly thirty years of searching.

It is also a tale about goblins and Christmas decorations; about the perils of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence; and about the real value of librarians, cataloguers, indexers, and archivists – what should be called the Noble Professions.

And it is an account that ends with not one but two wonderful events.

So if you are sitting comfortably, with a suitable seasonal drink, we will start with a bit of background and with a historical excursion.

*

Once upon a time there was a story.

And the story was in a book – a child’s anthology: the sort of book that one used to get in school bookshops and advertised in the special catalogues that were common in English schools (and elsewhere) in the 1970s and 1980s.

All the books I had at the time got lost – house moves and so on – and since the world wide web made searching for second-hand books easy I have replaced the books one-by-one.

When you re-read such books, sometimes what one thinks are one’s own original ideas and expressions stare back at you and you realise where you got them from.

What the economist J. M. Keynes once said – “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist” – has a far wider application.

Many of us are the slaves of what we read when very young.

*

But there was one book what eluded me, every time it was searched for.

What I could remember (or believed I could remember) was as follows:

– it was a story in an anthology;

– the story was about what will happen if you do not take your decorations down by Twelfth Night – for goblins and other ne’er-do-wells will go through your town and hide behind any remaining decorations and cause you mischief all year round;

– but there was a cure to this mischief if a certain thing was done on Candlemas – 2 February – and this was because of an esoteric rule which could be applied surreptitiously by those with special knowledge;

– the book was purple;

– the title or sub-title of the book, or of the story, was “from Michelmas to Candlemas” – the use of “Candlemas” was obvious from the story, and the “Michaelmas” I was certain about because it was a word I would again encounter in my late teens as a student, as it reminded me of the story/book.

(One of these memories, however, was false and another only semi-reliable.)

*

The story was important to me because it led to my passion for lore.

For me as a legal commentator, law (in its technical, black-letter sense) is practically far less important than what people – including lawyers and even judges – believe the law to be.

(Long-term followers may also recall my original blogging name was of a folklore hero who bested the devil by careful attention to what was actually agreed.)

And so this remembered Candlemas story had everything for a lover of lore and law: a predicament, an obscure rule, the skilled application of that rule, and a remedy.

*

How I searched for this story – usually every year in November or December.

At first, I searched the web generally – with text and then, as Google developed, for the book cover.

I searched sites which had pictures of the book catalogues of the time.

I searched the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and every library I could think of.

Nil-return.

*

It was a mini-exercise in being J. R. Hartley year after year.

After a while certain results became familiar – and I probably know more about devotional texts about – and adventure stories set at – Candlemas than many other people.

And it was always a pleasure to renew contact with texts like “[i]t is a very old enactment that no Gascon wines or Toulouse woad be brought into England in strange bottoms, and nothing which has been done affects them but was devised to restrain the folly of English merchants who ventured to Bordeaux at unseasonable times, and the restraint from Michaelmas to Candlemas, by avoiding dangerous times, will rather augment the traffic…” (emphasis added.)

I bought books of Christmas stories on the off-chance they would reprint the story I was looking for – a disconcerting number of which appear to have been edited by Gyles Brandreth.

Nil-return.

*

When social media came along, I would then appeal from time-to-time for any information.

Those who responded were often very helpful – and so yet more Christmas anthologies were bought, and further lines of enquiry followed.

I made direct contact with experts in folklore and fairy tales, but they were as non-plussed as me.

Still nil-return.

*

Along the way though, I found out a great deal about the lores of the twelve days of Christmas and Candlemas which contextualised what I could remember.

For example, both Twelfth Night and Candlemas have historically been the ends of the Christmas period – the latter being the fortieth day after Christmas.

And I discovered that Candlemas – which is also marked the purification (or what became known in England as ‘churching’) of Mary and the presentation of Jesus at the Temple – was once an annual event that was very important in English culture.

Indeed Charles I arranged his coronation to be held on Candlemas.

And royalists made a point of celebrating Candlemas as part of what we would now call “culture wars” of the 1600s.

One once-famous poet, the loyalist clergyman Robert Herrick published three poems about Candlemas, one of which urged the burning of decorations on that day, else bad things would follow:

Kindle the Christmas brand, and then

Till sunset let it burn;

Which quench’d, then lay it up again

Till Christmas next return.

Part must be kept wherewith to teend

The Christmas log next year,

And where ’tis safely kept, the fiend

Can do no mischief there.

(This ritual burning of decorations is a tradition that still has echoes today.)

After the culture wars of the 1600s, however, Candlemas became less popular – and soon it was all-but forgotten culturally, outside the annual blessing of candles at certain churches.

(On Candlemas in particular, see chapter 13 of The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton, and on the place of Candlemas in the politics and religion of early modern England generally, see Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580.)

*

This was all fascinating, but it was not getting me any closer to the book or the story.

A couple of years ago, after the usual social media appeal, someone suggested I try the r/whatsthatbook thread on Reddit, where very clever and generous people spend time trying to identify books from the scantiest of details.

So I did.

And someone there corresponded with a suggestion which actually covered each of the data points I could recall about the book – and it had the right title, and the book even had a well-known editor.

This was an extraordinary find – how could I have missed this in all the years of searching?

Well.

The reason it had never been uncovered before was because the impressive looking account had been generated – entirely fabricated – by ChatGPT.

This false account has now been deleted, but the correspondent remarked when I said this looked like it had been auto-generated: “You’re right, I’ve tried chatGPT on some descriptions around here and it worked pretty well. However sometimes it has a propensity to spew random bullshit. I forgot because it’s so good in other areas. I’ll check better.”

I had never come across ChatGPT before – and so I have distrusted it ever since.

*

So this year – a couple of weeks ago – I did the annual appeal – but this time on BlueSky and Mastodon, and not on Twitter.

And yet again, people were helpful – anthologies were suggested and bought (though no further ones by Gyles Brandreth).

Someone again used ChatGPT, and they came up with:

“The book you’re describing sounds like “From Michaelmas to Candlemas” by Ruth Ainsworth. It was published in the 1970s and features seasonal stories aimed at children, including the one about the need to take down Christmas decorations by Candlemas to avoid goblins hiding behind them. The title references the traditional English calendar, marking the time from the feast of Michaelmas (September 29) to Candlemas (February 2). The story you mentioned aligns with themes found in folklore and poetry, including those by Robert Herrick. If this is the book you’re thinking of, it was indeed popular in school book clubs during that era.”

Again, like the account offered by the Reddit correspondent, this passage looks authoritative and plausible.

You will even notice how it neatly covers everything I could remember – giving equal weight to each data point and deftly joining them all together.

And again, what ChatGPT here had to offer was utterly – absolutely – false.

Like a fluent and practised (but unwise) liar it had contrived an account that fitted only the available information.

It was fake.

This year looked like another nil-return.

*

And then, something remarkable happened.

The appeal got this response:

Wow.

It was the same story, now looking up at me from a computer screen forty years later.

I remember the stylised first letter, the imagery, the pacing, the tone.

It did mention goblins as part of the ne’er-do-wells, but it was about a demon – not a goblin – who hid behind a sprig of holly.

(My insistence that it was a goblin was a semi-unreliable memory.)

And there was (who I now know was) Granny Hawkins being the holder of the all-important esoteric knowledge.

*

What had happened was this: Charlotte was far from a ChatGPT bot but instead a trained and experienced librarian.

(You can and should follow her here – she is a genius and a treasure, and she has found other odd things out for other people.)

She sensibly assumed some of the things I could recall would have more weight – be more reliable – than others.

(The “Michaelmas” was, it turned out, a false memory – and this had undermined my searches.)

She then used various permutations of my memory points until she found a match, and she then found a book which someone had scanned onto internet archive.

You can see the book here.

The details there found could then be cross-referenced against this truly amazing catalogue of fantasy short stories -and it was indeed in an anthology – alongside the Herrick poem!

The story had been found – because of a librarian using critical skills (and thereby not giving equal weight to each factor), an archive, and a catalogue/index.

Verily: librarians, archivists, cataloguers, and indexers are the Noble Professions.

For they organise information in a manner in which humans actually think – unlike ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence.

They are the holders of the old knowledge and skills.

*

So here is the book:

*

My initial reaction was that Charlotte had certainly uncovered the same story – but it was perhaps in a different edition.

The cover of what Charlotte had found was black – and I distinctly remembered the book being purple.

Nonetheless I ordered the book online – so I could read all the story again in physical form (I refused to read it on the archive – I could wait one more week after so many years).

And when the book arrived I noticed something.

The back of the book was purple.

Never judge a book by its front cover.

*

Before we come to the second wonderful event of this book-quest, here is the story of “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” in full.

Note as you read how the old knowledge is used and the necessary rule are applied – and how the vicar ensures that a suppressed, secret ceremony can take place – there seems to be a great deal of cultural and religious knowledge behind this simple-looking children’s story.

*

“Of course!” said Granny Hawkins.

Of course.

*

But who was Ruth C. Paine?

It was certainly not this Ruth Paine (which made internet searches very difficult).

The editor Dorothy Edwards was a prolific author and editor – many of her books are still in print – and she was also involved with Listen with Mother.

(I said you should be sitting comfortably.)

But Ruth C. Paine was more elusive.

*

What I was then able to find out was that Ruth C. Paine had published stories in a number of Dorothy Edwards’ anthologies.

Here is another example, about the changing of the seasons, with a splendid line from a frog about how to deal with winter

*

‘I’m just off to the pond. I shall dive to the bottom and cover myself with mud and stay there. That is the only proper way to spend the winter,’ said Frog, and he hopped away.

*

I can also recommend the story about old Mother Merriweather in her Cuckoo Fair story, which deals with summer, in this other Dorothy Edwards anthology.

*

A bit more research showed that Ruth C. Paine had contributed a story for broadcast for Listen with Mother (thank you to the kind person who put the Radio Times listings archive online).

But otherwise it was really not surprising that an author from the 1970s and 1980s had so little online trace.

It crossed my mind that Ruth C. Paine could be a pseudonym of Dorothy Edwards – such things are not uncommon with busy editors who need to fill spaces in books and broadcasts.

Yet there was something about the distinctive depth of knowledge behind the Candlemas story which made it unlikely to be a throwaway pseudonym of someone else. And Dorothy Edwards often included her own stories in her anthologies.

Anyway, no matter: I had the book and the story.

That is where I thought this story would end.

*

And then the second remarkable event occurred.

Charlotte and I got this reply from the novelist Victoria MacKenzie:

And so Ruth C. Paine certainly did exist – and, as the Candlemas story indicated, she did have an extensive knowledge of religion and cultural history.

Her great niece has now kindly provided the following fascinating details:

“Ruth Cecilia Paine was my great aunt – my grandfather’s twin sister – and although she passed away in 2001, when I was just twenty-one, she was a big influence on my life. We wrote to each other regularly (I still remember her postcode, all these years later) and she was very encouraging to me about my education; at the start of each school year she sent me a little money for stationery, which I found incredibly exciting!

“I always knew that she had written stories for children, but that only a handful had been published – mostly in anthologies edited by Dorothy Edwards. As far as I knew, writing was a hobby, but I sensed it was one that meant a great deal to her. She often sent me books as gifts and occasionally I visited her in her flat in Canterbury where she lived with her lifelong companion, Lillian.

“She was a Christian and a church-goer all her life, latterly giving tours of Canterbury Cathedral. My dad told me that she’d been a missionary in India earlier in her life and I seem to half-remember a story she told me of travelling through a monsoon in a small aeroplane – understandably a terrifying experience!

“When she returned to in Britain she became a Religious Studies teacher, and her last job was at Hastings High School, before her retirement around the time I was born in 1980. Apparently she was regarded as quite formidable by my dad’s generation, but she was always very kind to me. I wish so much that she could have known her great niece would become a writer!”

*

The formidable Ruth C. Paine had indeed been a former missionary in her youth – Birmingham University records attest this.

This is Ruth Cecilia Paine in her teaching days:

And not only did Vicky MacKenzie provide this information and this photo, she also had a box of papers from her late great aunt, and in that box of papers were the original amended proofs of the personally influential story I had spent years looking for!

*

“Of course!” said Granny Hawkins.

Of course.

*

In a matter of days I has gone from the ritual despair of an annual fruitless, futile search, to not only having the story and the book – but to also seeing the actual manuscript of the story I had spent forty years thinking about and about thirty years searching for.

This was a wonderful, extraordinary turn-of-events.

*

Two things can perhaps be said by way of a conclusion to this story.

The first is that we should be wary of the mischievous demons of our own age – that is ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence – and to renew our trust in the Noble Professions who hold the old knowledge and skills: librarians, archivists, cataloguers, and indexers.

The second is that nowadays the real problem perhaps is not with Christmas decorations staying up too late, but with them going up too early, and with shops selling Christmas wares and playing Christmas music well before Advent, let alone Christmas.

We need new cautionary tales about when such things should be done and not done.

We are going to need some new goblins.

*******

I am very grateful to the heirs and holders of the literary estate of Ruth C. Paine for their kind permission for me to publish “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” and “How Nip spent the winter”.

Editors would do well to contact Vicky MacKenzie to arrange permission to put her great aunt’s stories in new anthologies.

I am also grateful to Vicky MacKenzie for her kind permission to publish the unpublished corrected manuscript of “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” and the unpublished photograph of her aunt..

Many thanks to Charlotte who not only found the story, but dealt with many follow-on queries.

Many thanks also to my friends who listened to previous versions of this post.

This post is dedicated to one of these friends, Nick, who is currently dealing with a challenging time – and who has also listened to me go on about story-telling for over thirty years. Poor sod.

Posted on 20th December 202424th December 2024Categories Artificial Intelligence, Candlemas, Demons hiding behind Christmas decorations, Law and Lore55 Comments on “Twelfth Night Till Candlemas” – the story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending
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