Pile it on the stairs
I grew up at a time when household main floors were considered mostly the province of adults. So my sister and I were invited to play with our toys downstairs provided that we gathered them up when finished and put them away upstairs in our rooms. (That was the theory anyway.) In addition, my childhood home was a 100 year-old farmhouse. The ceilings were high and the rooms spacious. There was a lot of real estate to travel.
My mom understandably got tired of schlepping our stuff up when we forgot, so her solution was to place it on the lower steps of the staircase. "Take your stuff off the stairs!!" became a popular shouted admonishment when she heard us head up.
That image seems and apt metaphor for this page of my site. It's the cyber accumulation of things too important to throw away but things that don't have an obvious place within my virtual house.
The day after Queen Elizabeth II died, The London Review of Books brought Alan Bennett's story "The Uncommon Reader", first published in the LRB in 2007, in front of the paywall for a few days. In the spirit of sharing, (but in equal measure encouraging that you support LRB,) I make available the copy they made available. If you enjoy it, please support this wonderful publication.
The Magnus Archives is a weekly horror fiction anthology podcast examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organisation dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. Join new head archivist Jonathan Sims as he attempts to bring a seemingly neglected collection of supernatural statements up to date, converting them to audio and supplementing them with follow-up work from his small but dedicated team.
Individually, they are unsettling. Together they begin to form a picture that is truly horrifying because as they look into the depths of the archives, something starts to look back...
