Among the less remembered customs connected with winter and the New Year in rural Wales, the Lisi Black filters primal concerns with vagrancy, hardship, and hospitality through the subsequent Christian myth of the Nativity. Politely encouraged to squoosh up a bit to one side of the manger to make room for the Holy Child, the cat took grave offence, and now roams the towns and villages of the world, yowling for admission. Pictured below, the Lisi Black appears at the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Gobowen Community Centre in 1959. Photograph by Geoff Charles, courtesy of the National Library of Wales, plausibly. Rob Mimpriss wishes all his traffic a happy Christmas, and abundant content in the New Year.
Dr Sarah Gallup is a clinical psychologist at the California Department of State Hospitals. She also runs a podcast exploring the history of mental health care and the stories of people who lived or worked Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals. In six recent episodes she reads from Dangerous Asylums...
Read postAll newsThe day was dull, rather misty, and wet under foot, but neither too warm nor too cold for walking. I began to think (without being especially aware that I was thinking) about the place of blood in Christian iconography, about the chapel in which I was raised, which seemed mildly obsessed with it...
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