VALENTINE'S FREE-FOR-ALL

Maddie set us off with The Beginning of the World, and told us how Men and Women eventually got to know each other, and found they could give one another pleasure.

Raph departed from the Valentine's theme completely, with a Chinese tale of two brothers, which begins with a miraculous dog that can pull a plough, and continues with the wicked brother destroying all he touches in his attempts to copy [and cheat] his sibling, until the monkeys take a final hand.

Ian, a new recruit, told us Tam Lin, the way he tells it, which was certainly a tale for Valentine's, full of passion and suffering and loyalty.

Lisa, our headline guest for March, came over to see how we did things in Ringwood, and gave us her version of Mister Fox, with a bit of anthropomorphism, or lycanthropy, depending on which way you look at it. She brought with her Leslie, from Frome, who told us about the origin of the fruit that is the shape of the human heart, the strawberry, and how it put an end to the quarrel between the First Man and the First Woman, and if that hadn't happened, where would we be?

Mike told a Kabyle story of the Nzemi, the Man Whose Trade Was Pleasing Women, a tale collected by Leo Frobenius in The Black Decameron. [Some of those present wished such a person could be made more generally available.]

Maddie gave us the wisdom of the rabbi's wife, which sorted out a potential problem for the newly-weds through food metaphors, while Raph remained resolutely unromantic with Coyote Steals a Blanket, and Ian took another view of other kinds of love with The Unicorn and the Single Wish.