Month Notes, October 2025

This weekend just past was the Hastings Borough Bonfire Society’s torchlit procession.

I wrote about this last year in a piece called Collective joy & collective ownership of ritual so I won’t describe it again, but suffice to say that it didn’t disappoint.

Earlier this month I went along to the Electric Palace Cinema—a 48–seat independent community cinema in Hastings’ Old Town—for a screening of the 1984 film The Company of Wolves, adapted from a short story by Angela Carter.

I’ve seen this great film many times, but never at a cinema, so this was a treat. It was screened as part of the cinema’s Strange Frames Film Club series (also on Instagram) that:

…celebrates the offbeat, grotesque or arcane films and concepts that lurk in the shadowy recesses of cinema; with a focus on viewing cinema through the lens of history, folklore and fairytale.

Yes, as you can guess, I’ll probably be a regular at these screenings - I’ve already booked my ticket for Strange Frames’ November offering which is the 1968 Japanese film The Snow Woman.

I recently ordered a copy of Radical Antiquity: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings by Christopher B. Zeichmann from Pluto Press. The blurb reads:

Radical Antiquity takes you on a unique journey in search of anarchy, statelessness, and social experimentation in the Graeco-Roman world. Sweeping across the Mediterranean from the time of the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE until the emergence of Islam in 610 CE, Christopher B. Zeichmann introduces the reader to communities of escaped slaves, pirates, and religious sects—all of whom sought a more egalitarian way of life that avoided the coercion, hierarchy, and exploitation of the state.

…so it’s fairly obvious that this was a must-buy for me. It even has an endorsement from Alan Moore:

Despite humanity’s egalitarian origins, hierarchical societies must depict anarchism as chaotic and unworkable. Unearthing the ancient world’s anarchist cultures, Zeichmann presents a compelling argument that authority may itself have always been the real aberration. Highly recommended.

And so as the grey wet autumnal weather darkens my mood, in some sort of reverse pathetic fallacy, I’m still finding enough to keep myself occupied enough to be at least partially distracted from the gloom.