I was always fascinated by stories of the Burning Times when women and men denounced as witches were burned all across Europe, and hanged and stoned in Salem Witch Trials.

Even the word “Salem” conjured up a picture in my head of what it would look like there. Forests and fields, big evergreen trees and dirt roads, old shacks, timber houses and circular wells.

This is what it looks like today.



I never felt any inner horror of the burnings, more a keen sense of wanting to understand why… why did they murder so many people under such spurious puritanical laws? Reading some of the trial transcripts, you seriously have to wonder what the fuck these people were on.

So, over the years I have read lots about the hangings and stonings of Salem in late 1692.

And the burnings of Europe, and I’m still fascinated.

Maybe my ever-burning legs are a karmic payback - maybe they didn’t burn me as a witch.

Maybe I burned them.

And wasn’t Mum was forever telling me to leave the fire alone when I was little…