Those of you who go in for astral projection and associated shenanigans will know that what you appear as in astral is not your physical self but your self-image. This is why people who project their astral self to others generally appear as being the age at which they felt most like themselves: it's also why it's important for your self-image to include clothes. What's less well-known is that your self-image can be anything you can imagine being with sufficient conviction: I used to work with somebody who always manifested as a very small, plump dragon, for example.
The white hound is my thing for being in astral. It's actually lifted from a very creepy song, the author of which I have forgotten or never knew, about warrior robots in the shape of giant dogs which guarded a city. They were never intended by their designers to have any independent life or minds of their own, but the chorus ends:
They're stone and steel and cable fine They're never flesh and bone, But I have seen them hunting, When they thought they were alone.
When I first designed this website, I committed an act of a special kind of stupidity available only to programmers, and set up all the layout, text-sizes etc. without realising that I'd got my browser set on ×1.5 text-size. It took me nine years to discover that when viewed in the default text-size it was all teeny-weeny and very hard on the eyes. I am slowly working my way through it all correcting this and tying it all in to Cascading Style Sheets, but it's a big, slow job.
The website comprises the following parts:
This fairly mixed bag of topics inter-connect in strange ways. Kenny Richey's one-time fiancée's mother was a friend of Eric's. On the anniversary of his ludicrously inappropriate imprisonment Eric 'phoned me, depressed and very drunk (because a friend had given him a case of ice lager and hadn't warned him how strong it was!), and demanded "Cheer me up!" I said "But, something hopeful has happened today - a litter of baby rats has been born" and he cried "Oh, fantastic!" and got a real kick out of it. A photo' of the last survivor of that litter, Clementine, appears on the ratty part of the website: she lived to be nearly 3½, making her one of the three oldest rats I've ever kept.
My family history also connects oddly with the fanfiction section, especially with Snape: for my late father Rory Langford-Rae attended Ampleforth, a school which for several reasons is believed to be one of the main models for Hogwarts; he was, if not exactly a spy, almost certainly the sort of person who does the sort of thing the government doesn't let you talk about for thirty years; and he died at thirty-eight, the same age as Snape, in circumstances which probably weren't as accidental as they were cracked up to be. I only found most of this out years after I became a Snape fan.
And if Eric himself had ever done a website it would no doubt have included both a deeply serious section offering advice to victims of sexual abuse, and something on long-haired chihuahuas.
Claire M Jordan
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