Someone Has To Leave First. This Is A Very Old Story. There Is No Other Version Of This Story.

Hello!

I often see people who want to listen to the Radio adaptation of Good Omens, but can’t seem to find it or can’t afford to buy it, so I decided to share - you can listen to the adaptation in the following links.

This is the full version of the radio play, without the cuts from the aired BBC version, so, have fun!

Part 01

Part 02

Part 03

Part 04

Welcome!

- name: june

- pronouns: she/her or they/them

- on tumblr since: 2020/2021 (don’t remember)

- fandoms: good omens, all for the game, the shadowhunter chronicles, grishaverse, osemanverse, the raven cycle, the folk of the air, red white and royal blue, killing eve, maurice

- current obsession: good omens (tv), all for the game (tsc specifically)

- enjoys: romcoms, sapphic literature, tragic fiction, fantasy, comedy

secrets of blackthorn hall is basically the highlight of my week, but I still don’t read it until the day after most weeks

well

I try

COMMUNICATION! The divine gift in TSC!

Julian to Magnus

Hi Magnus,

So I know you told me only to get in touch for a “real emergency,” and I think you might have already left for vacation. But we’ve got some ghost trouble here at Chiswick House and we could use a little advice. Just in writing! No need to interrupt your time away! Unless, um, you think it really is an emergency.

Chiswick House is in awful shape in general, so it’s hard to know what’s a real problem and what’s just a hundred years of neglect. Other than one small area nobody’s touched the place since, it seems, the time of Tatiana Blackthorn.

We have some garden gnomes here doing the structural repairs and the big stuff, masonry and framing and so on. I mean, they’re not actually garden gnomes, I think they’re brownies, but they have the big pointy hats and the beards and everything. They’ve been moving pretty slowly, but recently Kieran was here and he had a talk with the foreman (this guy named Round Tom who is not even all that round) and since then things have sped up a lot. And there is a lot less complaining about the work conditions, and a lot less disappearing for the day if the tea runs out for more than five minutes. On the other hand, they’ve started leaving little offerings around intended for “the Un-Seel Laird,” which I gather is Kieran. Not anything Kieran would want, I don’t think. A lot of acorns and pretty rocks, mostly? And the occasional portrait of Kieran in chalk, which let me tell you, it’s a good thing they’re competent at construction because their portraiture could use some work. We’ve been keeping all the stuff in a box for him just in case.

I’m rambling, sorry. It’s just us rattling around in this giant ruin and all we want is for someone to listen to our dull stories about home renovation. But what I actually want to tell you about is the ghost.

I’m sure there are dozens of random spirits going back centuries that have some kind of faint presence in the house—Round Tom hinted as much to me—but there’s definitely some specific one that is actively haunting the place. We’ve had some poltergeist-y stuff. Mostly harmless pranks: vases overturned, drinks spilled, music faintly playing in the distance but originating from nowhere, weird hot spots, weird cold spots, doors slamming, doors closing very slowly on their own. To clarify, I do NOT mean poltergeist as in the movie Dru made me watch. No one has been sucked into evil dimensions or levitated (yet!). Still, it seems like we ought to try to get out ahead of this, so Emma and I have been trying to communicate with the presence directly. Whoever it is, they haven’t responded to us speaking to them, and it’s starting to feel silly to constantly talk in a friendly voice to nobody, like we have an imaginary friend. All that happens is the next morning someone has stacked all the gnomes’ hats into a hat tower and we have to convince the gnomes it wasn’t us.

Lest you think we haven’t tried smarter things than just yelling “Here ghostie ghostie ghostie,” Tiberius sent us a device he’s been working on, like a Sensor for ghosts. I spent some time walking the halls and eventually found a spot along some random corridor where the Sensor went crazy. I busted the wall open with a sledgehammer—somehow I feel like you would approve, although the gnomes did not—and behind the plaster, wedged between two of the beams, was a Ouija board that must go back to at least Tatiana’s time, if not before. There was no planchette, so we made our own out of scrap wood and furniture tacks. Maybe there was something bad about using that instead of something that went with the Ouija board, I don’t know how it works, but in any event, we tried the board and it went really badly.

We tried to do things officially—Emma and I waited until midnight, we got dressed up nicely, and we went down into the cellar. (There are a bunch of rooms down there that are highly spooky and look like they’ve been used for ghost-ish business in the past.) We extinguished witchlights (no electricity down there any more than it’s anywhere else), lit lots of candles. Ghosts love candles, right? We had a bolt of black silk to sit on that Emma found in a trunk somewhere, and we sat on either side of the board and both put our hands on the planchette.

Us: HELLO

Nothing.

Us: WEMEANNOHARM

The candles guttered, but most of the windows in the room are smashed, so with the usual draft from outside I’m not sure we can count that as a response.

Us: WHATISYOURNAME

We heard a scratching sound coming from one of the walls, and we opened up that wall in great excitement, but it turned out to be a badger. Actually, it was a mother badgers and some badger cubs, which was very cute until the mother starting trying to kill us. So we had to interrupt and go get the gnomes to help us and they relocated the badger family to a glade of some kind. (They also issued us a bill for “badger decampment.”)

This was all very disappointing. Emma said that maybe it was rude to ask for the ghost’s name before introducing ourselves.

Emma: MYNAMEISEMMACARSTAIRS

Me: ANDMYNAMEISJULIANBLACKTHORN

Well, that got a reaction. As soon as I finished the last “N” the board leapt off the ground and twisted violently around. The planchette went flying and Emma went to go retrieve it from the other end of the room, but then when she came back the board went flying around in the air and, I am sorry to say, we chased it around for probably two full minutes without catching it. Eventually the ghost got bored, I guess, and the Ouija board stopped in midair and shattered into pieces, which fell to the ground. And all the candles went out. (There were sixteen pieces, if that means anything. Emma says no, I said we should mention it anyway just in case.)

So…any advice? Too much ghostly energy for an old Ouija board? Defective board in the first place? Does the ghost want to be left alone? (If so, why does it keep knocking things over?) Did we offend it? There hasn’t been anything like that since, but exploding Ouija board seemed sufficiently threatening that I wanted to get in touch. What do you think is our next step?

Again, I’m really sorry to bother you, but your help would mean a lot to me. I really want to make Blackthorn Hall a place that the Blackthorns can use again, a place that will feel like a second home for all of us. And it would be nice if people in London associated the Blackthorns with a grand manor house rather than an infamous wreck. Which is not going to happen if visitors wake up with their hair tied to the bedposts, or have their suitcases upended on the staircase. In payment, we promise you as much babysitting as you like, whenever you need. Although maybe once we’re no longer living in a collapsing death-trap.

Much obliged—

Julian

I think Alastair is going to die in cot because of so many reasons, but also this unidentified snippet:

He spends so much time convincing Thomas he’s not in love with him (or at least giving Thomas that impression) and it makes sense for one of them to die because it would be utterly heartwrenching.

I very much hope I’m wrong though

guide for texting people you want to befriend by a person who is terrible at texting but is living a success story right now and wants to share

1. find any possible intro message, could be something you’ve talked about or something on social media or a question based on something you know about them

2. ask follow up questions to your intro message

3. keep asking follow up questions (maybe throw in some personal details)

4. write a message with ZERO questions but something that invites questions from the other part. this forces the convo to become more two-sided because you’re no longer the one extending the conversation

5. keep doing this. once you have a bit of a habit of texting you can change topics more freely or even casually make plans

remember, be brave!

Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.

my strategy for how to become friends with someone

1. find mutual friends (or at least someone who knows them better than you)

2. make plans with the mutual friends and their friend groups

3. once at the plans, talk to the person you want to befriend. hopefully you can have a nice conversation with or without the others

4. exchange social media or numbers or something

5. keep doing steps 2 and 3 til you feel that you can make plans with the person themselves (or make up a practical excuse to meet them outside of your friend groups)

6. if successful, you are now friends

if also in the nordics: never trust how you feel about your life after 2:30 pm

"never trust how you feel abt ur life after 9pm" is a spring & summer & fall rule. for winter it's never trust how u feel abt ur life after 4pm

reblog if you’re NOT tumblr famous, but you ARE tired and kinda gay