Food, life and travel

Do you know what I want to see more of in literature? I want more Pratchett-style witches. Not in the headology and the things which are unique to Pratchett’s world, but this whole notion of tough-as-old-boots old women doctoring and standing guard over a community, somewhere between James Herriot and Harry Dresden. Witches being called out at midnight to attend at a birth or cure a sick cow, and then having to stay on their feet to deal with an old lady who needs her medicine dropped off, or to lay out the dead and help wash the sheets they died in, because that’s not a job for the faint-hearted, and then have to go and take back another family’s child who’s been stolen by fairies or undo a curse besetting a man who wandered into the woods and disturbed things he ought not have touched. Witches who live their lives on call, spending most of their time going from one emergency to another and never stopping to breathe for a moment because there’s still work to be done. Witches who rarely receive thanks for their work, and when they do it's only for the most desperate, hard-earned struggle a witch could hope to live through, and sometimes not even then. Witches who are crabby and difficult and snappish all the time, but will still work all hours of the night to get a community through an epidemic or save a life that might otherwise have been lost. Witches who cultivate fearsome reputations, because if every horror in the dark is scared stiff of you they’re not going to come and cause trouble in your bit of territory, to the people you live and work among every day. Just…Terry Pratchett’s idea of witching can’t die with him, because it’s the most perfect notion of witchcraft I’ve ever read, and I’ve never wanted anything so much.

This. This is exactly perfect.