Welcome to Roon Soup, a podcast about Magic, Culture and the Paranormal, coming to you from Sunny West London.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. Enjoy. Today on Roon soup, it is my extra special pleasure to be speaking with one of the key

instigators of the 20th century British magical revival, none other than Lionel Snell,

aka Ramsey Dukes.

Lionel, thank you so much for your time.

Hi, well it's a pleasure.

Actually, I've just been, spent this short while beforehand looking for your website which I thought was rather amazing

and particularly I've been learning about e-books because I'm going to have to do more of that.

Well that's very high praise I know it's certainly a pleasure for me to be speaking to you as well

especially as your kind of east of Greenwich so I'm not up in the middle of the night having a

talk so I've got to I've got to find more people east of the UK to do this with.

Oh yeah yes. So there's a classic question that we start most of the shows with

Lionel which is were you a weird kid? Well, you know, this, I've been listening to one or two of the other podcasts and this really had me thinking

because, you see I brought, I was brought up in fairly deep countryside in Gloucestershire.

Now to determine whether you're weird you have to have a norm to measure against. And when you've got a very scattered population

and a small population, there isn't such an obvious norm. Now, see, when I was tiny tiny I used to just wander for miles and miles and I could go about a

mile up to the main road and only pass one house.

And I remember a woman asking me how old are you,

and I didn't know, so I went back and asked my mother

and she said you're four.

Now by modern standards, to have a four-year-old kid my mother and she said you're four.

Now by modern standards to have a four year old kid wandering on his own for a mile

...