Free Red Solstice (Alfheim Book 1) by Unknown Page B

down a lot of notes for future reference and hoped that there would be a future that I would reference.  Hilda arriving home discovered I had barely eaten and was concerned but I brushed this off saying I actually had not missed food and no I did not feel ill.  However, I did get enough enthusiasm together for their evening meal and I even helped finish that final bottle of wine.  It was almost a celebration.
     
    I have discovered that Hilda moved here around the same time as my parents and unlike me she has a taste for the historic.  I had always wondered why our town was so far of the radar in its approach to modern living, and why we did not have regular television and other benefits.  It seems that the town was originally settled by a religious group that liked to live as their ancestors had done.  This meant that they did not want the modern world to intrude on them and so many things were banned that people outside saw as life's basics, such as good communication systems and fast travel.  Things did improve or we would not have had the town hall library and the weekly markets but it was not until the brewery set up at the lip of the valley that a car or lorry was ever seen and in this end of the valley it is still a rarity. 
     
    Some of the more hippy style craftspeople and musicians were drawn to the simplicity of the life here and gradually the old and new merged.  It was around this time, Hilda told me, that my father and mother moved here.  Originally there was a steady  trade in vegetables and craft goods but when the economic collapse came the market for our crafts died out which is why the dock end of the town is such a devastated place.  At one point we even had a small fishing fleet working down there and there was talk of using the water to transport beer but that also had only a small market and so the larger transport ships gradually passed us by.
     
    Eventually we got electricity and decent sewage but at that time telecommunications were not generally run underground and so the telephone systems would not work for us with the high steep valley walls blocking signals and making the building of pylons almost impossible.  This also proved a problem for radio signals as well and only the college has the equipment to allow broadcasts or capture their reception.  We rely heavily on our education system including the library and the traders for our knowledge of the outside world.
     
    The original settlers kept to their more Christian celebrations but the influx of hippies and crafts people brought with them some more pagan sects and although these in theory could have clashed with the Christians' ways, they in fact kept an open mind in the matter and many people therefore came to celebrate everything that seemed a good idea at the time.  The Solstice was part of this and originally it was a druid festival except there were no actual druids in the town but there were a few that deemed themselves Wiccans and they saw the Solstice points as being as much theirs as the druids did.  Also the Wiccans had a festival close to Christmas which just made the entire celebration just a bit bigger and longer.  It was probably one of the best ideas for religious integration ever thought up as everyone seemed to gain from it.  The church was full at significant times no matter if the people in it were there for Harvest festival or Autumn Equinox, Halloween or All Saints day.
     
    The Summer Solstice was at a point in the year where not much else was happening and when there is not much happening then usually people want to make something happen and for the people of the town that meant turning it into a big party with lots of beer and fireworks followed by a day off work to recover.  Originally it marked the turning of the Spring into Summer and when the druids were in charge they usually gathered at some place like Stonehenge to march around and light bonfires.  Then everyone would wait for the first rays