The birds that I’m drawn to, just purely by chance, everything from crows and other corvids through to herons who were guardians of the gates of the other world, in Irish and Welsh mythology. She suggests we live with the force and essence of life as our culture tries to persuade us that ageing is to be shunned. Manda: I think Sharon is so erudite and goes into such depth in her writing, but it’s always an honour and an edgy excitement to speak with her. So all of those things and the fact that she is really, really funny just make me adore Granny Weatherwax.

Sharon: And to see that marriage of all of those qualities; the integrity, the, you know, sense of humour, the fierceness, the I’m not going to budge if I think it’s right.

So this brings up a lot of questions that again, probably reflect my ignorance of mythology and the past. But even now, the conversation seemed to be more on well-being and health and staying young-looking and beautiful during menopause and elder hood, and not on inspirations for actually going through it, doing it fully, and maybe actually finding yourself transformed in a positive way by the experience. It’s an autobiographical account full of rich stories and anecdotes, which weaves a world where everything is connected.

I wanted people to be inspired to think that there could be something quite magical after menopause, if we just take that as a, you know, a handy midpoint for for many people or change point for many people. Which subsequently about just under a year later was clearly associated with the lymphoma that I was then diagnosed with. So that in the first half of your life, you’ve done all of the building and the creating and the playing and the growing and, you know, in whatever fashion that has taken. So to me, to go to those stories, to look for examples, inspirations, something beautiful and magical that can really capture the imagination, was what I wanted to do. Her books have been translated into several languages, and she has been interviewed by the BBC, US public radio and other broadcasters on her areas of expertise.Blackie wants to reconnect you to the natural world, to life-giving goddesses (“no twinkly fairy queens”), to laughter, to argument, and to meaning. The cookie is used to calculate visitor, session, campaign data and keep track of site usage for the site's analytics report. This moving and uplifting book will inspire a new generation of female elders: women who have reclaimed their Inner Hag, matured into their own unique brand of hagitude and who are ready to pass down their deep feminine wisdom for the benefit of the wider Earth community. And she appears at a time in a woman’s life where you’re beginning to turn inwards, kind of for the source of your own wisdom.

Just say a little bit towards the end about the wonder of Granny Weatherwax and what kind of a role model she could be. After studying psychology, I spent several years as an academic neuroscientist/ psychologist specialising in the field of anxiety and panic, and working at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris and the Institute of Neurology in London. These days we own just a small patch of land, and so I am focused more narrowly on the keeping of bees and hens, and the growing of vegetables and herbs. And then she had written songs based on it and singing those songs as a group of women, just in a village hall in Devon, made my marrow melt.We produced a large proportion of our own food, keeping sheep, cows, pigs and a miscellany of poultry; a large thriving polytunnel, and a herb garden. And if any book and concept and the course that you run from it, is ever able to rid our society of its fear of age and death and look up to the wise people who have gone through the alchemical process and come out the other side. And so she is kind of very much a product of her environment in the way that the Cailleach was associated, literally kind of almost immanent in it. It's for any person going through a transition and hoping to come out the other side more in touch with their inner hag.