Witches of Lychford: Night of the Gnomes

Episode 21 (November #1, 2023)

Zoya had to close her eyes.  When she’d been younger, before Jas had come along, she’d spent some time in the towns to the east of her home country, communities where sympathies had lain more with Moscow than with Kyiv.  She’d listened to the talk in the coffee bars there, and what she’d heard had made her close her eyes in just the same way as she was now.  There was something about people, she thought, not even just about human beings but about gnomes too, where they seemed only able to choose one thing out of two.  Us and them.  Good and evil.  The latter assigned to the former.  Everything in-between, everything awkward, got shoved into one of the two camps.  And doing that distorted the real world, destroyed all hope of finding what was actually true, if that truth was a problem for the tribe you’d chosen.  ‘Can you even hear yourselves?’ she said, too quietly she thought for anyone to hear above all the shouting.