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My mother didn’t have it easy.

She didn’t even have a sense of smell.

And while the rest of 1980s Ireland had miraculous moving statues, we made do with mysterious margarine.

Back in those days, butter was bad and margarine was good, so young Morgan et al. all ate margarine.

Sometimes my breakfast toast tasted fine with it.

Some mornings the margarine was weird.

A brand new tub.

Just opened the previous night.

I had put it on my evening toast.

My mother had put it on her evening potatoes.

No problems.

Now it tasted yuck.

It stumped me every time it happened.

Good margarine.

Toast and potatoes.

Bad margarine.

I couldn’t ask my mother for help.

She had no sense of smell, remember, and that messed with her sense of taste, too.

That’s why she added garlic to her potatoes and margarine.

Aha!

Look, I understand about garlic, now, but I still don’t know where she even found the garlic back then.

Yes, my mother was a double-dipper.

Going in for margarine, rubbing it over the garlic on her spuds.

Then going in for more with the same knife.

Making it taste strange if you weren’t expecting garlic-flavoured margarine.

So, the dark mystery was solved, and Mum’s up there now, spreading margarine with the angels.

It’s time to forgive her for her margarine mind tricks.

But you won’t forgive yourselves if you miss out on 50% off loads of my books – and The Phoenix for free.

You’ve got 72 hours before the Smashwords End of Year sale ends.

Go now.

​Quickly!

The Smashwords sale is over but you can still get two more free ebooks from me here!

Chat soon,

Morgan

Get 2 free ebooks from Morgan here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter.

Families are great.

But a lot.

If you’ve had about enough of yours, tell them this is a very important email you have to read.

I’ll back you up.

And it is important, as I present some crazy New Year traditions, that will make your party go with a bang!

Killer List of 10 Bread-Based New Year Traditions.

1. At a party, wait until the countdown to the new year starts before throwing a bread roll over your shoulder. You might hit the person you one day marry in the face with it.

2. Villages used to get through tough winters with the help of crafty bakers. The bakers lined the walls of bears’ dens with layers of puff pastry in autumn while the bears were foraging. Once the bear started hibernating, the bakers would heat the den until the pastry expanded and suffocated the bear. Hungry villagers could pay a penny to eat as much as they were able during the first week of January.

3. In Liechtenstein, they consider it ill-luck to start the new year with leftover bread. Liechtensteiners celebrate New Year’s Eve by dumping their old bread on the street, then racing their neighbours to sweep it into the nearest river or canal first.

4. Irish men who don’t want to die as virgins – but definitely want to die – will spend their New Year’s Eves tossing doughnuts onto the ring fingers of patient banshees. New Year’s Eve is the only day of the year that banshees feel like company.

Though not for long, as the mating habit of banshees resembles that of praying mantises.

5. In the Champagne region of France, people fire rockets inserted into balls of dough at midnight. The rocket simultaneously cooks the bread lightly and explodes it.

People from the Champagne region are called “Huskies”, not “Champagners”, and this is the “yellow snow” that Frank Zappa once warned about. Zappa preferred well-toasted, almost burnt, bread.

6. In ancient Rome, Caligula was gifted an enormous “life-size” chess set made of bread. At a loose end one New Year’s Eve, he ate the entire thing.

Feeling ill the next morning, he forbade the eating of “queens, bishops, or prawns [sic].” Even today, some people still won’t eat bishops in honour of Caligula’s tummy trouble.

7. Before hair dryers, fashionable ladies dried their hair in the oven in order to be ready on time for the New Year’s Ball at the castle. They protected their hair from the heat by wrapping it in pastry.

8. In England, grating buns on a hedgehog’s back on January 1st is considered lucky.

9. In Switzerland, people used to believe that cuckoos caused the passage of time. In 1431, the Council of Basel tried to stop time by eradicating cuckoos.

The clever cuckoos hid in other birds’ nests.

Not wishing to look foolish, Pope Martin V made his baker work all that week.

He baked thousands of pieces of cuckoo-shaped bread. These were “drowned” in Wildenstein Castle pond on the last day of the year.

10. In Japan, young women are increasingly opting for NYBBBs (“New Year Baked Bread Boyfriends”) instead of old-fashioned real ones. Over 90% claim real boyfriends “don’t like being buttered.” A claim that this author finds astonishing.

If that’s whetted your appetite for strange stories, you’ll find tasty bargains at the Smashwords end-of-year sale before 01st of January, 2026. Get 50% off many of my books here.

Chat soon,

Morgan

Get 2 free ebooks from Morgan here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter.

The Battle Smurfs are back in the cinema.

James Cameron calls it Avatar, but we all know.

We visited the cinema last week to see Osgood Perkins’ new film, Keeper, which was excellent.

No cinema this week.

Sorry, but No Papa Smurf + No Smurfette = No Morgan in the Audience.

I’ll catch up on my reading instead.

When we lived in Berlin, I went to DVD rental shop, Videodrom, every day.

On the way home from work, I’d pop in, grab whatever looked most interesting and then go home.

Watch the DVD.

Or not, if I didn’t feel like it.

Easy.

Now there’s choice everywhere.

Nadine and I take turns picking what to watch every other day.

I always groan when it’s my turn.

We’ve got Netflix, Prime and Mubi, and I waste hours scrolling and trying to choose.

Too much choice.

So, I made it easy for you today.

The third season (!) of Sleepytime Supervillain Theatre just started over on YouTube, and it’s all you need this weekend.

Like James Cameron, I’ve pulled out several stops for my latest video.

Background music!

Special effects!

No stringy, fish-faced Smurfs!

The brand-new series kicks off with a story about a birthday present you can’t take back…

Watch “Darned Wool” on YouTube here now!

Chat soon,

Morgan

Get 2 free ebooks from Morgan here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter.

I got caught in the terrifying crosshairs of Facebook’s war on AI this week.

Trying to contact author Robert Shearman for a non-fiction thing, I “friended” him on Facebook last Friday.

I also posted a link to my “Stupid Paranoia” YouTube video, which mentioned naked plumbers.

One of those things – or the combination of both – made Facebook suspend my account in case I was a rogue AI.

To prove otherwise, I had to upload a video of my face.

When I tried, my webcam wouldn’t work, showing a webcam icon with a red X where my beautiful bonce should have been.

“Very good,” said Facebook. “Now look left.”

I did so, wondering if Mark Zuckerberg himself had just materialised to help me.

He hadn’t.

“Look up.”

I did, snatching a glance at the screen, which still just showed the X-ed out camera.

No sign of my face.

“Look right.”

In for a penny… I looked right.

“We’ll get back to you,” said Facebook. “But if you’re not real, we’ll delete your account.”

“But…“ I wanted to explain about the webcam.

They contacted me on Tuesday, and I am real, because I’m allowed back on the platform!

Which suggests either:

I don’t actually have a face (and Facebook doesn’t care), or

my webcam can see me even when the computer thinks it’s off…

But at least I’m not an AI.

Which means my books weren’t written by AI.

To celebrate, get 50% – or even 100% – off loads of them at Smashwords’ massive End of Year Sale right here!

Chat soon,

Morgan

Read more — and get two free ebooks — here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter.

Congratulations to Hippolyte Pixii for winning my Name of the Week award!

Posthumous congrats, I’m afraid, as he passed away in 1835.

Hippolyte Pixii is famous for building an early model magneto.

Magnetos are like dynamos, but produce alternating current (AC), while dynamos produce direct current (DC).

And if you win a pub quiz with any of that information, I get 10% of your hamper.

I stumbled across Hippolyte while researching dynamos for The Cat Wore Black.

Before realising I didn’t need any of it after all.

But it proves that, shall we say, distinctive names weren’t invented by modern out-of-touch celebrities and billionaire horse tranquillizer enthusiasts.

I feel Elon Musk – to pick a random name out of the air – would be all over a name like that.

Especially if you told him that Pixii meant, I don’t know, 6-711.

P being the Roman numeral for the 6-7 meme, and IXII being an alternative, less-woke way to write 11.

9 and 2, see? Sorry, I’ve clearly made the coffee too strong this morning.

But suggest it to Elon the next time you bump into him.

He’s always on the lookout for great new names for his growing army of children.

Speaking of which…

A man takes an evening walk to find the foxes he can hear every time the sun goes down.

But as day turns to night, he gets lost.

And learns the noise comes from something much worse in this week’s unsettling bedtime story, “Foxes at Night” over on YouTube now!

Chat soon,

Morgan

Read more – and get two free ebooks – here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter.

it’s been all bloody go here at the HQ of the Official Hawkinge-By-Hythe Historical Society.

First, I had those man sniffles, then a sudden change in weather gave me a migraine.

And then I got lumbago.

Look, I hate making a fuss, but I’m putting my foot down – carefully, because of the lumbago – whoever has the Morgan voodoo doll, could you stop now, please?

The internet tells me “lumbago” is an “outdated term for lower back pain”, and I agree.

We should all be using the more evocative German term instead: Hexenschuss.

Literally “witch shot.”

(In the sense of shot by a witch, not shot with a witch. Though if you found a witch hard and knobbly enough, the effect would be the same, I suppose.)

Witch shot gives you a better idea of how sudden, nasty and inexplicable it is.

I just bent down to recharge my ereader, and suddenly all movement was agony.

Yep, you can definitely see how superstitious peasants would assume evil magic was at play.

There you are, sweeping out your hovel with a broom – or bending down to recharge your ereader – and bang, you’re a has-been.

Not that I believe in witches, of course.

Just fairies.

Horrible things they are, mad keen on dancing.

Dancing? Me? With this back?

No, I’m well out of it.

Unlike graverobbers, Aicke and Bowen.

When the Fairy Queen invites them to dine and dance, they can dance…

Or they can be dinner.

Find out what else is on the menu now.

​A Grave & Dreadful Business is no longer an Amazon exclusive! Click here to see if your favourite bookshop already has it!

Chat soon,

Morgan

Read more – and get two free ebooks – here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter.