Dear friends and supporters, I am sorry I have been a bit silent recently - my personal life has been very difficult. I'm working every day on the book, but progress is much slower than I would wish. There's no real chance of it being finished and published this year, so think 2022! In the meantime, I thought I would share something with you which isn't part of The Hidden Matrix at all. It's my short biography of the extraordinary self-created storyteller and singer Ruth Tongue, for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, who have kindly agreed to make it open access for a short period. As soon as I heard recordings of Ruth in the BBC archives nearly 40 years ago, with her middle class, educated voice, suddenly modulating into "Mummerzet" when she performed, I knew she was a fake. I didn't include any of her stories in my English Folktales. But my attitude towards her has changed, because I realise she was both fake and real - her storytelling talent was true, but her stories about her songs and stories were not. She just really did not distinguish between creation and collection. Katharine Briggs was completely taken in by her, in a way which makes their joint Folktales of England the weakest of all the volumes in Richard Dorson's Folktales of the World series (University of Chicago Press or Routledge, depending on which side of the pond). My thinking about Ruth Tongue has been partly influenced by discovering the writer David Southwell and his imaginary county of Hookland, in which "nothing is made up, just remembered differently". Ruth was the mistress of remembering things differently. I hope you will find this interesting: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-63241