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- Nov 9, 2017
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- Merry olde Englandeshire
By the time I was twenty one years old my life had changed a lot, as you might imagine. I'd had a couple of experiences with precognition, I'd been diagnosed with depression and after a battle dropped out of education. I had a career of sorts working in a wine shop, I had girlfriends, tried every drug I could lay my hands on (and that was a lot) and had been to America. I'd been kicked out of home by my step-dad a year after I gave my mum away at their wedding but had never moved far from my old home, always within a few minutes walk. I'd had a transformative epiphany after a near death experience which caused me to truly understand my place in the universe and devote myself to being a good person rather than just thinking I was. (Yes, that's a absurdly short shrift to give to a life changing experience, but the disadvantage to the every seven years way these events played out is that big things get skipped over or we'd be here forever!)
By the time I was twenty one I was also expecting a return visit from the 'aliens'. My only concern was that I no longer slept in the same house and I just had to hope they'd find me. I had not wasted my time. I was prepared this time and I had questions. I was not going to cower in fear.
Part 1
In 1998 I was living in the next street to my old family home and so it was easy enough to drop by and visit and as I got a hefty staff discount on alcoholic drinks I'd often pop over and spend time drinking with my younger brother. On this particular night in the autumn we'd been watching "From Dusk Till Dawn" with wine, beer and a bottle of tequila. By the end of the movie I was nicely on the borderline between merry and drunk but he had taken a turn into the horror of maudlin self-pity drunk. My brother had really nothing to complain about. At the age of eighteen, he was a little shorter but quite a bit stockier than beanpole human greyhound me. His grades weren't as great as mine but he was no slouch and I'd dropped out anyway! Also, while I could compete at sprinting and triple jump and never had a girlfriend till I was eighteen, he was in the school basketball and rugby teams as well as being a good academic student and being popular and having girlfriends. I never held a grudge, but this night under the spell of depressed self-pitying drunkenness, to him I had all the luck! I didn't have to live at home (I got kicked out!), I had a job (I had to pay rent and bills!) and worst of all I had a girlfriend!
How dare he! Showing great restraint, I stormed off rather than get into a fight over it.
It was a warm night for the time of year and as I walked down the road towards the church the cool breeze freshened me up and cleared my head. I didn't want to end the night on a downer and my housemates wouldn't be up for anything fun at that time of night and there just over the road from the church and spanning the distance between his street and mine was the park. Somewhere I'd always loved. Dark, beautiful quiet and starlit. I walked over there.
It was a wonderfully clear night and I walked past the sunken gardens to the field beyond, ringed by trees, with only dim street lights filtering through some way off in one direction it was dark and lit only by stars and the moon. I lay down on a grass slope (a mountain by local standards but most other people in the world would call it perfectly flat ground. You get a different scale of elevation growing up in the Fens.* )
I should point out that I have never hallucinated from drinking ever. I'd also taken actual hallucinigenic drugs and not hallucinated. It was quite frustrating. I'd only tripped once at that point by eating part of a bizarre silver unknown mushroom from somewhere in South America and it was nothing like what was about to happen. Still, I thought I should mention the drinking and past history as hallucination is an obvious explanation.
After a while of just stargazing and soaking up the atmosphere and feeling thoroughly happy and at peace with everything (in stark contrast to previous odd happenings) I noticed insects flitting past my eyes. I didn't mind. I certainly didn't lash out at them, but lay still trying to work out what they were and that became a puzzle. England in mid to late autumn is not a place for large insects, much less at night. We may see a 'huge giant moth! Like Mothman or Mothra! It was huge!' but most of the rest of the world would see 'a very small moth. I think. It was really small.' In any case this wasn't at all like moths.
It was dark. There was a distinctive buzzing whine made by the wings as they strafed me totally unlike moths and as they whizzed around my head I could catch glimpses of long translucent wings like a dragonfly with light shining through and a dark stick-like body in silhouette. But I'd only ever seen one dragonfly at a time rarely and on very hot days in mid summer. A swarm at this time of night at this time of year was impossible.
There was more though. They didn't move on, and the shape was wrong, with four spindly limbs visible as an insects wouldn't be and a head shape and the body was wrong. There was a sound and I can't describe it as it makes no sense. All I have is that it was laughter with a quality like tiny tinkling bells. It was joyous but with an edge and I knew they were laughing at me, the great clumsy non-flying lummox! The shape in silhouette was like tiny women made of twigs.
I knew they were a Victorian invention and didn't and never had existed but I was being mocked by little winged fairies!
An exclamation mark just doesn't seem to do how I felt justice and neither do emojis. Just trust that I was about 700 exclamation marks and all caps and all the emojis and I'm going to stop for a break.
*The Fens have not been marshland since they were drained over a century ago but the whole area is flat. It takes a local to discern the subtle non-flatness. We have a hundred different words for flat including flat, slope (flat by any other standard), hill, (also flat), level, mountain (still flat), bottomless abyss (flat but with a small pothole)... and so on.
By the time I was twenty one I was also expecting a return visit from the 'aliens'. My only concern was that I no longer slept in the same house and I just had to hope they'd find me. I had not wasted my time. I was prepared this time and I had questions. I was not going to cower in fear.
Part 1
In 1998 I was living in the next street to my old family home and so it was easy enough to drop by and visit and as I got a hefty staff discount on alcoholic drinks I'd often pop over and spend time drinking with my younger brother. On this particular night in the autumn we'd been watching "From Dusk Till Dawn" with wine, beer and a bottle of tequila. By the end of the movie I was nicely on the borderline between merry and drunk but he had taken a turn into the horror of maudlin self-pity drunk. My brother had really nothing to complain about. At the age of eighteen, he was a little shorter but quite a bit stockier than beanpole human greyhound me. His grades weren't as great as mine but he was no slouch and I'd dropped out anyway! Also, while I could compete at sprinting and triple jump and never had a girlfriend till I was eighteen, he was in the school basketball and rugby teams as well as being a good academic student and being popular and having girlfriends. I never held a grudge, but this night under the spell of depressed self-pitying drunkenness, to him I had all the luck! I didn't have to live at home (I got kicked out!), I had a job (I had to pay rent and bills!) and worst of all I had a girlfriend!
How dare he! Showing great restraint, I stormed off rather than get into a fight over it.
It was a warm night for the time of year and as I walked down the road towards the church the cool breeze freshened me up and cleared my head. I didn't want to end the night on a downer and my housemates wouldn't be up for anything fun at that time of night and there just over the road from the church and spanning the distance between his street and mine was the park. Somewhere I'd always loved. Dark, beautiful quiet and starlit. I walked over there.
It was a wonderfully clear night and I walked past the sunken gardens to the field beyond, ringed by trees, with only dim street lights filtering through some way off in one direction it was dark and lit only by stars and the moon. I lay down on a grass slope (a mountain by local standards but most other people in the world would call it perfectly flat ground. You get a different scale of elevation growing up in the Fens.* )
I should point out that I have never hallucinated from drinking ever. I'd also taken actual hallucinigenic drugs and not hallucinated. It was quite frustrating. I'd only tripped once at that point by eating part of a bizarre silver unknown mushroom from somewhere in South America and it was nothing like what was about to happen. Still, I thought I should mention the drinking and past history as hallucination is an obvious explanation.
After a while of just stargazing and soaking up the atmosphere and feeling thoroughly happy and at peace with everything (in stark contrast to previous odd happenings) I noticed insects flitting past my eyes. I didn't mind. I certainly didn't lash out at them, but lay still trying to work out what they were and that became a puzzle. England in mid to late autumn is not a place for large insects, much less at night. We may see a 'huge giant moth! Like Mothman or Mothra! It was huge!' but most of the rest of the world would see 'a very small moth. I think. It was really small.' In any case this wasn't at all like moths.
It was dark. There was a distinctive buzzing whine made by the wings as they strafed me totally unlike moths and as they whizzed around my head I could catch glimpses of long translucent wings like a dragonfly with light shining through and a dark stick-like body in silhouette. But I'd only ever seen one dragonfly at a time rarely and on very hot days in mid summer. A swarm at this time of night at this time of year was impossible.
There was more though. They didn't move on, and the shape was wrong, with four spindly limbs visible as an insects wouldn't be and a head shape and the body was wrong. There was a sound and I can't describe it as it makes no sense. All I have is that it was laughter with a quality like tiny tinkling bells. It was joyous but with an edge and I knew they were laughing at me, the great clumsy non-flying lummox! The shape in silhouette was like tiny women made of twigs.
I knew they were a Victorian invention and didn't and never had existed but I was being mocked by little winged fairies!
An exclamation mark just doesn't seem to do how I felt justice and neither do emojis. Just trust that I was about 700 exclamation marks and all caps and all the emojis and I'm going to stop for a break.
*The Fens have not been marshland since they were drained over a century ago but the whole area is flat. It takes a local to discern the subtle non-flatness. We have a hundred different words for flat including flat, slope (flat by any other standard), hill, (also flat), level, mountain (still flat), bottomless abyss (flat but with a small pothole)... and so on.
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