The beechwoods of the Chilterns
And Elvis was right. We walked all that afternoon through woods and never heard or saw a motor car at all. As dusk fell we entered an elven settlement in what I calculated to be the Northamptonshire Uplands, though quite where all those trees had come from I never worked out. That evening I was treated to an elven banquet and a harp concert - Aeolian cadences and all that. I returned their hospitality by teaching the assembled company to sing The Land.
I passed the next week with Elvis and we travelled with Gypsies, spent a night with poachers and conversed with foxes and badgers. At length, we reached the beechwoods of the Chilterns and my companion went into Chesham to sell some elven waybread to a vegan supermarket he knows there.
He returned shaking his head. "You humans are funny. In the town there is a special building and all your kind are going in there, putting a cross on a piece of paper and dropping it into a box. What strange ritual is this?"
"Ritual, man? – sorry, elf," I returned. “That’s not ritual: it’s a parliamentary by-election!”
Beginning to think the noble lord has been taking too many ‘herbal remedies’.
ReplyDeleteIt's incredible to think that Lord Bonkers stuck around St Petersberg in 1917 as part of the British delegation organising an international scout jamboree, then 104 years later he's at ground zero of a Liberal revolution no less important.
ReplyDeleteYou couldn't make it up