This elegant sculpture is of King Harold, the legendary Horse King of Selhurst Common. I know it’s a bit far away, but there was a fence in the way, so I couldn’t get any closer. Whilst the landowner is enlightened enough to commemorate empires of horses, they are not enlightened enough to let people get close enough to properly worship the past. If I could have gotten closer, the base on which the horse head is resting would reveal to me an epitaph relating the mighty deeds of King Harold, from a time not too long ago. A time which could have extended to the present, if we human’s hadn’t turned out to be so narcissistic about who we celebrated and raised up in our myths and legends. In the olden days, we shared the mythic space with legendary beasts of which King Harold is a type. Beasts which soared in
What is Monkey looking for? Some say it’s justice, other’s the end times, other’s still his clan. I know though, that it’s actually a 20p piece: a special one he’s carried for more than fifty years. Monkey got the coin in change from a sweet shop when he was a kid. The sweet shop owner was the first human of any size to treat Monkey with dignity and respect, and didn’t even ask Monkey for any ID when he bought his cigarettes. So Monkey fell in love with the sweet shop owner, in his strange monkey-like way, and kept that 20p with him for ever and ever after, amen. Until recently, that is. One day, one sad and sorry day I should say, Monkey was playing with the calves of the cows in the Lammas Lands. He was running and jumping, climbing and rolling, and having a real monkey of a time
This is Rose, she is related to Deadloggosaurus, but is a much more modern descendant. She’s also considerably more benevolent than Deadloggosaurus, and is actually the gateway to the Land of Milk and Honey. You can find her on Holmbury Hill. The way to gain entrance is to present Rose with a jar of honey. If your offering is deemed acceptably delicious enough (tip: only present her with raw, organic, glyphosate-free honey), you will magically get pulled through to the other side. Don’t worry if you think you won’t fit through her gateway mouth, the magic will take care of that. You won’t get a scratch or a splinter, I swear. You should know that it’s only worth bothering to have this adventure if you are a dairy lover, as literally everything on the other side is made of it. Mountains of Stilton, sofas of brie, fountains of chocolate milk, etc., etc.
There are lots of kooky tellybox shows which say that aliens built our wonders like the pyramids and Stonehenge and whatnot. To be honest, I think they are probably right because this pod fell from the sky a very long time ago, and once contained millions and millions of books and their Reader. The Reader who lived and traveled in the pod came from a star system full of light and stories. Her planet had fourteen suns, although they were smaller than our own. The suns were different colours and traced patterns across the sky so that the whole day was kind of like a rainbow. Not too bright though, due to their smaller size, and the fact that they were pastel coloured. As beautiful as the light show sky was, the Reader sometimes found it annoying, as not all of the colours were the best to read by. So one
These are called tree crisps and are a very rare find indeed. In fact, they’re so rare that I had to consult my Woodland Trust app to even know what they are. According to the app, tree crisps (or arbores calamistratus to use their proper name) generally taste of salt and vinegar. However, there are some varieties growing in the West Country which taste like prawn cocktail, and in extremely rare occasions in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, you may find tomato ketchup flavoured ones. I don’t know about that though, it sounds a bit far fetched to me, but then again, so does deep frying a pizza. The reason tree crisps are so rare is because they only appear to hungry travellers who habitually kiss trees. I wasn’t actually hungry as it goes: the tree mistook my fannying about taking random photos of Serious Pig rosemary cheese balls as a