A Fairytale?

In 2007 Rich and I went to the Leeds Festival. We only just made it there alive. Rich was pretty torn up about some chick that he shared a house with in Didsbury called Suzie. Granted, she was a bit of a tease, using him a little, and manipulating his highly sensitive and equally fragile self esteem at that time, causing severe anger management issues. She was just fucking him, he was going out with her though. We were in Rich’s little Rover 200 series, not the safest car on the road, especially with Rich’s driving, even at the best of times. Anyway, he’d been ranting about Suzie for a good forty minutes whilst taking a few texts from his other housemates updating him as to her latest movements. I swear there was steam coming out of his ears and he’d hit the dashboard so hard a couple of times I was surprised that it hadn’t cracked. The motorway was pretty busy and all of a sudden people were slamming on their brakes and hazard warning lights up front. Rich was completely oblivious and quite simply blinded by rage. As soon as we motored on beyond safe stopping distance I shouted up for Rich to slow down sharpish, he snapped out of his rage and immediately panicked, slamming his brakes on hard. The car started to skid and pitch slightly sideways, blue smoke from the tyres was rolling over the bonnet, we were not going to stop in time so I grabbed the handbrake. We shuddered to a halt and then stall between two lanes and a foot behind the two cars in front, lucky for us there had been nothing directly behind us. The festival was not our usual hedonistic romp, and I saw little of Rich. I often wandered off on my own at festivals and this one was no exception, there’s no pressure see, and I was soon in my element swinging through the hours, celebrating the continued blessing of being alive. When the last day came around, I managed to meet Becks, a girl I’d kind of been long distance dating and she drew Rich out a bit with tits and drink. Becks and I had met at my brother’s birthday some years back, she was a friend of my brother’s wife, we’d had tremendous sex on the night we met and a couple of times since. Becks wanted more of the same at the festival, strangely I didn’t however, and so B-lined off to get wrecked. They were pretty trippy pills and things started to get really good as the light went. There was an area of pub benches at the festival where during the day people could hang out and drink in their hundreds, it had a sort of giant beer garden vibe. However, late on it was sparsely populated and the pub benches were used more for rolling joints than anything else. I stopped for a time to observe and this is when it happened. No more than twenty feet away, I actually saw myself rolling a joint. This wasn’t just someone who looked like me, it was definitely me. I moved in for a closer inspection and sure enough there was no doubt that it was me and I wasn’t dreaming. I dare not approach to introduce myself to myself, just in case I disturbed the space time continuum or transcended into another dimension never to return, so instead I just stared. The next thing I knew a whole load of faerie type folk rushed around my knees. The males had long wispy beards, gnarly noses and big hairy warts, and so did the females, just to a lesser extent! They were dressed in fairytale like miniature outfits and pretty much whisked me off my feet as they danced around me laughing and clapping like a whirlwind. They were gone before I knew they were gone. I looked up towards the bench where I’d seen myself and I was gone, there was just complete quiet in all immediate directions and no sign of anything I’d just witnessed. Although confused and a little disturbed, I gathered myself together and went in search of music. I found some coming from where the Mystical Nik Nak stall had been during the day and it was banging. They had battened the hatches of the tent that housed their shop floor and surrounding the place with makeshift railings. After a couple of attempts I realised there was no getting in so I just stood outside on the grass dancing. Within about twenty minutes a small gathering of dancers had accumulated, an hour later there must have been a hundred, all clapping and whooping. I’ll never forget one of the stall keepers faces as she poked her head out of a flap to have a look outside, two seconds later the volume went up.