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‘It was sunset, and the sun was coming down. The sunset was spectacular. I was up the farm ‘doing the jobs’ (feeding the birds, checking the enclosures, driving birds in and shutting them up for the night) on my own. I would have been nine, ten, eleven – that sort of age. Late primary. I was unhappy, which wasn’t unusual. The sunset looked like a bright world hanging in the sky and I looked at it and wished for escape. And instead of looking away I carried on looking until a bright light came from the sky and turned into a sort of elaborate hot air balloon full of tall, elegant, bejewelled beings with peacock blue skin and shimmering golden hair. I was a well-read child, I’d read my Nesbit and Farjeon, so I knew exactly the risks I was taking when I spoke to them, went into their ship, and read a book they gave me, and ate their food, and I didn’t care. At the same time I had an awareness, like a shadow, of myself standing still in the field as the sun went down. The quality of the experience was not like a daydream, more like a really loud noise, coming from somewhere else, that drowned out everything else. There was music, but it was like a single chord playing continuously. I remember being offered some sort of choice, suggesting they came in response to my original wish, of a single, proper escape, or the ability to escape whenever I wanted, but always having to come back. I took the second choice, and although they said they had given me something – the ability to escape – it felt more like something had been taken from me. I was returned to the field via a pretty rope ladder, and the craft flew back into the last threads of the sunset, becoming a light, then nothing. I did see/hear/feel other things as I grew up, and even as an adult, but nothing with the absolute elaborate beauty, grandeur and narrative compulsion of this experience. I felt the compulsion both to share the story and to keep it a secret so I wrote up a slightly elaborated version for a free writing exercise at school. While I was writing it the same sense of harmonious compulsion came over me and I was unable to stop writing until the end of the story, writing through my break and part of another lesson.’ ‘Tall, slender. Hair shades of gold, clothing long robes in dense bright colours with an iridescent sheen, scattered with pearly jewels, small gems and sparkle. Very, very beautiful. Peacock blue skin, with an iridescent sheen to it. They kept their expressions quite muted, and spoke without moving their eyes. They looked amused/aloof/interested/speculative. They moved with a sort of painful grace.’ ‘A single glorious chord playing really loudly and continuously, which made it hard to think, and kept you focussed on the experience. The memory of that noise itself is weirdly compelling.’ ‘People spoke of strange things happening in the village certainly – the field I was in was called *** Field and was a bit weird.’ Why do you think your experience was a fairy experience, as opposed to a ghost or an alien or an angel or some other type of anomalous experience? ‘Good question. Later, in my teens, when I read the right books (!) I noticed the similarity of my experience to alien abduction accounts. But I think it is essentially a Fairy experience. It happens in response to a wish. It involves a transaction. The experience is one of joyful compulsion. It is marked with music, beauty and wonder. It answers a need.’ What are fairies? ‘I genuinely don’t know.’ ‘I think that part of what came out of my experience was the ability to believe/experience something, and at the same time not believe/experience it. I think this was both important to me developmentally, and helped me manage things in my life and about my own sensory experience which might otherwise have been much more difficult.’