Circling the Square Mile

An invitation to join us in doing something magickal on February 29th, Leap Day

Scene I

Take note! Pay heed! Give time! Now listen in –
wire-swaddled, server-coddled code sings …

‘under the fiddling Atlantic, filling fibre optics,
faster than a raindrop, algorithms girdle the globe. 

Clever someone’s getting richer, others getting poorer,
mischief in the numbers, trickery in the terminals.’

Now listen, wi-fi fireflies sing out …

‘our language is new,  quick and briar true,
tangled, thornyfair, we have tales for you,
in this monied, glossolalien air.’

---

On February 29th, Leap Day, 2020 a group of us planted the world’s largest faery ring around the City of London’s financial district, an area traditionally known as the ‘Square Mile’.

Leap Day is a calendarial portal isn’t it? A strange, mysterious day that only opens up every four years.

On February 29th 2024 we will strengthen, rebuild and replant the vast, shimmering, magickal and binding faery ring. Will you take a day off from the machine and join us?

Let me tell you the story of why we did what we did in 2020.

It started for me in 2019. I had just shut my design studio to focus fully on what writing can do. I was appallingly in debt, very miserable and working on some deeply demeaning projects with money-minded deadsouls from the City. One morning I was being crushed on Bank underground station during rush hour and came to the inevitable conclusion that my existence wasn’t far off Richard Dadd’s 1855 painting ‘The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke’ – confused, nightmarish and populated by bizarro people whose motivations I couldn’t fathom.

Some lines of verse arrived in my head.

Delays at Bank.
A hundred faces buried together,
two hundred nuts,
three hundred berries, 
more gather forever and ever. 
An acre of underground folk,
spat-pip heads a-bobbing like mice in a wickedswarm,
and every eye from beeswing lace to dead ladybird  
to the milk-purple dragonfly dash. From chittery rub 
of the cricket, to peppery ants in a wrenstitch line.

---

And I realised with a rumbling underground insight that the world’s Financial Traders (you know, the people who don’t actually make anything but whose gambling triggered the 2009 crash, the global effects of which we are still reeling from today) are the Faery Folk the old tales warned us about.

Hear me out …

Pick up any book of old country tales depicting the ‘Good Folk’, as they like to be known, and you’ll quickly realise three things about the Fae.

They are usually human-sized and in human form (no cute Disney Tinkerbells here), they are indistinguishable from people until …

… you understand they are amoral – they do not care for the rest of us one jot, they’ll do their thing and if some poor person gets caught in their path then woe betide because …

… everything they do is transactional. You’ll be offered a seemingly fabulous deal until it’s time to pay up and then you realise you’ve been bested in all manner of restrictive, punitive ways.

Now read those three characteristics and apply them to the avaricious denizens of all-glass mountains in the City.

---

Take note! Pay heed! Give time and listen in –
dilly-dally mad-merry data sings ...

‘Come to the tower-dappled unreal City, 
glassorexic buildings with corporationmagic names.
The Milkchurn, The Bower. 
The Apple Basket, The Hearth.
The Sealed Wall and The Stile.’

That’s a bunch of City bankers taking their guardians Gog and Magog out for their annual parade. Faery Folk I tell you.

Following my financial folkoric revelations I wrote a long poem entitled The Weeping Cufflinks. A poem and a cautionary tale. Extracts of which you’re reading in this post. You can find The Weeping Cufflinks in my Selected Workings or These were days of endless endless.

*Then* whispers were put out on the wind to seed the meme into culture that City traders are the Faery Folk the old tales warned us about. A rush of beautiful creative people responded including the brilliant Marc and Rosey of stoplookandlisten.studio

And Rosey and Marc created the epic idea of surrounding the Square Mile with a perfect circle of handcrafted bronze mushrooms. It’s an idea so sublime I would be very surprised if it isn’t part of London legend in one hundred years time.

How do we root out and cleanse the dark corners of capitalism? By weirding it of course. This is that.

But the magick only works if we keep reinforcing the faery ring every four years. Reweirding.

So will you join us? Email me back to be part of it all. Everyone welcome. We meet at the Royal Exchange on the morning of Thursday February 29th. Split into teams. It’ll take about two hours. Then we go to the pub.

With apologies to anyone called Toby, here’s a meeting happening in the City right now.

It was not enough a coincidence to comment upon. 
Every man was Toby.

A Toby presenting, a Toby pouring tea.
One Toby chairing, three Tobys drinking tea.

One Toby in the corner on his mobile,
talking to another Toby 
who is not part of this scene,
now you forget about him,
just a creature of whim.

The Tobys were all markedly different,
diversity is so important now-a-days.

Toby Merrybuck likes cycling.
Toby Nibble likes sport.
Toby Oakenpurse goes skiing.
Toby Coughleaf also likes sport.
Toby Jamtoday is a whizz at numbers,
he asks hard questions about the bottom line,
that’s his thing. Toby Shycrown hasn’t cried
for eight years, he feels he ought to
but his tears don’t. 

Merrybuck wears chinos,
so does Oakenpurse. Coughleaf wears brown,
Jamtoday a suit. On Fridays they dress down
and wear gorse and the furze of the heath
and wind-ripped mist and speckles of sticky peat 
and the path of a frog and bog water … on the inside,
on the outside they wear jeans.