The world's largest faery ring – Feb 29th
If you’re in London this coming Thursday, February 29th, Leap Day, then this is a last whisper to encourage you to join me and some friends in planting (or rather re-building) the world’s largest faery ring around the ancient City of London – the ‘Square Mile’.
Details and reasons below.
So should you fancy it … we’re meeting at 12:30pm on February 29th at The Royal Exchange (EC3V 3LT) Step out of Bank Station and you’ll see it.
You do not need to bring anything, other than a stout heart, mischief and walking shoes.
We’ll split up into five or so teams, with each team having a section of the ring to plant. You’ll get a map and a clutch of bronze mushrooms. When you arrive at each point in your section you hide a mushroom somewhere – entirely how and where it’s up to you. Obviously don’t break the law or risk hurting yourself though. Finding a crack in a wall is fine.
It’ll probably take you a couple of hours, if that. And then we’ll meet back in the City for drinks. We’ll be surrounded by THEM and they *won’t know* what we’ve done.
We did this on Leap Day 2020. You can see some examples of mushroom plantings on my Instagram here.
A week after we planted this first faery ring the UK stock market plunged. Might have been Covid, but who can really say?
If you’d like to be part of the strange fun then you’re welcome to email me back and I’ll send you a link to a Whats App group. Or just turn up.
Why are we doing this? I’ll tell you in a bit, first have a look at the mushrooms.
One hundred unique bronze beauties. They are handcrafted in wax by Rosey and Marc of Stop, Look and Listen Studio and then cast by Just Castings in Hatton Garden.
Ok, why *are* Rosey, Marc and I doing this? Hatton Garden cast bronze mushrooms aren’t cheap you know and we’re spending an awful lot of time making this happen.
And perhaps more pertinent to this Substack – the Substack of a writer you've followed because you’re maybe curious about my writing – is the question of how does this relate to my spiralling addiction to language.
Well, you see, I think you can boil the activity of writing (and almost every creative activity) down to attempts to seed memes into society. I mean memes in the original Richard Dawkins sense here. ‘Meme’ as the name of a spreadable unit of culture.
All of us, everywhere, are trying to change society in our own little ways. Writers and artists definitely so. And we do it by trying to create the strongest and most powerful ‘memes’ we can. Ideas so infectious that others pick them up and share them further.
And the meme at the heart of the faery ring event is that ‘City Traders are the faery folk the old tales warned us about’.
Many old folklore tales feature the fae. Amoral creatures that take human form and who live their life transactionally. Everything’s a deal to them. Forget to leave out gifts of food and they’ll steal your firstborn. Accept a pair of new shoes from a beautiful stranger on a lonely evening road and you end up spending seven years somewhere in a hill.
Every folk story involving a transaction that humans rarely benefit from.
Post 2009 financial crash, it struck me that maybe they were back. That City Traders were the faery folk all the old tales warned us about. Amoral, human form, everything a deal and no-one but them benefitting.
So every four years we plant and replant the world’s largest faery ring as a way of binding them in their glass mountains.
I was introduced to an arts editor of the Financial Times last week. Will they write about the faery ring? I very much doubt it. Is the meme City Traders are the faery folk the old tales warned us about now skipping lightly through the newspaper’s office? Possibly. Sometimes in the seeding of memes that’s the best we can hope for.
I hope you can join me on Thursday. If not please do spread the word about the Trader Fae.