This gorgeous flat, hilly county nestles in England’s thighs, like a contented lapdog sunk dreamily in motherdog’s luxuriant flanks. Farmholdings dot the landscape, chimneys lazily belching delightful plumes of grey-blue smoke as busy, buxom farmerwives pound dough and bake bun and brioche. Famous for the annual Glastonbury Festival – which happens yearly and features music, dancing and half of the BBC’s entire staff – the county is synonymous with mysticism. Modern-day pagans and druids thicken the roads and towpaths with their bristling, starry-eyed presence, dispensing wisdom and gaiety toward all whom stumble into them. In the town-village of Glastonbury, commercial high-street commodity outlets (shops) offer the latest in candle and rug technologies, allowing those working at the frontier of contemporary spiritualism to equip themselves with the paraphernalia needed to navigate the battles ahead.
According to Legend (John, NME interview 2001), Somerset was once a “king depository” where future regal rulers were weaned and readied for the rigours of divine office across Europe and beyond. Indeed, The Hall of Kings is said to exist to this day, buried somewhere below Somerset’s verdant leas, its antechambers stuffed with “treasures so wanton that even Jesus himself would fall to his knees and give praise to Mammon” (J Legend, same NME interview, but towards the end, after he’d expounded on his love of desktop publishing).
But Somerset isn’t all men in cloaks, hippies and subterranean royals. The gentle county is also swarming with mischievous spirits and marauding aliens.
The village of Pityford lies north of Somerset’s south. It is a dowry-based community, heavily reliant on ant farming and car boot sales. The only event of note to have ever disturbed the outpost’s bucolic serenity was during World War Two, when drunk German paratroopers descended and baffled locals with a crazed display of teutonic pratfall. However, all that changed on St Chloe’s Day, 1982. Pityford traditionally celebrated the occasion with a game of cricket, the two teams selected at random from amongst the population by the oscillations of a sparrow. The game was already into the fifth quarter when spectators and players alike beheld an eerie gloom that began to grow in the aerial part of the sky above them. From the front page of the following day’s Pityford News and Voice:
“It was all go at yesterday’s annual ‘cricket’ match – the event that has every man and his pig turn out to watch two teams of inordinate incompetence battle it out for the dubious prize of being the least embarrassingly awful.
“However, on the very verge of coma, your fearless reporter was suddenly jerked from his state of overwhelming weariness by the emergence of two alien attack saucers.
“Whether intent on building a colony on earth or merely galactic sports fans horrified that even a game as universally boring as cricket could be reduced to such an insipid shambles, the extraterrestrials wasted no time in vaporising players and onlookers alike.
“The UFOs hovered onto the scene whilst Mr Markus Skollob was busy bowling a niner to even the contest with a low split, or some such nonsense.
“Dim as a shrew’s bedroom at twilight, the ‘sportsman’ failed to notice the astral death machines levitating above his cavernous head and continued with his desperately hopeless attempt to bowl out his opposite, who had at this point already been zapped to ashes.
“Quick as they appeared and rained down death, the aliens blasted away back into space.
“Talking of blasted, the blasted game has been reconvened for Sunday week, fuck it.”
Mysterious EnGland 
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