In yesterday's post I compared and contrasted Neverland and Fairyland. Neverland is, as J M Barrie says, "second to the right, and straight on till morning", and it exists in the minds of children. I always think of it as a fairly dodgy place. When I was a child myself, the expectation that I would just get to adulthood and have a perfect quickie sex change was what was in my mind, among other things like how wheels were evil and hovercraft good, and a vague desire to be a flatworm, because that's what I'm like. So in Neverland, I'm obviously female.
Fairyland is different. Fairyland is not somewhere you can get directions to from here. "You can't get there from here". Nonetheless, many small children do adopt the costumery of the Queendom in question. Some of these children are later discouraged from continuing in this wise at an earlier stage than others. Were it not for my extreme caution, I would in all likelihood have been such a child.
Fairyland and Albion, along with the appendix to Albion referred to as "the Universe" are not commensurable places. I live in Albion, a place once described by a Greek traveller as a place where the elements of earth, air, fire and water are not separate, so in other words it's quite muddy and drizzly here, and the sun is watery. It's quite easy to get muddy here and muddy and pink don't go well together. Nor do mud and glitter. But where there's muck there's brass, so there are a lot of rich people here, many of whom are at relative peace with the contents of their trousers, a fact which, unlike Fairyland and Albion, are quite closely connected.
I of course was not at peace with the contents of my trousers. This can no longer be said to be so for several reasons. In fact, the contents of my trousers made it hard to acquire much of that glittery shiny blinging stuff often found in the pockets of the aforementioned garments, and whereas it is filthy as well as shiny, it probably is an accurate measure of how much society values me, in other words not at all. However, that's OK because how much society values people correlates rather poorly to how much they're worth, which considering that we're all of infinite value, is hardly surprising.
In any case, I can't use filthy lucre to buy a ticket to Fairyland because there are no scheduled flights there, so why would I want any in the first place? I can't buy my way out of Albion with it. So instead, I went to Cloud Cuckoo Land, which to me is more local than it is to many other people anyway, so it was quite convenient. Unfortunately, while I was away in Cloud Cuckoo Land, things did not go well in Albion and my estates fell into disarray.
Nobody can really know what it's like to be someone else, not really. I couldn't know what it was like to be a subject of the Fairy Queen, for example, not unless I actually was one.
However, it so happened that as time went by, I became a mage, and as that mage, Lady Luck slipped me a magic potion which awoke me from the spell which had been cast upon me by Albion, and I slowly began to realise I didn't live in Albion at all, but Fairyland. Therefore, the mere fact that there were no bridges, roads, railways, flights or boats, or even hovercraft, to Fairyland and there never could be didn't matter at all, because in fact I'd always lived in Fairyland anyway, I just didn't realise it. I went from Snow Queen to Fairy Queen.
Welcome to Fairyland.
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