⚠️THE FAYRE HAS RETURNED⚠️

Not sure when. Not sure how. But it’s back.

Woke yesterday to the unmistakable thrum of calliopes and the faint, metallic wittering of what I can only describe as “merry tune leakage.” The sort that gets under your fillings. The kind that plays even when you block your ears with bread.

The cabbage leaves were curling inward, as if trying to protect their innards from something unknowable. Three of my compost heap’s lesser spirits had retreated entirely. And the goats? Well, they will not look at the green.

That was the first sign.

The second was a coating of fine, sticky sugar on my front step. Not weather, exactly, but a precipitation of candyfloss and sawdust, faintly smelling of roasted peanuts and long-dead marmosets. A single toffee apple lay in the road outside, steaming gently. I did not touch it. I know better than to get involved too early.

The third sign: The Punch & Judy tent, half-lolling like a sleeping dog beside the war memorial. No puppets visible. No stallholder in sight. Yet there they were—the children. Sitting. Cross-legged. Staring. Not laughing. Not blinking. Just watching the stillness. Like they’d been waiting all year for it to do something.
It hasn’t yet. That worries me more.

I approached, but was met with the sort of silence that makes your liver feel oddly noticeable. I took a photo, of course, but it’s mostly thumb and nerves. Keith says I should “get better at photography” and “stop photographing events in fear.” I told him he should stop trying to give advice while holding a bowl of vibrating jelly.

He’s taken to sketching peculiar shapes on used napkins again. Says they're diagrams. Says the dodgems are ‘whispering coordinates’. Says not to worry. I am worrying.

Anyway. I expect the Fayre will stay the week, just like last time, when it vanished overnight and took all of Mrs Blench’s cats with it. We never did get them back. Just got a note reading:
"Borrowed. May return. No promises. — The Custodians of the Ongoing Ride."

If you go near the Fayre today, don’t go alone. Don’t eat the popcorn (not this early in the week), and if a man with too many elbows offers you “an upgrade,” decline politely and walk in a spiral until the sky looks normal again.

More updates as and when.
V.
🥬🔮🎠