Weird Britain

Britain, if you ask the right people — the ones who feed the right crows, who know which lane the sat-nav refuses to map — has always been a porous sort of place.

Long before the motorways and the retail parks, there was another realm pressed up close against this one: the country of dragons, of Arthur, of the old strangeness our myths keep trying to explain. The two worlds were never properly separated. They leak.

Most leaks are small. A standing stone in the wrong field. A village that’s a little too quiet on a particular night. A gull that steals your chips with what looks suspiciously like strategy.1 But sometimes something larger slips through — a war-chief, say, arriving in a school car park with an axe and absolutely no idea what a lanyard is.

The magic survives only where Britain stays open: public, odd, a bit shabby, un-flattened by branding and bylaws.

Where places are sealed, privatised and tidied into sameness, the old roads close. So the strangeness hides in plain sight, doing quiet maintenance, keeping the thresholds ajar. Mr. Gorzug is one such leak who decided to stay. The rest of these stories are about everywhere else it’s still getting through.

A few house rules of the leak

• It comes through at the edges — failing piers, lay-bys, the bit of the car park nobody parks in.2
• It is rarely dramatic. It is usually damp, and frequently polite.
• The creatures that come through are not the problem. Britain’s paperwork is the problem.
• Tidiness is the enemy. Magic needs somewhere a bit unkempt to live.