10d (edited) • General discussion
Fête Accompli
Every English village has its mysteries.
A phantom black dog on the lane. Strange lights over the woods. A face glimpsed at an upstairs window where nobody lives anymore.
Woolaston, in the summer of 2019, got a mime artist in a morph suit.
He appeared without warning at the village fête. Dressed head to toe in a black-and-white chequered bodysuit, he wandered among the stalls in complete silence. No introductions. No explanations. Merely a series of gestures, shrugs and theatrical flourishes. He communicated entirely through mime. Which, as every sensible person knows, is already suspicious.
His proposition was simple.
For the princely sum of one pound, villagers could attempt to guess his identity. The money, he claimed, would go towards the village hall. Children handed over pocket money. Pensioners contributed coins. Nobody knew who he was, but somehow everybody joined in.
Then, having collected his takings, the mysterious figure climbed into a waiting car and vanished.
Like a Victorian stage magician. Or a particularly economical supervillain.
What followed was glorious.
Local newspapers seized upon the story.
Television crews arrived. Social media descended into collective detective work. CCTV images emerged. Posters appeared around the village. The unknown trickster seemed positively delighted by the attention, occasionally dropping new clues into the story while remaining stubbornly anonymous.
The sums involved were tiny.
The mystery was ridiculous.
And yet an entire nation became briefly obsessed.
Perhaps because the tale possessed all the ingredients of proper English folklore: a village fête, a masked stranger, a baffled community and a mystery so utterly trivial that it became irresistible.
The morph-suited visitor eventually returned the money and the scandal quietly evaporated.
But I rather like to imagine him still wandering the Gloucestershire lanes.
Silent.
Unidentified.
Waiting for the next fête.
(Though it’s true that most people online have identified the mystery man as the local publican based on their matching ‘flat bottoms’. Though, to me, that sounds like a bum rap!)
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Fête Accompli
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