Faerie Queen by Charles Penrose (aka Chris Lloyd)

In a time long ago, before mountains were fully grown and the cold, harsh, rocky land was covered with snow and ice and the nights were as black as the inside of a black cat, (or an old oven) and wolves and other, unknown animals, (Hmmm), roamed with impunity, a Faerie Queen ruled over her people with a kind, beatific sense of peace and calm.  The Faerie Queen had been on her noble throne, (in reality a so-called magic rock), for many eons and she was thinking that it was time to hand over the wand to a younger queen and besides her bum was numb from sitting on the damned cold stone. So, one bright sunny day, the first for a while, she called a meeting of her sub rulers and their customer-facing drones. (Drones were mainly males but most did not have the parts that definitely meant they were males in the Faerie Queen’s eyes, well not eyes, you get the drift.) Her desired meeting was a call for the election of a new Queen and her most trusted Sentinels. This was the first time for two eons that such an election was called during the time immediately before the faerie’s most joyous time of the year, Getting Pissed and Fat Day, (that is a loose translation but near enough.)  All the faeries would visit each other, let their wings down and the younger ones would generally slag each other off by sending images of themselves in various state of undress, to the faerie media companies. It was such fun until someone sent an image of you with a Sentinel when you were at a Faerie Party, then it was tears, denials, resignations, recriminations. Thankfully, the Faerie Queen didn’t have any Princes being silly.

But I digress. The Election call was met with much shouting, waving of bits of paper and pointing. The head Sentinel had to visit the Faerie Queen to formally ask her to suspend the powers of all concerned so they could all have a jolly good time wandering around schools, hospitals, Faeries’ doors, and other places where they were not welcome. Now I think it fair to say at this juncture that there were no chickens in Faerie Land in those days so the shouting and strutting could go on without fear of having an egg collide with your clothes, or your face which was a shame. The Faerie Queen was putting a great deal of trust in the Election Committee, which was a semi-power house of old Sentinels who were deaf, incontinent or blind drunk. When they got out of hand, the ruling Sentinels ignored them and did their own law making anyway. It is termed “democracy.”

There was to be a short time to complete the election as Getting Pissed and Fat Day period was usually devoted to rushing around with bags of useless tat purchased from the Ezelek shops, (Faerie Land currency), which was all broken by the end of the celebration. However the fact that the date of the election was near that time, it could be said that the result would favour those people of Faerie Land who were, shall we say, less likely to be chasing around the Ezelek shops for gifts, as they had “Faeries” bring presents to them in order that they could select in the comfort of their own well-appointed underground maisonettes.

The day of the Election dawned and the time of seeing Sentinels that you had never seen before passed. This was met with great relief by the general Faerie population; all that remained was the vote and all over Faerie Land little houses were erected in case it rained and so that the voting Faeries could go in and stab a hole in a spot next to their candidate. Easy, you would think. No; simply because if the bits of paper of the stabbed ballot paper, (called chad, after the Chad Hole Punch Company), did not cleanly fall out, that vote could not be counted by the notoriously unreliable counting machines. This was clearly a dilemma, (had there been tampering, or other nefarious deeds to make less chad?) Anyway, they would never be used again.

The head Sentinel summoned senior sentinels and discussed whether to hold a referendum to determine if the “Chad Votes” as they were known, should be in the vote or out. The Sentinels, except Jimmy K from Northern parts, refused a referendum as they were worried Jimmy K might turn it into a different referendum.

At last, ten days before Getting Pissed and Fat Day the result of the election, minus Chad, was announced. 

The ruling group would remain in power with enough seats to ensure that fairness among the populace would remain firmly in the south. The second main group with the beardy Sentinel gave up. The Faerie Queen decided that actually she could have sat on the rock, sorry throne, for a bit longer so all in all a complete waste of time and all the high street shops, or what was left of them, complained for weeks after Getting Pissed and Fat Day that they had lost stacks of money because the interference of the election diverted faeries’ minds just before the biggest shopping period of the year. It makes you feel sorry for their highly paid Directors!


And on that bombshell, things in Faerie Land did not change one iota! Except that the beardy one sort of disappeared from the scene with a lot of his friends. Happy Getting Pissed and Fat day!

Charles Penrose