Pixying
Pixying (v) - The act of sabotaging large-scale industrial construction equipment and then insisting that the faeries did it.
Just over a decade ago I was working out of Marshfield as a comms engineer for Dopra. My project at the time was lead engineer for the installation of a new telephone command switch for the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service. Don't worry, I think the equipment is obsolete now but for a long time if you lived in Berkshire and had a chip-pan fire your kitchen's survivability was directly linked to how much beer I'd had the night before designing the cross-connections in the switch.
One blustery late-autumn evening, with the rain coming down in sheets, I had to drive to Reading for a meeting the following morning. By the side of the road, just before the M32 began, stood a rather forlorn and bedraggled figure holding a sodden itinerary sheet. At the time
nevboo and
shaunotd were doing a fair old amount of hitching and coming back with unhappy tails of roadside abandonment and irate anti-hitcher police officers. The guy looked a bit crusty, but about my age and relatively harmless and so, feeling a tad sorry for him, I pulled over and offered him a ride.
He thankfully dropped into the passenger seat, rivulets of rain-water running down his scalp and dripping onto the upholstery. But that's what rental cars are for. I asked him where he was going and received a mumble in response. So I tried again and eventually prized from him his destination. He was returning to the Newbury bypass protest camp after a visit to another protest somewhere near Southampton. And that was about all I could get from him. He was a sullen individual, to say the least, and all my questions were answered with mumbled, terse responses which were so quiet as to be barely audible over the rumble of the car wheels on the tarmac. I was tempted to dump him at a service station and carry on with my journey but curiosity got the better of me and we eventually arrived at the camp site.
The major offensive by the security forces had already occurred a few months earlier - the tunnels had been stormed and the trees cut down from under the protesters - and the remaining contingent were a hardcore group of ardent believers in their cause. We drove up to a lonely twenty-four hour petrol station and my passenger indicated the direction of the camp site and invited me to visit. The rain had abated and the light levels increased to a point where I could see the devastation surrounding the area. Through what must have once been a heavily wooded section of countryside there now lay a gash in the landscape where all vegetation had been stripped away. A two hundred foot wide strip of stark, brown earth which, through the twilight, seemed to lead into the horizon in both directions lay between the us and the lights of the camp. We trudged over and were met by the cliched rag-tag group of protesters. All the standards were there. The middle-class kids wanting to make a stand for something. The dreadlocked hippy types appalled at the devastation being visited upon the countryside. The dedicated eco-warriors, part anarchist, part agit-prop expert, all pissed off. All of them were charming and thanked me profusely for returning to them one of their own. Around a camp fire beneath a hole in a large tarpaulin which offered some protection from the disgusting weather we traded comestibles - a cup of tea in their case, a packet of cigs in mine - and stories. They told me about the mother duck who had just hatched her eggs underneath one of the felled trees right next to where the construction machines were due to be heading the next day. It was then that they introduced me to the term pixying, defined above. In return, I explained all about nanotechnology (way before the current media hype, this was 1996 remember) and scared the living crap out of them by telling them exactly what an ethno-specific virus could do.
We wandered back to the petrol station where I bought another couple of packets of cigs "for the cause" and bid them all good luck. The funny thing is that, when I look back, I find myself wondering more about what happened to the duck and her chicks than to the protesters. No doubt a lot of them have rejoined society properly but I bet there are still a few of them chained to trees, somewhere.