Melissa Kite: aliens have landed in Warwickshire — I’ve seen their spaceship

Like the heroine in Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, I stood in front of it with my mouth open in awe. It was a ship in the earth. I was looking at the tip of a flying saucer protruding from a field where it had become wedged thousands of years before after crash-landing.

I had been walking across the farmland at the back of my parents’ house with the builder boyfriend and Cydney the spaniel when we came across it. Let me paint the picture: mile upon mile of rugged countryside stretched in every direction. Stubble fields were lit by a magical golden light. Cows ambled around grassy meadows.

Perhaps it was portentous that we were walking along a track that had been recently tarmacked to allow access to these fields to cyclists, disabled people and members of minority communities who are offended by mud. Multi-user route, they call it. Every few seconds a cyclist in Lycra raced past us at top speed.