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. Joggers flew past too. One stopped and refused to move until we called Cydney to heel, presumably for fear the tiny spaniel would savage him.

We put all this out of our minds, however, and continued to try to enjoy our walk. We pressed on along the multi-user route until we were brought up short by the ship in the earth. At first sight, all we could make out was a huge, gleaming, solid silver block, nearly the height of a man, rising incongruously out of the stubble field.

We approached it cautiously, barely daring to think what it might mean. I was immediately put in mind of the alien ship in The Tommyknockers because I am reading that novel right now. The similarities were uncanny.