PINS - Rule Eighteen: Maps - More Special Features - Lancashire Edition
(He went to school with one brown shoe, and one black. The brown shoe was handed down from his older brother.)
Maps need many features. And PINS can’t be played on a featureless map. So here we mark out some potential features which may be residing somewhere in our memory, like a carp at the bottom of Rishton Reservoir, and give them a new life. Most of these features need a nudge in the form of a question or a call to action.
Before we ask you to mark out the features in this special Lancashire edition of PINS, don’t forget to turn right, at the place where we bought the plant!
Did your ancestors indulge in the tuppenny rush in the twentieth century? And which of the six cinemas in and around Accrington town centre did they visit? Where did they sit? Mark out your approximations where those cinemas were on your map. You can be wildly inaccurate. Or you can stand in the still extant Palace cinema on Whalley Road - now a budget clothes emporium - and dream that you are in the same place as your then-young grandmother. What did she watch? Also, remember that next door was the Army & Navy stores, with posters of topless women hanging out on American streets, wearing Wrangler Jeans. That’s where your mother once bought you a duffle coat.
Where did the Portable Museum of Hearing Aids set up after it left the Town Hall?
Where are the rabbits buried? The bones of the ones that were eaten on Christmas day, because there was nothing else? (The ones that froze to death in Derbyshire will need a different article.)
You could chalk “No People Allowed” on the brick gatepost and designate that as a special feature. Spellings are optional and age-dependent.
Run up the hill with a bike strapped to your back. That’ll show them. They can laugh all they want. Mark out the muddy path you traipsed back down.
Swim a stretch of the Leeds Liverpool canal as a sign of affection for a girl. Once swum, mark out the start, and finish, in white chalk and make similar markings for the features on your map. Don’t forget to challenge her suitors to do the same.
Mark the place where you set the cemetery alight by throwing aerosols on a fire. Don’t forget: the original reason for that was to speed bake the raw potatoes you brought along.
Point out - as a special feature - which houses on Whalley Road had their milk delivered by horse and cart until 1982.
First, find the lampposts that had the papers attached to them, the ones that advertised the raves in Shadsworth and Altham. Mark them on your map with a smiley, if you wish. Remember: one notice was near Rising Bridge.
Then, designate as a special memory the stretch of the M66 where your friend, on acid, began hallucinating that the car you were a passenger in was being chased by abominable snowmen.
Remember your mother saying: “ooh it was a tragedy, the vicar there, his daughters died young in a road accident.” Practise the baleful stare - with raised eyebrows - sent towards the churchyard of St Johns, Baxenden. This feature can be a memorial to both the daughters and your mother’s continually repeated remarks at the spot over the years: a tradition. PS: you don’t really know if the daughters died.
Where does your school friend's mother - a very kind and troubled woman - work the streets? Is it near the doorway where the simple boy stands and waves at you? Approximations within two rows of streets are allowed here.
Where exactly did they chop the body up and how did they put it in the pies? Did anyone notice? This feature can be written in invisible ink.
Mark the empty schoolyard, bordered by sturdy, soot-blackened sandstone, now a carpark, as a special feature. This is the yard where:
You saw your classmate wear one brown shoe and one black.
Your friend ran full tilt, without stopping, into the wall.
You saw the first punks.
Similarly, travel back in your mind to where the allotment was, the one you have never found in real life despite repeated attempts over the last forty years but where:
You saw a group of young people looking at the pea pods: they had never seen peas in a pod.
The fence was torn down by the kids from the estate: people smelled poor!
Ask yourself: what was on the plinth on the Coppice for? And where were the trenches used for rifle practice dug? Both deserve a special feature.
Mark all the places where you felt REALLY UNHAPPY, or lonely, or MISUNDERSTOOD in Accrington. I’ll start you off.
Wilson playing fields
Beech Crescent
Accy Vic
Peel Park playing fields
There are plenty more.
An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.
