PINS - Rule Fifteen: Hang on a Minute
(It says on this map that there should be a public through road.)
The common thing to say about early January is that it’s a good time to look backwards and forwards. So we are going to look backwards, at PINS, and forwards, at PINS. This post is written on the second of January, 2024. Not on the first, because that would be daft. Comical, as my Lancashire grandmother would say. No, writing on the first of January would have been comical.
We begin by looking back over what’s been said and written about PINS.
What have we learned so far? That PINS can be seen as a game, and from the notes and photocopies we were left with, we can see that PINS was envisaged as a game, on the back of various semi-official papers, in the County Palatine of Lancashire in the 1970s and 1980s; one to stave off the wearisome demands of office life.
We are still working out what kind of game it was to be. But we are united in saying that PINS can be anyone’s game, and built according to their own circumstance and psychicke estate. That’s the message we got when walking down the Barrack Road in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in the August of 2023. The messenger came and went and whispered in my ear and that’s where we are, and I’m not going to change course now otherwise it’ll be a heap of trouble. Anyway: this means all the posts about PINS you read here are parallel to your own ideas about what PINS can be. As such they are guides. Scraps, figments, whispers; things I am posting in the aether digitalis, to be lost and recast in any future they stumble into.
A brief summary for the scrollers, the ingenues and the confused.
You need two or more C.O.s. Remember: a C.O. can be anything beginning with a C and an O.
You define and create your own Units. A Unit can be anything you wish it to be. I would recommend you choose either / and: vegetable, animal, mineral, mnemonic.
You shape and determine the landscape (emotional, physical, phantasmagorical) through which you can move.
Each C.O. needs to write down a number of orders to move through that landscape. Note that these orders can be anything. Their temperament should befit the humour of your C.O. One could be to “move crabwise with a pair of pinking shears'', for example. TIP! Wear a hat whilst making up your orders.
When moving, and confronted by an obstacle or something you can’t help staring at (the plaque with the head of Eric Morcambe on a terraced house in Clayton Le Moors, for instance, which may unduly - or grievously - waylay you on the way to the butchers) you will need to make a local decision. So: think of the local decisions appropriate when moving through that landscape. These can be cathartic. They can be destructive. They can be meaningless. With Morecambe, for instance, you may need to cast an appropriate hand sign that allows passage.
PINS are - I think - high-level decision maker moments that make sense of landscape, a C.O.’s humour, and the interpretation of each order. But I could be wrong. We still have to work that out.
That’s as far as we have got in the game.
Note, as yet, there is NO GOAL and NO END in sight.
What about looking forwards? Well right now we’re looking at a rutted field in the county of Westmoreland. The 1964 OS Map (opened, and folded for easy reference) says there is a drovers way through this stretch of land that takes us to a B Road which allows us to then access a major tributary for vehicles boasting an internal combustion engine, one known as the M6. But this thin strip of worn earth between lush grazing land doesn’t look like any kind of way to be used by a car and the farmer, also in the field, by chance, is looking at us quizzically. The person in the front passenger seat, your father, flustered, is telling you he definitely used the way in the 1960s, in a Morris Minor. A skylark sits on the bonnet. Looking forwards is bringing you nothing at the moment. Maybe this is the kind of thing you need a PINS moment for.
The same car, looking forwards. You, and the other passengers, and the driver, this time your father, not you, have looked forwards and upwards at the cast bronze pants seat of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein for the third time. Seconds later, you descend into the long and fusty tunnel: for the third time. Can PINS overturn the very, very bad local decision made an hour ago?
Here is the bus, the yellow national bus, coming down a street that is nowadays only half a street but back then was a street with high brick red walls on either side. Near the stop is the deli run by the woman married to the Polish bloke who was in the Paras. Down the street is the local shop, with homemade witches hanging on string in the window. You could get off the bus much earlier, near the Heap of Trouble (that place goes under another name), but prefer to stay on past the ruined house on the corner, then the row of houses with the old butchers and the asphalt parking space behind the modelling shop, where you can see the Black Bull and the old fire station assembly under the viaduct where they trained soldiers in the Great War. Or let's invoke a PINS moment and look forward to when all these sites are under tarmacadam and street furniture.
An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.
