PINS - Rule Fourteen: Localities - Superlocal

(London? What’s to do there? Plumbing? Plastering?)

We shouldn’t stop talking about localities yet. Not just yet. Some localities are so local you can’t see them. Sometimes they only reappear in your mind in a state of perfect localness. This means you can pinpoint each bit, as if it is in front of you -  after years; or in a dream, or on an old photograph, or at a distance of a few miles. Only then can you revel in that place's particular character. So: all the more reason in this game of PINS, where we will have to make local decisions, to look back at places that are so local that you often can’t see them.

Is it true we used to live in that white house? That’s what has been said, the family's house, once a farmhouse, noted down in Doomsday as well, under the name that is nearly the name of a nearby town, your family name on your mother’s mother’s side. Back then the family lived locally; for instance your great uncle would sit on that wall, the one next to the old infants school. The one on the old row, overlooking the church. There’s a photograph of him doing that, it’s in the tin with the other pics, including the one of the bad lad who got to America in 1919. Another bad lad has his name in the parish records from the 1840s. The name is also on the church wall, near the nave on an inscription, with a black, finger-pointing hand next to his name. Some of them went to live as distant as three or four miles away. One lived in the row of houses up the bank past the older industrial estate; not the one across from the church where all the family are buried, but the other one further up; towards the Padiham road.

That row of houses further up used to have a pub at the end; you went to a wake there for one of those who’d kept things local since Doomsday. One of them gave you a pound as a tip as she walked out of the pub door. Stingy, certainly for 2002. Roll of the eyes directed at you. Last time you saw her. The pub’s now a trophy house. Good riddance.

This information should be given out to others, especially those who don’t know, with a roll of the eyes. When giving specific orders based on this information, you can also mouth the words as a stage whisper, or lip sync them, depending on whether you have worked in a mill, or lived with people who have worked in mills, as this is normal.

The church is beautiful, bits from Stephen but on the site of a much older structure, and maybe one that has pre-Christian activity, some say.  It’s low lying, a river lazily courses through the fertile landscape behind it, the waters often dark, sometimes glistening like obsidian. Electric pylons cross the landscape here and frame the church. Nearby, huge new warehouses constructed from gleaming metals and brick face the old industrial park. They only add to the curious beauty of the place. The dogs bark a lot in the farm next opposite. You have been to many burial services here, through the lych gate, along the long, tree-lined corpse path towards the church entrance, past the long burial grounds with the vaults and memorials. All the stones turn by degrees to look at you and point you out as one of those who is no longer local.

Once, in the town that bears a similarity to your grandmother’s name, you got chased for a few yards by two Alsatians. They were on a long leash that probably only extended to the end of the lane they bounded up. Didn’t stop you running. You were going to the Rollerama disco, where youths wrapped burberry scarves around their necks, to just under the tip of their nose. Listening to New Order. They would not be lip syncing.   

Once, near the church, you fell down a hole in a barn’s roof with the son of the farmer.

The other industrial estate across and up from the church hasn’t changed much since the late 1980s, when it had “illegal raves” there. Loads of cars, their lights snaking up the hill, looking like a slow moving dragon. Once, you went. Copying the dancers, round a sump pit, in the dark. Once, you tried handbrake turns and crashed. Then there is the big house set back along the road, once a hotel of sorts; a disco place in the middle of nowhere, Northern Soul. Once, in the mid-1980s you saw a Radio One deejay play records there. You were tall, so you got in. The walk back to town, over the hill where the tip is and next to the brickyards, was a bugger. Past the pit disaster memorial, on which three names of your family, the name that is close to that of the nearby town, are inscribed. They were laid out in the pub, on the tables, the pub where, once, in the late 1980s, you drank some of the hundreds of pints poured out that were the spoils of a robbery, was it a robbery? No-one asked.

Once, that great uncle on the wall, he turned up one morning in your mouth talking to someone who was lying next to you, asleep, trying to make them, and you, feel better. Not to worry!  Not to worry! Tha’s not to worry, no!

Superlocal orders here can be surmised thus: 

1. Give a full historical summary of the church’s architecture as it now stands. Pay attention to the Coldstream Guards memorial to a local and posthumous VC as an addendum. This information can be used in a later stage of PINS to buy you time.

2. Quickly write down three Northern Soul tunes most likely to have been played by the Radio One deejay.

3. Give the date of the new estate at the rise of the hill before the turn down to the brickworks.

4. Pinpoint the Doomsday House.

5. Pinpoint the house where - legend says, your friends said, your auntie said - a chimp and gorilla were once housed.

6. Draw out a rudimentary plan to show strangers where the family vaults are. Especially the ones from the 15th century.

7. Remember the makes of bitter, mild and lager that would have been standing on the pub tables after the heist took place. If successful, you can offer up another local order, where you describe the particular furnishings that had remained unchanged from the 1930s. An extra order move can be given if you can describe the stained glass in the toilet doors. 

An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.