PINS - Rule Nine: Move 2 - That Which Cannot Be Altered

(There’s lads in Felling Male Voice Choir with better voices than Orbison’s.)

Let us imagine we have moved and now we are moving again, as we are told to in “move 2”, which, (if you remember rule eight), “cannot be altered, except by Pin and Local Decision.”

And what is move 2? We just know that it cannot be altered. These kinds of things can determine our fate.

Many things cannot be altered. Like removing the thin, see-through polythene wrap on the car seats of the new Vauxhall, which allows the owner, who lives in a fancy corner bungalow down the road from our Lancashire grandmother, to sell on at a decent price. Gran thinks she’s cheap.

Or not talking to the priests and nuns who come to talk to the neighbours. Because they are Catholics. That practice must not, in any circumstance, be altered.

Singing light arias alone on a moor near Rochdale, and being laughed at by young farm women, cannot be altered.

Any position you have adopted whilst staring out of the bedroom window at the dull, tiled roof of the bungalow opposite, cannot be altered during the playing of side one of Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music.

Being quiet when our friend’s dad is drunk can’t be altered, as he’s sometimes downstairs at the kitchen table yelling, with a bottle of Martini and a mills bomb in each hand, though the mills bomb must be safe as - when he’s been sober - he’s chucked it to us like a cricket ball.

Routines, like being asked “do we want a bit dinner” (tinned mince, carrots and spuds from the allotment) whilst in Felling, Tyne and Wear, cannot be altered. Nor do we want them altered, for the entire duration of the 1970s. Jelly for dessert.

Understanding that the Elector of Holesia is Stadtholder of Palatinate (Lewis III) and his capital is Raing, the former imperial capital, cannot be altered. The Elector is an important figure in PINS. Under him are the Counts Palatinate (protestant Lutheran). Archbishop John Manberinak, the Elector of Wemser is “brother of above”. This fact, also, cannot be altered.

My Lancashire grandad’s assertion that he was scared stiff in test flights for bombers cannot be altered, especially as we cannot tell anything more about it. Neither can his early death, bang on his retirement. We wore purple at the funeral, as befits young boys of the 1970s. Forty years later I met the son of one of his workmates at a private screening in an arthouse cinema. He was wearing leather, fetish-style clothes bought in Berlin. That is another coincidence that cannot be altered.

Walking past the cemetery wall and imagining the whole bleak expanse of ground rumbling and beginning to subside in a congealed, gelatinous mass, thanks to the angry remonstrations of the unhappy dead (many before their time, some servicemen far from home, probably killed on test flights), cannot be altered. Don’t walk on the pavement cracks! Nor can the dreams about the cemetery opening up to reveal the throbbing wounds of the mine seams that must have held so much pain, and a hidden underground tunnel full of rotting human horror that goes under Whinney Hill where the tip is - as well as those evil eyes that glitter in the attic of the big house next door - cannot be altered.

The act of unplugging the radiogram at night, every night, cannot be altered.

Being told not to be so soft cannot be altered. So much so, it becomes a motto. Don’t be so soft.

Reading the news that BENNETT SCORING FOR BOSLON WITH BARELY SECONDS TO GO AGAINST NEW THUMPTON, (with illustration, in biro)  in a hand sized minute book from 1949, which otherwise chronicles the Felling and District Labour Group’s meetings, cannot be altered. Just think; as an egg in my mother’s womb, I was already seven years old at the time.

Knowing that the tread and wheel on the old sewing machine in the back upstairs bedroom in my aunt’s house in Bury would move of its own accord as soon as I entered, every time, over a decade, cannot be altered. Neither can the feeling that I was looking out from another age at the backs through the window, and that all noises from the people downstairs felt like radio interference and that they came from another time than the one I was in. I still heard BBC Radio 2 giving the football scores, though. 

Enfin. As in the last post, let us imagine a local decision. Because the rules say we have to make one soon. Not sure when, mind, but soon.

Forth, Tyne, Dogger, and Irish Sea are my favourite stations; what are yours? What will you decide?

An accompanying set of photocopies for this post can be found in the Museumof Photocopies.