PINS - Rule Thirty-four: Danger Zone, Steady Up!
(Don’t forget - parboil the sprouts, parboil!)
You can completely lose the plot with no PINS. Look what happens, you get into the Danger Zone, where things go radge. So steady up.
Excuse me miss, can I buy some famous duff? There’s nowt else to do in Accrington.
Be careful, the cat eats his food next to your pillow in the morning, he’s jealous of anyone in this bed so keep your bits wrapped up.
You know that was a mistake, swallowing that block of hash, now you’re done for, your friend’s face is coming off he keeps looking at you and tells you he is trying to smile at that girl but his cheeks and lips keep sliding off and he has to keep pulling a face to keep everything where it should be, otherwise they’d slide onto the floor. Then there is the small matter of you levitating and not talking to the big fellow on the bike who may or may not have a machete under his tracky top, and the fact he’s cycling round and round you in Hulme on a night isn’t smart, but then, you keep walking putting one foot in front of the other the way your mother told you - don’t step on the cracks unless something goes wrong, remember the nursery rhyme - and you will get back to the flat where you’re…
…holding up the wall for the lads on the sofa, whilst your friend, his face now settled into a vaguely human shape, is rearranging all the cutlery and tins while Terry Christian’s face gurns and mewls at you from the telly. You realise you are screaming “don’t move” at the poor kids who are living here, and who only know you from your mate, who lent the pair of you his room for the night. But you know if you move the house might capsize and all the cutlery and tins have to be laid out in correct order on the floor. In a line, preferably. Later you both see the strip of light under the door and point at it and laugh hysterically at it, and the loud and enthusiastic gay sex noises from upstairs that seems to be working in synch with the quality of the light emitted, then you just laugh loudly at the very idea of light.
The disco in Rusholme, with the posh girl from Derbyshire. The man with the devil horns. The Brothers Johnson. You think, ‘post modern’ and feel a wave of boredom enveloping you.
Well, what I did was make up some operas and write them to your mother as letters, with little illustrations for each part, and all the players in the orchestra.
Oh, give over whining, you’re lucky. Think of your dead great aunt, she was the bridesmaid but died of TB. Her picture is still on the dresser.
The polka dot shirts - all the posh girls wear them, the law students. Like that trend of putting your collar up, snooty.
Well, there you are, that’s it, you won’t meet anyone interesting or amusing after you leave university. Just bores and show offs from now on. Just bunkum.
He was throwing cheesy strings at a pop star and saying, ‘they’re good, try one.’
We can’t do it here, we’re on the entrance steps and everyone can see us, you on top of me. I like it, but we are right next to the queue for the door.
Just before I met your mother I went to Blackpool to see Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mike and Titch with some young lady and some friends, in the ballroom I think, oh, you know what I thought then, what a load of rubbish this pop world is. Couldn’t be bothered with all that modern stuff after that. I tried. Not like the rock and rollers, you’d throw chairs at them.
And after that I had to look after your Nana, just had to pick her up off the floor and hold her, your Granda was all in, it finished him. That’s why he would always get up late, that and maybe his time in the war. He went to Germany shortly after the end, he never spoke about it.
This book is from somone polish, know in your country and which is also souvenir on the next time for you, dear XXX
Richard.
15 / XI 40.
London, Paris, Accrington.
Walking up the street, fur boots, Afghan coat and a meat cleaver.
Swinging from the curtains!
Going in the stocks whilst three sheets to the wind, getting pasted by cub scouts with wet sponges and winning a tin poster advertising Newcastle Brown Ale. Now you have to hitch home over Pendle.
You’ve gone and glued your fingers to the fuel filter, we’ll never get to Bury now.
Someone’s got a gun in one hand and a bag o’dabs in t’other. How can he eat with a gun?
He came home and said, who are you? Didn’t recognise his own dad, after six years away. And he also ate the banana with the whole skin on! Didn’t know what it was.
She’s passed out in the tomato soup, her wig’s all red. What do we do now?
He was soft, all that Geordie sentiment. Oh, he could be so embarrassing, dragging him by the hair to the hotel, drunk, on the Paris metro. Ruining all the memories I had when I was a student there.
Don’t tell anyone where I get the leaf mould from.
I always go and stand on the railway bridge and look out and imagine great white sharks, just how big they are. I’d love it if one got as big as a whale. I love coming up here and watching the lights on the tracks and imagining what they’d glow like if they were under the ocean. Anyway I know you mean well, but everyone thinks you’re after their girlfriends, you’re not, and you’re too weird for this town, you’ll never fit in here and you just don’t know how to talk to people, do you?
We were on honeymoon, just before the Troubles started, we went into this pub and they all started singing rebel songs. I had to drag your father out.
I have dreams where I think the viaduct is built out of papier-mâché and it starts to rot, and the whole big, stinking structure starts to sag and Accrington sinks into this green swamp. The only bits that are left are the stone houses and the cobbled roads that go up behind Whalley Road just past Back Owen Street in Waterloo, where the works and builders merchants are, they’ll remain, but the rest will just start to sink and decompose into this putrefying slime. Shame. The place where Guiseppe used to make my suits will go. He was an Italian refugee in the war, his English was like Manuel the waiter’s but he was brilliant, a lovely man, and had his shop in his front window. Still got his suits, they don’t fit, but who wore a three piece suit and a hunter in town, apart from me in the last 60 years?
You’ve lost all your coin to that bloke with the hospital tag on.
An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.