PINS - Rule Thirty-nine: How To Hide

(The Moon’s a balloon!)

In PINS, it’s important to know how to hide. We have seen there are many enemies about, especially those down the Con Club whist drive (the one by the Leeds-Liverpool bridge), down Clayton bottoms, up Bash or Intack, or down Low Fell or at The Greyhound where you’d go golfing with the landlord’s son, not that either of you could golf or even tried, but you had found a set of clubs and it was a good way to waste an afternoon in a bit of countryside. He’d drive you out to Killingworth and you could both get away from all the radged up boozers doing scratch cards on the bar. Botham’s Winners! Reg fucking Regal! When Tommy the Slipper won twenty free pints from a card, his missus brought his dinner and his tea down in the lift from his flat on a tray, because there was no way he was gannin’ back up and she’d not have him in the house. Stands to reason. And that's The Greyhound in Felling, not the one down Clayton at the junction going up to the tip where NORI was, because that one’s the one they laid out your great uncles and nephews when they were killed in the pit disaster. But the landlord doesn’t let you swear in there, and Sam Smith's man, makes you piss like an officer’s horse. You’d hide away from The Bay Horse and the Portland in Felling, as they’d do you in there. No one sticks around in either for too long. Better bet is The Wheat Sheaf where you could hide with decent company and Rodger the Biker would turn up and talk about Alexander the Great. “Do You Like Curved Air?”

You can hide by getting your hair cut at Nutty Norman’s in Clayton, or George’s, down past the bridge, near Felling Metro stop.  Both charge two quid and you come out looking like you’ve joined up. No-one knows who you are for a day or two. 

In the Rules of PINS, we are told that hiding means you have to first “pinpoint target positions or places vulnerable to the Enemy.” Only then can you hide successfully. To do this, we need a gridded table top to determine the enemy positions so that every time you move to occupy a grid you can consult your side to see what happens, if anything.

For that you need a gridded table top. Largish table, with 10 inch squares.Two dice to find the target centre. 

On reflection, perhaps 8 inch squares would be better.

Write it down.

But first you’d better do the house stuff you’ve already written down; this is what you need to do for the rest of 1975. Don’t lose the paper. Bathroom: ceiling, beading, carpet, lights. R. Bed: cupboard, decorate. Main Bed: decorate. E. Bed: paint, bits of paper. Outside: Shed. Drive. Garden.   

Otherwise you’ll never hear the end of it, what with Ivy coming round and running her finger over all the surface every day and Charlie making eyes and laughing in silent commiseration with you as he puffs his pipe. I wish she wouldn’t do that, running her finger looking for soot; but they all do, these Lankies - Grace, Ivy, Marion and Lily and cousin Graham and all that lot from Salford and even Arthur, you’d have thought he’d be wise to that stuff, being a butcher and surviving the Libyan desert. And that scene last year at Christmas when Ivy and me mam argued about who was sharing their ciggies.

What you can also do to hide is consult the maps I made for the Royal Lancashire Show at Great Harwood. Drew it out on trace in Indian Ink. 1:1000 scale. Plenty of places there. Like Ring (light horse), Horse box park, Collecting Ring A, or the public accumulation area. Plenty of places at a big do like that, look at when Michael D disappeared at the races for two hours and came back with two big bratwurst rolls in his jacket pockets. He was chewing on another, with the sauce all stuck in his beard. Dead giveaway, that. That yoga and cheese-free diet can’t be doing him any good if he needs to stuff himself on the quiet.

You can hide the stone otter in the kitchen after the Mr Fireworks incident. Half of Low Moor is after you. 

You can also wonder how she hid all that stuff about the war in Czechoslovakia and Bohemia for so long, how she avoided being poisoned as nanny to the family, ooh, she is so brazen and tells me all these things in German she’s never told to Derek. Terrible things. Talk about hiding gruesome secrets behind chintz curtains. She is so haughty, marrying a lump like Derek must have been a shock to her, but then straight after the war she could have been killed any old how, or lynched. I don’t know why Derek was out there, RAF I think. He probably didn’t “do” much. R. goes down to look at Derek’s stamp collection, just think, a ten-year old and a fifty-sixty-year old sitting there looking at boring stamps when she is in the background drinking coffee and laughing at his stupid hobby. Bet that collection must be worth a bomb. Like John and Ken’s next door that must be worth a packet, too, but Ken sits there in that outhouse twiddling his radio knobs and dials all day, trying to pick up shipping signals in the Irish Sea. They are all so pathetic, these older men with their silly hobbies. Poor John, not being able to walk though, bless him, what an awful thing, he’s a lovely lad. 

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