PINS - Rule Twenty: Maps - More Special Features - Garden Worlds

(“Atlantis Solved?”)

If you are lucky enough to have a garden, even if it overlooks the brickworks with their forbidding towers of red Accrington brick (what if they fell?), we suggest you prepare it as the scene for The War, which one manifestation of PINS attempts to chronicle. This is a war that is, (according to the copperplate notes), “basically a conflict between the Protestant new order in the North and the Catholic old order in the South with Dynastic implications.” 

You can, at any stage in your notes, draw a little cartoon of a figure wearing a tricorn hat that has more than a passing resemblance to Sammy Davis Junior. 

In preparing for The War, remember: PINS is not a recreation, no mere wargame or idle fantasy. It is a portal into another world, like those found in the The World Atlas of Mysteries (Francis Hitching, 1978, Pan Books) that your household and extended family often pore over. It suits their fatalistic Lancastrian outlook. Nothing but MISERY in this veil of tears, along with spontaneous combustion, plagues of frogs, and Bigfoot. They write down prophecies taken from similar books like Card Fortune Telling (C. Thorpe, 1972), Tea-Cup Fortune Telling (“Minetta”, 1972), Old Mother Shipton and her prophecies, past, present and future (Arthur Wigley & Sons Ltd., Leeds LS6 2RT, no date), or The Wonderfvll Discoverie of Witches in the Covntie of Lancaster (Thos. Potts, 1613), in tiny notebooks they’ve kept since the 1940s, alongside notes on how much the gas metre reading is and how much spuds are from Catlows. They roll their eyes when telling you about coming disasters and past tragedies. They can’t help it.

PINS could be an entry to another world alongside all the myths and tales found in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (1959, Introduction by Robert Graves). It’s a bit of an old-fashioned tome, and its terminology is a bit offensive nowadays, but what can you expect from a work written by those still steeped in the language and mores of European Imperialism? That was then. ‘Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’, eh, but the illustrations by Bilibin and the rest are terrific. As is the Graves intro. Still, some primaeval force unconnected to both has seen your eldest son pour over the witchlike figures in Slavic mythology and rip out the domovoi and Kikimora figures and draw all over them. Little monkey. Maybe softly bowling the corky you found towards him, to get him interested in cricket may work, so he’s less destructive with the books. Ball’s a bit hard for him yet. It’s nice to do that down at Higham fields next to the cricket club. He kept knocking the ball towards the railway embankment the first time you went, not much sense of direction yet. So it’s the back lawn for now.

However, as said, the front lawn, a moss lawn, with the worn and grimy sandstone flags that make up the first part of the pebble and concrete front path, the piles of NORI bricks near the neighbouring wall and the hunks of limestone you found and are using for a rockery, can be used for positioning your forces on elevated ground. Just keep them away from the trail of soot and grime that leads to the coal bunker. Don’t have your forces arrayed when the coalman comes or when Jackson’s milk lad turns up with the horse dung on his boots.

This lawn must be another world during PINS. You are no longer on the border of the parishes of Altham, Enfield, and Accrington.

To create the characters in PINS, letters have to be sent to the following casters for information and supplies, so your alchemical prowess in the shed can find form on the lawn. These are:   

Pax Britannica, (Manchester Road,  Burnley, Lancs.), S.E.G.O.M. Ltd., (Lower Balloo Rd, Groomsport, Bangor, Co Down BT 19 2LU), Rose Miniatures, (15 Llangrove Road, London, SE18 3ST), Micro Mold, (1-2 Unifax, Woods Way, Goring-by-Sea, Sussex), Greenwood and Ball Ltd., (61 Westbury St., Thornaby-on-Tees, Tees-side).

Don’t forget to write these addresses out in copperplate on a spare sheet of A4 paper. 

(More on this in a later edition of PINS.)

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