PINS - Rule Twenty-two: Inner Mapping
(Garlic, New Spuds, Flowers, Parsnips, Parsley / White Wine, Blueberries, Tins Toms, Bank, Church)
PINS can be carried out anywhere. We know that. We think it’s best to do it in your garden. But you can also do it in your head, each day as you drive your Morrises, Vauxhalls, Austins or Volvos to Preston, Swinton, Salford, or Manchester.
We don’t know if PINS is true. But that’s not a problem. Sometimes, it’s just what we remember hearing, or imagine about the stuff we’ve found in a set of old brown card folders marked:
Duke’s Tunnel
W/r G’m’s Notes
Pax Britannica
Victoriana Furnishings
3 Move Game
Mr Cuthbert’s Guide to Growing
Greater Manchester Council
Mother
Rupert Street, Newton Heath
Felling and District Labour Group
AquaScribe
Clerks of Parish & Town Councils in the Burnley Area and Whitworth TC
NavWar
PINS, though, doesn’t have to be in a garden. Lots of your new pals from school don’t have gardens and neither did you to begin with. You had a paving area with ground under the rose bushes to dig up with your fingers. Maybe you were preparing yourself for PINS back then. Your first word is car, pronounced ‘CAR.’ You also have backs, and a yard, with a high brick and stone wall, painted white, to keep off the soot. You can hear the nonstop clackety-clack of the mill machines at night. They're just over the wall. Elsewhere, you can hear the swing and groan of the river cranes at night. They’re just down the valley.
Not many do things with gardens any more, anyway. Let alone play PINS. Some bungalows have overlaid their allotted land with bricks or concrete slabs. And they paint the concrete gnomes and decorative animals they have collected red, or white. They paint the brick walls red, too, to keep off the soot and grime.
You can take a minute to stare at the ornaments on the way to the prefab built during another war, that is your day nursery. Run by the State, there’s posh. That’s also near the place where your gran told you to smell the fresh tar on the roads and where you watched the bloke stoke the brazier, for flying sparks. He’s also the bloke with the withered arm who lights fireworks for the children every year, you will find that out later. Look, some ornaments you see, normally the gnomes, are even red and white. Count them. And listen to your mother who tells you about the man with no limbs in the pram that she, and all her friends, teased. Listen to your Great Aunt Marion, who rolls her eyes and whispers when she says, “shot in the back, by one of his own.” Listen to your Auntie Lily when she says she would lie under a table with your Great Aunt Marion every night in the dark, wearing a mask and a helmet. They’d both hope the husband wouldn’t come back. Listen, again, after you’ve inhaled the tar smell, to your grandma who mentions “terrible flights in aeroplanes” your grandad and her foreign friend had to do. Listen to your Auntie Grace who rolls her eyes when she talks of your Uncle Arthur coming back, from the desert, “with fleas.” Listen to your dad when he tells you he was under the stairs and, peeking out, saw his mam, your nana, stand in the doorway and shake her fist at the bombers overhead to say, “Eeeeh, nivva!” Listen, too, to your nana who tells you about the male teacher, who would cry and roll on the floor when she and her classmates banged their desk lids. A little later on, remember to sit under your desk when you are told to, every week.
Your grandad, your granda, your Uncle Arthur, your neighbours with the kukri and the bible will say very little and smile. You only find out about the foreign friend later, on the leaf of a Polish-English dictionary.
PINS can be carried out anywhere. We know that. Watch the man in the small car drive slowly down the road bordering the playground as the whole school screams abuse at him. Everyone enjoys that. That can also be PINS.
PINS can come from anywhere but can’t be played out on what the television shows. What the television shows are other images, coming from elsewhere. They can’t really be incorporated, or trusted. You do remember the feeling when things change to colour. That transformation is a very strange feeling and not to be trusted. Now, there is too much colour from outside, and this can’t enter PINS.
So: please try not to forget the following when playing PINS. Colour television is not to be trusted.
The woman wearing a green woollen roll neck jumper, giving a talk about not eating meat. The backdrop behind her was a flat pearl grey with a blue radiance. She looked very thin and ill and her long hair made her look bitter. Not to be trusted.
The many heads of a rock band. Their heads rotated around the screen in purple, yellow, black and scarlet. They had very curly hair. Not to be trusted.
The strange animal or humanoid forms, animated puppets or moving toy figures that talk, or tell stories, or have things to say, normally said by a man with a rich voice trying to be friendly, on the children's programmes you are sat down in front of. Not to be trusted. None, none are to be trusted.
The image of water and buildings that appears before programmes with some lettering upside down. Not to be trusted.
PINS is not played on any screen. This is the only real Rule of PINS.
An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.