![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezEarlier this evening I posted a picture of a gravestone on the FB because ho ho ho gothics and churchyards, eh? What am I like, etc?
The slightly longer story is probably going to take me a couple of attempts to get out of my head, so I don't know how much of this will survive.
There's another picture in the phone, which would have been of a pair of circling Kestrels (maybe) had the camera optics been a bit better. Instead you can see the house across the valley from Charlton Abbots church. It is called Holt Farm and I lived there until 1976. The set of views possible from those two locations were quite a feature of my growing up. I am really quite familiar with many of them.
Thus it is quite hard to completely convey the absolute weirdness in finding that gravestone, lurking in plain sight in the wall of the churchyard. It really is very Nigel Kneale.
The other thing that happened is that I stumbled over a 'tweet' by what appears to be 'Tony' 'Parsons'. It reads, for the most part, 'Hande hoch! For you zer war is over!'.
In seventies Winchcombe, which was halfway between home and primary school, there was George Constant the barber, an actual sweet shop called oh god I've forgotten the last time I looked it was an antique clock shop, which means the children of Winchcombe will have to make do with a restored half-hunter rather than a sherbert thing and a packet of ten candy cigarettes. Round the corner and down a bit, almost opposite the narrow lane down to Hayward's (hardware shop) workshop, was the newsagent. There was a sloping counter of general interest magazines (Farmer's Weekly, Woman's Weekly, etc), things I never looked at towards the back of the shop, and a roundy-roundy thing (aka a hurdy-gurdy) that contained JT Edson paperbacks and Commando comics.
What little I knew of people from Europe in those days was informed by those Commando comics, Dad's Army, Colditz (although that was on late so I wasn't allowed to watch it) and The Secret War.
Quite a number of years later, (1993) I (we) beetled off to a campsite just outside Lelystad for a hacker camp (HEU) and discovered really rather quickly that everything I thought I knew was more or less wrong, which was absolutely fine, and most of the things that other people (friends, family, the mainstream media) were keen to tell me was also wrong, and that was absolutely fine too and I could cheerfully ignore them.
It also made it obvious that the people who wrote for the NME had haunted similar shops and also read Commando comics and watched Dad's Army. And had learned nothing of the wider world since then.
'Tony' 'Parsons' has not been to a hacker camp, so can be cheerfully ignored. He is reacting to people from Europe as if they were from a Commando comic.
It is the C21st and that sort of behaviour is really quite stupid. On the other hand he is old and probably had it shot off in the war for the likes of you.
The slightly longer story is probably going to take me a couple of attempts to get out of my head, so I don't know how much of this will survive.
There's another picture in the phone, which would have been of a pair of circling Kestrels (maybe) had the camera optics been a bit better. Instead you can see the house across the valley from Charlton Abbots church. It is called Holt Farm and I lived there until 1976. The set of views possible from those two locations were quite a feature of my growing up. I am really quite familiar with many of them.
Thus it is quite hard to completely convey the absolute weirdness in finding that gravestone, lurking in plain sight in the wall of the churchyard. It really is very Nigel Kneale.
The other thing that happened is that I stumbled over a 'tweet' by what appears to be 'Tony' 'Parsons'. It reads, for the most part, 'Hande hoch! For you zer war is over!'.
In seventies Winchcombe, which was halfway between home and primary school, there was George Constant the barber, an actual sweet shop called oh god I've forgotten the last time I looked it was an antique clock shop, which means the children of Winchcombe will have to make do with a restored half-hunter rather than a sherbert thing and a packet of ten candy cigarettes. Round the corner and down a bit, almost opposite the narrow lane down to Hayward's (hardware shop) workshop, was the newsagent. There was a sloping counter of general interest magazines (Farmer's Weekly, Woman's Weekly, etc), things I never looked at towards the back of the shop, and a roundy-roundy thing (aka a hurdy-gurdy) that contained JT Edson paperbacks and Commando comics.
What little I knew of people from Europe in those days was informed by those Commando comics, Dad's Army, Colditz (although that was on late so I wasn't allowed to watch it) and The Secret War.
Quite a number of years later, (1993) I (we) beetled off to a campsite just outside Lelystad for a hacker camp (HEU) and discovered really rather quickly that everything I thought I knew was more or less wrong, which was absolutely fine, and most of the things that other people (friends, family, the mainstream media) were keen to tell me was also wrong, and that was absolutely fine too and I could cheerfully ignore them.
It also made it obvious that the people who wrote for the NME had haunted similar shops and also read Commando comics and watched Dad's Army. And had learned nothing of the wider world since then.
'Tony' 'Parsons' has not been to a hacker camp, so can be cheerfully ignored. He is reacting to people from Europe as if they were from a Commando comic.
It is the C21st and that sort of behaviour is really quite stupid. On the other hand he is old and probably had it shot off in the war for the likes of you.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-03 10:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-05-03 07:51 pm (UTC)If just beetling about at HEU and talking to random European hackers hadn't made it obvious that I had more in common with these people than the types in the village pub (And the fact that the only other English people on the terrain stayed in their tent the entire weekend and didn't mix with us), then HAR in 2009 put the tin hat on it.
I'd gone into the info tent, I think because I wanted some more beer tokens, when some Swedish hacker behind the desk shouted 'Does anyone have any questions?'
Because the imp of the perverse was with me, I shouted back 'What's the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?'
'African or European swallow?' went the chap.
English humour, Dutch campsite, people from all sorts of places.