h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Thystl, Bente and Sande - A5980377
Author: WaLLLz (Drop sheep, not Bombs) - U123301

Up for workshopping comments - It's a joint effort of mine and Pinniped's. Pin wrote more of this than I did.

And the whole environmental/green thing was his idea.

Ok, that last bit's not true.

As if.

(Getting Pin involved in something like this is kind of satisfying after his 'treeless Shropshire' remark in the 'Unreliable History of Steelmaking though.)

What's true is that Pin suggested I suggest something for collaborating on. I've always felt the EG entry I wrote for the place at the centre of this missed something that mattered. This was an attempt to fill that hole.

I want it to work, so I'd really like feedback on what anyone finds confusing or obscure or ... anything. Pin gave me his bit as what he called a 'rough draft' to use, and, not seeing much rough about it, I used it more or less as given. But then I was familiar with the story so perhaps I'm not seeing where readers have to make leaps.

Oh and the lapwings/bin bag thing specifically - is it too much? I see them that way and my sister is indignant about that so I've left it but something tells me I ought to cut it.

Waz

"for forty summers I have not returned to these broken walls ...."

wow

hullo authors of this wondrous document - this multi-layered, multi- textured story, with different typefaces and atmospheres -

I haven't read anything longer than about four paragraphs for about 25 years, so this is going to take me a while - I have surfed it, but in the next few days I am going to read it - so far I have got as far as the above sentence, and I was so affected by its poetry - the way it slots in there, changing the brain and the rhythm around - that now I have to rest mine eyes - - -

if I could say anything at all like a reviewer is supposed to say it - or offer critique - I would - but I am still in the first stages of my education with all that kind of thing -

thanks folks!

Helen

Waz,

I am just speechless with the beauty of your prose...true prose!

It merits several close readings to be fully appreciated though! Good literature always does!

A real Gem, it must find its way early into the UnderGuide


f.

Thanks Helen and f, .

Sounds like it's requiring some work to read, which isn't unexpected.

f, more of the prose is Pin's than mine.

My main aim with this is to get it as good as I can to link to it from a thread on the Edited Guide entry on Forvie. And then I ought to look at updating that EG entry, it's missing some facts now, as well as having the gap I wanted this entry to fill.

Waz

I have vivid memories of the Ythan estuary, the creches of Eider ducklings, up to 50 or 60 in a dark fluffy floating mat in the charge of one adult shepherding them through the water - flints in the sand exposed by the wind and the stories of cists [chests], stone chambers in which the Beaker people buried their dead in the fetal position, being uncovered by the wind in the dunes and the object that they were named after, the handsome wee clay beaker still intact beside their bones - the quality of the nature writing is superb - reminds me of Tomlinson's 'The Dunes' - of Beston's 'The Outermost House' : both classics in the genre and now this : lyricism when the trend is to see it dead - well done - and this from Andrew Young inspired no doubt by the same tale :


Culbin Sands

Here lay a fair fat land;
But now its townships, kirks, graveyards
Beneath bald hills of sand
Lie buried deep as Babylonian shards.

But gales may blow again;
And like a sand-glass turned about
The hills in a dry rain
Will flow away and the old land look out;

And where now hedgehog delves
And conies hollow their long caves
Houses will build themselves
And tombstones rewrite names on dead men's graves.

As you may be aware, Nature writing has an ancient lineage - your writing is a piece of the genre - don't stop now that you have got going - I can give you a hundred author's nams to start with - it has given me lifelong comfort - if you require inspiration read for instance Mary Austin's 'The Land of Little Rain' - its a mind-blower
- cheers [pardon my enthusiasm] - langsandy

The hills flowing away - that's , that's something else.

I've seen those creches, and an eider spreading its wings out to cover the chicks under attack from a gull, and an oyster catcher's egg just starting to crack open and so many other things at Forvie. It's a wonderful place and the last, last thing it is is dead.

Writing based in the natural world is probably more my preference than Pinniped's. He wrote most of this, put the people into the landscape, but the subject choice was mine. Interesting things, these collaborative efforts. I'll look up your Mary Austin.

PS it's good to meet someone who also knows the Ythan and I'm very envious of the flints. I've looked for them. Best I've found is mussel shells in an Iron Age midden.

funny you should mention midden but years ago when camping at Cape Cod
- it has eighty mile beaches - I saw a firepit exposed under the Pitchpine forest by a bulldozer - predating the Puritans no doubt - about 3' down and filled with Quahog shells - those of a popular fat clam common to that coast - & footnote to this, at the museum in Provincetown, a beautiful naked, buxom woman that was the figurehead
of a sailing ship : The Belle of Aberdeen lost off the coast . . I
had a poem published once : 'me on my back in the marram grass' at Cove near Doonie's Yawns on a bright bright winter's day - langsandy