The walls grew fatter here than any in the land
It is not my norm that all of my completed fiction so far this year has been fanfiction, but on the other hand I could be not writing fiction at all. Most lately, for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit: "The Debt of Centuries."
I wanted to write them reciprocal casefic for Sapphire & Steel (1979–82), so I threw their catalogue of original and other elements into the Ersatz Genremixer to see if I got any useful prompts. Among others, I received "Arsenic / Zinc - Awkward moment & tradition & Lending a coat in the cold," which was technically no crackier than the rest except that Arsenic and Zinc are fancast with Caroline Blakiston and Alec McCowen, last seen by me in Mr. Palfrey of Westminster (1984–85). I could not resist.
The title is a mondegreen left over from hearing Dave Goulder's "These Dry Stone Walls" (since I can't find a link to his own recording, here performed by Gordon Bok) decades before I saw the official lyrics. It seemed to suit. I do not think I am one of nature's tag-users.
thisbluespirit: "The Debt of Centuries."I wanted to write them reciprocal casefic for Sapphire & Steel (1979–82), so I threw their catalogue of original and other elements into the Ersatz Genremixer to see if I got any useful prompts. Among others, I received "Arsenic / Zinc - Awkward moment & tradition & Lending a coat in the cold," which was technically no crackier than the rest except that Arsenic and Zinc are fancast with Caroline Blakiston and Alec McCowen, last seen by me in Mr. Palfrey of Westminster (1984–85). I could not resist.
The title is a mondegreen left over from hearing Dave Goulder's "These Dry Stone Walls" (since I can't find a link to his own recording, here performed by Gordon Bok) decades before I saw the official lyrics. It seemed to suit. I do not think I am one of nature's tag-users.
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This made me laugh - it does sound like it could be, doesn't it? (It definitely isn't, though. I love it.)
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And, maybe, but Mr Palfrey of Westminster does absolutely sound like a lost Trollope novel. One of the short ones, probably set in Barsetshire, even if partly also in Westminster.
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Thank you! I am glad to be writing, too, and very glad that you love it. Your opinion of psychogeographical weirdness matters to me.
And the song too; must investigate Dave Goulder.
He's a folk singer, dry stone waller, and former railway fireman; this song comes from an album called Stone, Steam and Starlings (1974), which pretty much covers the bases. I almost used its last lines as an epigraph for this story: Just look and discover two walls that lean against each other. You'll never see them in quite the same way again. Some of his folkloric songs like "The January Man" and "Faraway Tom" have become reasonably famous in other people's voices, but I heard most of them first in his own voice and I wish it were easier to find online to share. (You may just end up getting a pile of mp3s from me.) "The Man Who Put the Engine in the Chip Shop" is one of his railway songs and a good sample of him in narrator mode.
Mr Palfrey is something I didn't know of beyond the title; for some reason I thought it was a Trollope adaptation.
Hee. I wanted to write it about this month and instead got banhammered by this cold, but it is a small, marvelous spy show which uses most of the premises and none of the tropes; it is deliberately not action-packed, or all the action happens in conversation. I have been describing it by saying that its stories have a trick of resolving quietly while still being individually momentous and there's something haunting or bittersweet in all of them. My mother has just been saying "it's thoughtful and all the people in it are people." There's not much of it, but it ranges from totally watchable to stupidly good. McCowen is just fantastic. His performance definitely animates how I thought of Zinc. You can watch the complete series on DVD in your region!
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