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I wonder, is there an inherent human tendency to create a mythos of rarely-glimpsed, usually small beings? I ask this as I've recently been recalling the 'civilisation' that my friend Dave Gardner and I created in the Horse-chestnut-girt alleyways of Worcester Park in the 1970's...
To the rear of Dave's parents' house, there lay a narrow 'alley' of cinder and grit - typical of the 1930's houses of the area. This was bordered by overgrown privet hedges and trees, and close to the Heath Robinson 'car port' that housed the family Beetle (er...a VW, they weren't quite that weird) and abutted onto this alley was a big pile of sand. This, we decided, was the capital city of a herpetological (imagine bipedal salamander) alien race of two-inch tall beings called 'Flogs' - the name, coined by my pal, being derived from the (Daily Telegraph?) character 'FLook - by trOG'. Not a bad derivation for an eight-year-old.
Anyway, we created an entire mythos and economic system for these things. The local clay soil yielded modelling material from which we made a wide variety of vehicles and siege engines (the Flogs were permanently at war with the more prosaic Vespa - the wasps that harassed us from their nest in the car port) and artillery that we helpfully 'launched' by attaching the projectiles to 'whippy' privet-hedge sticks and flinging in vast parabolae in the general direction of the dwellings of anyone we (and hence the Flogs) had fallen out with, usually with remote shattering glass as a result. Tut.
This being well before e-mail and mobiles, the Flogs communicated with us via the McCarthyite-sounding 'Communies' - in fact starlings, whose mimicking trills and pips we of course could transcribe, like Morse Code.
The religion of the Flogs was tied into the worship of twin fetishes, the so-called SASTEPS, or Sub-Aquatic-Suspended-Tubular-Exhaust-Pipes, a pair of motorcycle exhausts that we had dragged out of the Hogsmill river (some distance away) and hung from the branches of a nearby tree. Hum.
There's a lot more to this, but that's the essence. I think our involvement with the Flogs began to fade after we inadvertently began to excavate cat shit whilst digging out the catacombs of their city in the sand. Dave Gardner now works as a highly-regarded horticultural journalist (a superb example of name-related metier if ever there was one) but I haven't yet asked him if he remembers all this.
Does anyone else have a similar tale of mini-people? I guess the Flogs were a type of neo-fairy, but it's interesting. Don't know why I'm telling you all this, really...just had to get it off me chest.
I'll tell you about the 'Alley Wars' and the Bunker one day... :?
To the rear of Dave's parents' house, there lay a narrow 'alley' of cinder and grit - typical of the 1930's houses of the area. This was bordered by overgrown privet hedges and trees, and close to the Heath Robinson 'car port' that housed the family Beetle (er...a VW, they weren't quite that weird) and abutted onto this alley was a big pile of sand. This, we decided, was the capital city of a herpetological (imagine bipedal salamander) alien race of two-inch tall beings called 'Flogs' - the name, coined by my pal, being derived from the (Daily Telegraph?) character 'FLook - by trOG'. Not a bad derivation for an eight-year-old.
Anyway, we created an entire mythos and economic system for these things. The local clay soil yielded modelling material from which we made a wide variety of vehicles and siege engines (the Flogs were permanently at war with the more prosaic Vespa - the wasps that harassed us from their nest in the car port) and artillery that we helpfully 'launched' by attaching the projectiles to 'whippy' privet-hedge sticks and flinging in vast parabolae in the general direction of the dwellings of anyone we (and hence the Flogs) had fallen out with, usually with remote shattering glass as a result. Tut.
This being well before e-mail and mobiles, the Flogs communicated with us via the McCarthyite-sounding 'Communies' - in fact starlings, whose mimicking trills and pips we of course could transcribe, like Morse Code.
The religion of the Flogs was tied into the worship of twin fetishes, the so-called SASTEPS, or Sub-Aquatic-Suspended-Tubular-Exhaust-Pipes, a pair of motorcycle exhausts that we had dragged out of the Hogsmill river (some distance away) and hung from the branches of a nearby tree. Hum.
There's a lot more to this, but that's the essence. I think our involvement with the Flogs began to fade after we inadvertently began to excavate cat shit whilst digging out the catacombs of their city in the sand. Dave Gardner now works as a highly-regarded horticultural journalist (a superb example of name-related metier if ever there was one) but I haven't yet asked him if he remembers all this.
Does anyone else have a similar tale of mini-people? I guess the Flogs were a type of neo-fairy, but it's interesting. Don't know why I'm telling you all this, really...just had to get it off me chest.
I'll tell you about the 'Alley Wars' and the Bunker one day... :?
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