Once More With Footnotes

writer.
     
    And it was journalism work, i.e., written for now. Keep it? Why? It was journalism, ephemeral as smoke. Besides, it was written on cheap copy paper, which resembled toilet paper in several respects and was not known for its keeping qualities.
     
    I do recall with some fondness, though, the piece written for the feature pages when Star Wars was causing big queues. It heralded things to come, since it was written from the point of view of the man whose job it was to mainta in the vending machines on the Death Star. He was doing an important job in difficult conditions, as his pained memos to Lord Vader pointed out.
     
    It was required that the pieces be on time and the right length. Oh, and tenuously linked to what was happenin g locally. This piece, which has survived by a miracle, if that's the right word, was written at a time when, it seemed, every TV company was planning some kind of "historical living" project locally.
     
    I stared at the office wall for a while, and began to write:
     
     
     
     
     
A nd M ind the M onoliths
     
                  You can't miss us, down here at the HTV Paleolithic Village. Well, you can, if you're not careful. What you do is, you come up past the Yorkshire Television reconstructed hill-fort, turn left at the LWT Bronze Age en campment, go straight on past Southern TV's Beaker Folk village, and we're next door to the field where some poor bleeders are being paid by Granada to try to build Stonehenge.
     
                  It's not a bad life, all things considered. There's only me and Sid here now, ever since Ron and Amanda were lured off to Border Television's Dark Age Settlement by the promise of not having to sleep in the same hut as the goats. Also old Tom Bowler left us last week, he said he didn't mind being Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, ex cept that when the original Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, wanted to get his head down after a hard day's flintknapping he, Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, didn't have a ruddy great 250 horsepower diesel generator roaring away outside his sod hut. Or a bank of arclights in his bedroom.
     
                  I can't say I mind that. What keeps me awake are the thuds and abruptly cut-off screams from next door every time a monolith falls over.
     
                  Still it's not too bad. I can put a pretty good edge on a flint, even if I say it myself, and next week it's our turn to go hunting. There's been a bit of a stink over this hunting business ever since the Granada lot came back with a side of best beef and three chickens with their giblets in a plastic bag. I thought that was a bit odd, and I said as much to Sid.
     
                  Mind you, Sid's an old hand at this business. He did a year on the Sussex University Ancient Farm, then he wangled a place on the Radio Three Celtic Living Experiment, and then he did nine months being paid to reconstruct Silb ury Hill. He can knock out a copper bracelet quick as a wink, can Sid, and when it comes to hunting, he just nips over to the nearest farm and pinches a cow.
     
                  The TV types have never rumbled him, we hardly see them now, what with there being no bathrooms in the Paleolithic and the midden right outside the hut and everything — they just stay on the main road and use a long lens.
     
                  Where I disagree with Sid, though, is over this flogging of fags to the other villages. I looked at his straw mattress the other d ay and it's stuffed with Benson and Hedges, toothpaste, shampoos, and rolls of soft toilet paper. I don't think it's in the spirit of the thing, but Sid said trading was very important in the olden days, and anyway, he can get a quid for a roll of Andrex d own at the Bronze Lake Village.
     
                  What? Oh, that was just that lot next door again. They've found 27 different ways Stonehenge couldn't possibly have been built. No, I shouldn't go and look, if I was you. They've already lost fifteen villagers, three camer amen, and the Blue Peter outside the broadcast unit.
     
                  That site over there? The empty one with the pond? Oh, that's the Irish Television's Jurassic Experiment. Yes, I know it's pretty difficult to find actors 30-foot tall with scaly skins — I suppose they'l l have to, you know, rig up some sort of pantomime horses, only dinosaurs, if you see what I mean. They had to go