Laar di daar

I spent last week redrafting two chapters of the book, with luck for the better. They were two easy chapters though, introduction and historiography, which mostly involved cutting and pasting, and the tedious business of editing footnotes and compiling a new bibliography. When I was 16 I wrote a short story set in Hell, where eternal punishment consisted of performing the calculations for every physical interaction that will ever occur in the entire universe. Were I to write that story now, I think I’d replace the maths with academic footnotes.

To celebrate Mission Accomplished on Saturday, I went for a longish walk down a nearby valley. As usual I got myself lost in the woods, although this time it was worth it because I accidentally stumbled across a mysterious collection of earthworks, half-buried beneath a shadowy, crunching sea of dead leaves, that don’t appear on the OS maps, and they kept me distracted for a while.

The main reason I wanted to walk down the valley was to reach an odd little place called Laar, which is supposed to be the setting for a play about Boniface I wrote earlier this year, which, for want of something else to do, I started to redraft this weekend. I was expecting to find a village, but it turned out to be one long, dead-end road flanked by decaying farm buildings, a crumbling mill house and a modest stately home. I walked up the lonely street and saw not a soul. It had the feel of a ghost town. Even the name, Laar, doesn’t have any personality to it. From what I know of toponymics, Laar just means ‘place’. “So, where are you from?” “A place.” “Oh. That’s nice. Anything interesting there?” “Not really. There’s a road. That’s about it.” “Oh.”

The brights lights of Laar

Perhaps this is a good thing. It means that the location is more malleable to the imagination. Anything goes. If I want to set some fictional adventures of Boniface there, why not?

A mill with a good stream