Scarfolk is one of my favourite things, full stop.
It's not just a funny series of posters but also some often fairly successful satire of British council politics and 1970s doom and gloom. The books are fun, and much more morbid than you see on the web. Lots of nice touches like the library stamps saturating at the end of 1979 (scarfolk is stuck)
I grew up in rural England in the 70s. Scarfolk is basically a documentary. I remember posters in our tiny local post office warning locals about rabid animals, and farmers about the Colorado beetle. My favourite touch is the blue tint to the posters. Sunlight will bleach inks, but blue ink was more resilient, so posters left on sunlit walls would take on a bluish tinge.
When was this sort of terror-based public information messaging abandoned, anyway? I grew up in late 80s/early 90s Ireland, and there was still some of it around (I’ll never trust a chip-pan, which I suppose was the point), but it seems to be almost entirely gone now.
I’m kind of curious if people who grew up either before or after the period when it was common _get_ Scarfolk.
There was a definite change in the wind in the 80s. Oddly I remember feeling that the newer, pastel coloured 80s offerings were a bit weak. I'd grown to quite like being terrified. Around 1979 our teachers showed us a public safety film, called 'Apaches'. I was about 8 years old, at primary school. It was a film chronicling the gruesome deaths of a group of children who were playing on a farm. It genuinely traumatised me well into my teenage years, it was really bad, and showing it to kids would be unthinkable today. Anyone else remember it? :-)
I'm convinced that these kinds of sites are why the internet was created. The fact that they are so rare shows that we are not fully deserving of the internet. Since we have subverted the intended use of the internet and made things like Facebook, we should be sent to our rooms without supper and have our internet priveleges removed for 2-weeks so we can think about the decisions we've made.
I still love this. In particular: the placenames, which are wonderful parodies of odd little East Anglian village names; "we deliver FREE absolutely anywhere in the world (except Whoft)"; and the surreal property listings ("Superb new development of 0-bedroom flats. Reduced to clear due to planning error. Garden.").
"Littler grew up in the 1970s, in suburban Manchester, where he remembers being “always scared, always frightened of what I was faced with.”"
I lived in Manc in 1977 - Wythenshawe to be a bit more precise. I was seven so a little young to be scared about much that I could articulate coherently. It was the Queen's Silver Jubilee year and summer seemed to last forever. I loved going to school (!) "Button Lane Infant's". The mums in our area organised a rota of four mums at a time to walk around 20-30 odd kids to school - about three miles or so for me and my brother. On the walk we whittered on endlessly and I remember we played a game where the world was made of sweets and discussed it. You'd be surprised what interests a seven year old to the point they can recall it aged 52.
Manc in the 1970s was a bit of a grey place. I do remember a lot of concrete and a lot of dog shit. However, where we lived there was lots of impromptu footie on the field near the allotments, behind some really crappy concrete garages, lots of bike riding and generally having a great time. I spent a few days in Wythenshawe hospital, to have the grommits removed from inside my ears that were put in by army surgeons in Rinteln (West Germany). Forty odd years later, I read in New Scientist article that "glue ear" is a bit of a dodgy diagnosis. I do have tinnitus probably due to surgery but it isn't that bad. I recall a smell of boiled cabbages and the walls being green. The nurses were lovely.
I could go on but that's more than enough.
Anyway, Scarfolk isn't really that much of a pastiche. My main complaint is with the name! It combines two English town naming parts but Scar- is mostly seen in the north and -folk is mainly seen in the south. Scarfield, Scarthorpe or Grenfolk or do the job properly and go for a really weird English name: Ryme Intrinsica, Hatch Beauchamp, Chew Magna and Curry Rivel are all near me. The name Scarfolk is quite obviously wrong Even so I can tell you how to pronounce it, if you are not too familiar with English place names. It is a bit like "Skaffuck" - you run both syllables into each other and folk loses the l sound. The final k sound is softened too - I put fuck in because it is a fairly well understood syllable.
I'm just getting started on how we pronounce place names! A few years back I went skiing in Banff (Alberta, Canada). Near there is Norquay which I pronounced as Norkey as in Torquay. Nope it's: Norrkway or perhaps Nork-kway. That's fair enough - the locals can call their place whatever they like and I can damn well like it or bugger off. The thing is that the place was clearly named by people from these parts but the language has changed and moved on. Here in the UK, Norquay means North Quay. I have no idea what Norquay means in Canada - is it just a legacy name.
Here in the UK we have legacy names too. For example River Avon - Avon means river in several Brythonic languages (Afon). The land that contains the modern UK has been done over quite a few times by all sorts of well organised interlopers - Vikings (lads doing the vik), Romans (Senatus PopulusQue Romani), more viking types now called Normans and with a thin veneer of respectability thanks to duffing up Normandy and settling.
Norquay/Norkway reminds me of quite a few places in North America where the original pronunciation gets mangled, like Versailles in Kentucky (pron. "Versaylz").
It's not just a US thing though, you mentioned River Avon ("ay-von", if I'm not mistaken) - there's a mountain in Scotland called Ben Avon which is pronounced "Ben Ahn".
Afon/avon means river in Welsh. The Ben Avon thing is likely an accident of transliteration. I known "Ben" means mountain in Scottish (Gallic).
The Brythonic languages - Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and I think there's one in Brittany (Franch). Those are the still living ones and as well as those there is a Cornish revival and languages such as Cumbric which only now live on in counting numbers. That lot is the, if you like, the old, original languages of Britain. Britain here means the lands of the Britons which also includes lesser Britain as well as Great Britain, which is northern France - Brittany.
So, although we have the johnny come lately English language, which is only about 1500 years old, we also have the far older languages here in the UK. All of those languages have fed and fed off each other. The Brythonics have taken on the Roman alphabet in their own distinct way as has English.
It is all too easy for us anglophones to forget that the alphabet we use was not invented here (Latin), nor was the term alphabet (aleph-beth - Hebrew I think). English is often described as the lingua franca - "language of the Franks" or French! Lingua Franca is a hangover from the days of the Holy Roman empire.
I live near a village called “Horsted Keynes” pronounced “Horsted Cains” - thought it was odd but found an old map from 1750ish and that has it written as “Horsted Cains” - somewhere along the line the name must have changed but the locals kept calling it by the old name and it has stuck.
Before we moved here my wife phoned up the local pub trying to reserve a table and said “are you in horsted keens “ the lady quickly, and quite sharply, corrected her “it is pronounced cains” - so I can see why it has stayed, the locals can be quite terse about it and generally always correct people.
There's loads of examples like that around the place. The "great vowel shift" is also responsible for many of them.
Near here (Yeovil, Somerset) is Leigh - not "Lee" but "Lie". Elsewhere in the UK Leigh will be pronounced "Lay" - I'll put money on it.
When I first saw your village name, I instinctively went for "husted kens". We generally shorten syllables and clip consonants, except when we don't! We insist on aspirating "h" (herb vs 'erb) but will turn beauchamp "bow'shamp" into "beeshum".
Wikipedia has a little bit of info on the etymology, it's quite interesting!
> Guillaume de Cahaignes, a French knight who participated in the Norman conquest of England, and lord of what is now Cahagnes, was given Milton in Buckinghamshire and the Sussex village of Horstede (The Place of Horses in Old English). The latter became Horstede de Cahaignes and in time Horsted Keynes
Americans are especially good at mangling French place names, St. Louis being an especially good example. The local pronunciation of Des Plaines, the city or the river, is "Dess Planes," and on and on. Sometimes we get it right, as with Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin, but usually there are one or more Anglicizations in French place names in the US. It can sometimes happen with Spanish as well, for instance, San Jose, IL is pronounced "San Joes."
I had glue ear when I was a baby, I couldn’t hear anything around the age of three - had gromits put in (which fell out by themselves) and I could hear.
I don’t remember much but do remember driving home from the hospital and hearing a whistling sound from an open window that scared me.
Until around 4 I could lip read, wish it was something I collect still do!
Scarfolk is amazing. It’s just so beautifully done.
If you want to go further, I’d very much recommend exploring artists like Belbury Poly [0] and Pye Corner Audio [1] and labels like Ghost Box [2] and Castles in Space [3].
They mine a similar mix of BBC Radiophonic Workshop-style sounds, 60s/70s public information films, vintage library music, TV themes, pagan folk horror and existential dread.
People who like this might also like Welcome to Night Vale [0], a podcast with a similar vibe that takes place in the American Southwest.
[0]: https://www.welcometonightvale.com/
Scarfolk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21789679 - Dec 2019 (23 comments)
Visiting Scarfolk, the Most Spectacular Dystopia of the 1970s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11334436 - March 2016 (29 comments)
“Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10389497 - Oct 2015 (21 comments)