Roger Pearse

As a boy I read all sorts of childrens’ fiction.  Many of these books left lasting impressions on me, and I recall them faintly even 30 years later.  But of course children don’t notice the name of the author, or the title of the book; and some of these books I would dearly love to read again, but cannot because I don’t know which they are.

Down the years I have stumbled across some of them again.  I remember seeing one in my local town library — enough to note the details, before it was stolen.  Later I ordered it.  On abebooks.com they used to have a feature where you could recount whatever you could remember, and others would try to tell you what it was.  I recovered another one that way.

But one eluded me.  All I could recall that was unique was the name of the villains; “baugrens”.  For years I have searched the web in vain, in case it should appear.  But it never did.

This evening I tried again; and got a result.  A bookseller posted an advertisement, and transcribed the blurb, and so it came up.  And it is the right book.  It turns out to be by a certain Tom Ingram, and the title is  “Garranane”:

The cloud appeared quite suddenly over the kingdom of Garranane. At first nothing seemed amiss to Kai and Flor, a brother and sister whose royal parents were visiting a distant land. But the cloud stayed, blackening the sky. Then Lotha came to Scortallin Castle with his troupe of performing dogs, and Fenrir, a beautiful lady who drew terrifyingly accurate pictures from life. And after Fenrir and Lotha, the baugrens arrived in Garranane, creatures of evil who cast no shadows. Almost too late Flor and Kai understood the meaning of the cloud.

Five minutes later I had a copy on order!  I shall be eager to see it again.  Isn’t google wonderful?  But in case this information should vanish, and there is someone else out there looking, I thought I’d repost it here.

UPDATE: 21 October 2017.  Here’s a picture of the cover:

Charles Sullivan has written a chapter of his forthcoming book in which he goes through all the works of Origen and looks at what is said about the gift of tongues.  The chapter is here.  It can only be read online, tho, and not downloaded.  I’ve skimmed it, as I don’t read stuff online all that well, but it contains some interesting ideas.

Driving in the sunshine can be very therapeutic.  I spent quite a bit of today doing this.  I’ve been wondering how to write a preface to the Chronicle of James of Edessa.  The steady beat of tyre on tarmac helped, and I’ve just written the first draft of the preface.  The problem is how to present the data in a clear and intelligible way.  But I think I’ve got it!

How quickly the past vanishes.  A few memories came back to me this evening.

Back in the 1980’s, I bought my first PC.  It was a plasticky Amstrad PC1640, with a hard drive on a card.  I bought it with a bank loan, and returned it very quickly for the screen was of poor quality and the colours faded in one corner.  I remember the feeling of bitter disappointment on the day, and the stress of the loan — perhaps £1,000, a month’s income in those days — and the following day I rang the vendor and asked to return it.  He, more aware than I of my legal rights, obfusticated only a little before accepting it.  It cost me £50 to return the hard drive, bought elsewhere.  I forget what the bank charged me to cancel the loan, but it was a large sum for only a week’s loan, and I never took out a bank loan again.  The relief when it was repaid was enormous.

Later I bought a PC with a proper metal box.  It had only a monochrome screen, but the lettering on this was actually yellow.  Everything about it was real, tho.  I bought a modem, again on a card, and  used it to dial up a bulletin-board system (BBS).  The telephone numbers for these were printed in PC magazines.  The high-pitched noise vanished as it connected, and the screeen gradually filled with blocky text and characters from the remote system.  It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen; and it was all going on before me on my PC.  There was no internet in those days, although usenet existed, if you were at a university and could access it.  It was a closed book to me.

Over time I visited quite a number of BBS.  I learned to post to the forums, which were syndicated across the Fidonet network that connected them together.  I settled on one BBS, which called itself “Rivendell”, and had the motto “Where misty mountains rise, and friendly fires burn”.  The motto was added to messages you sent. 

There were downloads too.  Pictures of asteroids and of earth, from NASA could be downloaded.  More dubious images also circulated; and I recall at least one BBS which was, in retrospect, clearly rather dodgy.  There was no search engine; most of the downloads were technical.

One element that was less welcome was the telephone bill that arrived at the end of the month.  There were no special arrangements in the UK at that date, and it was something like £40, a big sum in those days.  After that I was more cautious!  Rumours circulated of incredible bills run up by people using BBS’s.  In the US, we knew, enviously, that free local calls made BBS’s possible. 

The arrival of the internet in the UK was severely hampered by this sort of problem, until some bright soul thought of a solution.  He negotiated with British Telecom whereby he could charge a flat fee a month for access (about £18), and get an 0800 number which his subscribers could use.  A bulk discount and the fact that most people would surf at the low bandwidth available then for only a few hours a week meant that this could work; and ISP’s rapidly proliferated.  Today we all have broadband, but the price remains about the same.

I don’t know what became of the BBS’s.  I found that having a computer at home as well as at work was stressful, and in the end, ca. 1990, I disposed of mine with some relief.  I never had a computer at home again until I became a freelancer, and even then only bought a laptop that I could place in a drawer, out of sight, out of mind.