Liner Notes for A Tip To The Trip
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Okay so the tip. The Household Waste Recycling Centre as it’s called now. As a child I always enjoyed it, living at a time when you let kids wander about in a place where there were cars moving back and forth, people heaving big pieces of dangerous materials about and huge crushing machines. I was tall for my age (as indeed I still am) so kept ahead of the waves of health and safety.
Anyway I grew up and the tip is no longer a magical and smelly place, and thanks to pandemic rules I can’t even go with my Dad. But that doesn’t mean it’s entirely lost its grubby glamour. And I’m not the only one who feels it, who knows that the tip is a place outside of normal life, where anything can happen.
Fly tipping is bad, and I hope I don’t need to convince you of that.
This was not the first Strandbridge Tale I wrote (that was the forthcoming The Red Cap Of Old Hobb Mill), but it was on my list of things to do with the setting/concept before I’d written the second draft of that story. A Trip To The Tip was very simple to write, mostly in one go, and if it’s a bit shorter than I’d hoped then brevity has its virtues too. So many people, when I write something long, don’t have the time to read it in their normal life, having to wait until they go on holiday. Maybe shorter is better, you know?
This is possibly the purest expression of the concept behind the Strandbridge Tales. Someone is trying to do a fairly normal task, possibly in a slightly eccentric or comedic fashion, and they come across something out of folklore. A tiny guy, a fairy warrior in this case.
But a tiny guy who also likes the tip.
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