Hellsborough Exposed

Worth learning the local names before you make a fool of yourself in a Middlewood bar: what you'd call a magpie is a pied corvid here, a jay is a bearded corvid, and a common crow is -- inevitably -- a common corvid. The Dark Peak orders its flitters with a tidiness it grants almost nothing else.

My humidity plant is on the blink again -- over-hot one hour, silly-cold the next, neither one thing nor the other. You come to live alongside Hellsborough's machines the way you'd live alongside a bad-tempered animal: half-working, never wholly trusted to keep you warm or keep you breathing.