Hangup Zine 13 Preview: Take Your Time and Defrost Your Mind
After an unexpected hiatus, Hangup Zine 13 is out now. Pick one up through our store here, our sign up to our paid newsletter to receive every zine for the duration of your subscription.
Here’s a preview of Jono Coote’s Take Your Time and Defrost Your Mind; Hiking to Yorkshire’s Oldest DIY Spot
Our next door neighbour keeps asking us if we’ve accepted Jesus into our lives. We had to call the police on her the other day. A dual voiced chant built to a crescendo, invoking a nameless entity to “get out in the name of the lord,” before a piercing women’s scream and then complete silence. I get home as they explain things to the constabulary and we discover, listening intently at the door, that this was all part of the religious process; worried that she might have Coronavirus, she had enlisted the help of a professional exorcist. The shriek we had heard was the physical manifestation of the microbes being flung from her body.
This period of enforced isolation, an extended confrontation with our own psyche, has a lot of us thinking about madness; as I am on the first leg of a hike over to Bradford to check up on the north of England’s oldest DIY spot. Bypassing green meadows and huge country houses, I am struck by the sheer space available so close to the city and my brain drifts back to Oregon, where we camped by backyard bowls and skated huge private concrete parks on improbable seeming properties. If a few skaters with disposable income to burn bought up a few of these, we could create a network of concrete snaking all the way from Leeds to Bradford, connected by a tangled web of rural hillbombs and green fields. It’d take a wad in the way of start-up money, but thankfully I’ve picked a stable career path and writing rambling articles about skateboarding is probably going to make me my first million soon. One of the cows approaches me as I stop to appreciate the view, maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of the expectation of some kind of bovine treat. I christen her Mooey Lewis before continuing on my way, through the kind of villages where every house has a name instead of a number. Hilltop Farm? If it’s accurate then thank fuck, I think this climb is getting to me - when you start naming cows and mentally annexing large swathes of land in preparation for a group of skateboarders to enter the ranks of the noveau rich, it’s time to wonder if the lactic acid has travelled from your calves to your head and started percolating your grey matter. No, I decide; I’ve yet to start calling in the exorcists, I’ve probably got a few steps left before I reach full blown shit-thrower territory.