pendragony reblogged
pendragony reblogged
Trick or treat!
here is a treat: somewhere on the south downs, aziraphale is sitting up in bed reading a spooky story out loud very softly. crowley is tucked up against him, listening and occasionally humming sleepily as aziraphale’s hand runs up and down crowley’s spine, soothing and slow. he’ll fall asleep before the chapter’s finished, but that’s all right—when aziraphale hears his breathing even out, he’ll put the book aside and slide down into the covers to curl protectively around crowley, and they can finish reading it together tomorrow night.
pendragony reblogged
My new hobby is doodling their cottage in South Downs....
You may need to click for better resolution
pendragony reblogged
Aziraphale having a little internet cooking show
Crowley sets it all up. He thinks it's cute. He starts growing berries and herbs in his garden.
Aziraphale starts out with like three viewers per video. He's so proud. Crowley is, too.
Then he just kinda blows up. Crowley is a bit more internet savvy. He finds out Aziraphale is referred to as a cute, happy grandpa teaching people to cook. People like how positive he is about cooking and food in general. Young people who seem to be on their own for the first time are genuinely grateful for his tutorials and advice.
Aziraphale starts answering questions--can fresh be substituted for frozen, can lemon juice replace lemon, how long has he been cooking--and Crowley has a good idea to have do a little livestream while baking one day. People ask questions in the comments as he talks to them as if they're really there. He misses most of them as he's so distracted. Crowley watches from the side, avoiding being in frame.
Then someone asks how he grows his own ingredients. He beams and drops everything.
"My dear husband is a wonderful gardener!"
Crowley blushes. The comments go wild. Aziraphale grabs him by the arm and pulls him in front of the camera.
"This is my husband... Anthony."
Crowley ducks his head, face burning. He tries leaving. Aziraphale has a hard hold while he gushes for five minutes about how amazing Crowley is, how wonderful he is for growing fresh ingredients for his little hobby, and "no matter what he says he is a very nice man." Crowley hisses quietly.
Aziraphale lets him go. Crowley shuffles back to his place at the table.
"Where were we--ah!"
By the end of the night Aziraphale is happily finishing his dish and chatting away, occasionally turning to Crowley to make a small comment or acknowledge him when the questions about their relationship come flooding in. He's radiating love by that point and, still streaming, spins towards Crowley.
"What do you say to a few more godchildren, dear?"
The comments crash.
More little things:
- Crowley begins appearing in videos after the livestream. Aziraphale will pull him into frame and hold out a spoonful of his latest dish for Crowley to taste. The viewers love it, Aziraphale says, and he knows Crowley does, too
- Aziraphale becomes known as an LGBT icon. Comments become an equal mix of people discussing the recipes and expressing their love of seeing such a healthy queer relationship
- Because the comments start becoming personal as Aziraphale's audience becomes majorly young LGBT people, he begins peppering in life advice to the best of his ability. He says that he understands what's it like to not be accepted and to go against what he's been told is God's plan, but now he has Crowley and a little cottage and his joy now is indescribable
- He journies out to the garden with the camera some days. It's shaky footage. Aziraphale doesn't understand how the zoom works so he's obviously just moving the camera closer when he wants to get a close up of plants. Crowley is always there, ripping out weeds, plucking berries and herbs and laying them in a basket. People are genuinely amazed by how perfect Crowley's garden is. Aziraphale doesn't tell them Crowley's secret. It's already hard having people passing by stare as Crowley yells when he finds a weed.
THIS IS PERFEEEECTTT 😭😭
pendragony reblogged
“It needs a little work…”
pendragony reblogged
What the South Downs are like
Look, GO fanfic writers. I love you and you make life worth living, but I need to tell you some stuff. I live on the edge of the South Downs. It’s not all rock and crab grass and bleak stretches of windswept sand. Let me tell you what it’s like.
1. The local beaches are NOT sandy. They are shingle. They are the kind of beaches Crowley likens walking through the church to. They hurt your feet. There are also sometimes areas of black, barnacle-covered shelves of rock that stick out of the water, housing rock pools and pain for people who walk on them. You might find shells (mostly mussels and cockles) and bits of driftwood, but you’ll also find fossils (which regularly break off the cliffs in rock falls), seaweed, bits of old fishing nets and floats, loads and loads of herring gulls who will steal your ice cream, and these long wooden fences that run perpendicular to the coastline from the top of the beach into the sea (in a vain attempt to slow coastal drift) which are called groynes. Yes, really. Some beaches now have massive piles of granite boulders in order to counteract coastal drift. The sea is not clear and is rarely blue. It’s usually a cloudy greyish greenish blueish colour, and it’s a rare treat to be able to spot a shoal of mackerels or a porpoise.
2. In summer, we have heatwaves that feel hellish to us but would make people from other countries laugh. The rest of the time the beach tends to be chilly, because it’s always windier than inland. The air is humid year round. It’s usually about warm enough to swim from mid May till September, but you get the occasional hardy soul swimming outside those months. People go sailing, but not surfing.
3. Most coastal towns are a bit shabby and down at heel, with amusement arcades, chip shops and cafes being a common thread between them. Some are ancient fishing towns.
4. Seaside terminology in British English: it’s “the beach”, not “the shore”; “the seaside” far more often than “the coast”; “the sea”, NEVER “the ocean”, sometimes “the Channel” (the sea in question being the English Channel), never “the water”. (If people want to do stuff on “the water”, I assume firstly that they mean a river or possibly lake, and secondly that they’re foreign.)
5. On to the actual Downs. These are big hills. My American husband was shocked when he first saw them because he thought they were mountains. They aren’t (he comes from somewhere relatively flat), but they’re a good hike. They form a long, rolling ridge between the inland countryside and the sea. They’re made of chalk and flint, they’re covered in grass meadowland, rambling (hiking) trails and farmland. They are less inhabited than the surrounding Sussex countryside. You’ll find grazing animals; fields - mostly of barley, wheat, oats and oilseed rape; archaeological sites, ancient walkways and barrows; the occasional chalk figure; people walking, biking, horse riding and very occasionally even conducting Druidic rituals!
6. On that basis, please note that wherever Aziraphale and Crowley end up living almost certainly has a rural farmland type character and is definitely not a bleak, rugged headland. It’ll be archetypal English postcard territory in one of the counties that claims to be the ‘garden of England’. Think thatched roof and roses round the door, rolling hills, big old trees and a winding country lane that people down from London speed along like absolute menaces. They probably don’t have many near neighbours and are at least ten miles from the nearest town. Ten miles along ancient, narrow English roads is further than it sounds to someone from a younger country with straighter roads.
7. Broadly speaking, small towns in Sussex tend to be posh and full of old bookshops, tea rooms, antique shops, boundless history and teenagers desperate to leave. Big towns each have their own character. In terms of size, in my experience, most big towns in the UK are similar to smaller American cities, while American small towns are usually equivalent to what I would call a village, or even a hamlet.
8. Most cottages in England are built from brick or local stone (Sussex sandstone being very likely), but wooden clapboard is more common in Sussex than most parts of the country, because the south gets enough sun to occasionally dry out a little. Still unusual, though, because of deathwatch beetle, woodworm, damp and dry rot.
9. We have four distinct seasons, but rain can happen in any of them. If there’s snow in the winter, it’ll be the wet kind that easily turns to slush and ice, preventing travel because no one is prepared for it. In summer, the Downs get plenty of storms coming over from France, as well as taking the brunt of heatwaves. But generally speaking, if you paint a picture of the Downs, you will be using lots of bright blue for the sky, shades of green for the grass and woods, golden yellow for fields of corn* and hay bales, and perhaps some white for the chalk cliffs (think Dover). It looks like a postcard.
10. Retirement to the South Downs conjures up something chintzy and domestic for people who like the finer things in life but want to be left in peace to potter about harmlessly in a place that everyone agrees is utterly lovely.
*Corn, in traditional British usage going back centuries, denotes the local grain crop (eg barley, wheat, rye, oats) as opposed to maize, which used to be very rare here but is gaining in popularity.
(PS Sorry for the appalling formatting, Tumblr is weird.)
Some pictures I took the other day in Wilmington. The Long Man was just behind me. (A chalk figure. I didn’t bother taking any pictures of him because I didn’t know I was going to be seized with the urge to spill my brain online.
What the South Downs are like
Look, GO fanfic writers. I love you and you make life worth living, but I need to tell you some stuff. I live on the edge of the South Downs. It’s not all rock and crab grass and bleak stretches of windswept sand. Let me tell you what it’s like.
1. The local beaches are NOT sandy. They are shingle. They are the kind of beaches Crowley likens walking through the church to. They hurt your feet. There are also sometimes areas of black, barnacle-covered shelves of rock that stick out of the water, housing rock pools and pain for people who walk on them. You might find shells (mostly mussels and cockles) and bits of driftwood, but you’ll also find fossils (which regularly break off the cliffs in rock falls), seaweed, bits of old fishing nets and floats, loads and loads of herring gulls who will steal your ice cream, and these long wooden fences that run perpendicular to the coastline from the top of the beach into the sea (in a vain attempt to slow coastal drift) which are called groynes. Yes, really. Some beaches now have massive piles of granite boulders in order to counteract coastal drift. The sea is not clear and is rarely blue. It’s usually a cloudy greyish greenish blueish colour, and it’s a rare treat to be able to spot a shoal of mackerels or a porpoise.
2. In summer, we have heatwaves that feel hellish to us but would make people from other countries laugh. The rest of the time the beach tends to be chilly, because it’s always windier than inland. The air is humid year round. It’s usually about warm enough to swim from mid May till September, but you get the occasional hardy soul swimming outside those months. People go sailing, but not surfing.
3. Most coastal towns are a bit shabby and down at heel, with amusement arcades, chip shops and cafes being a common thread between them. Some are ancient fishing towns.
4. Seaside terminology in British English: it’s “the beach”, not “the shore”; “the seaside” far more often than “the coast”; “the sea”, NEVER “the ocean”, sometimes “the Channel” (the sea in question being the English Channel), never “the water”. (If people want to do stuff on “the water”, I assume firstly that they mean a river or possibly lake, and secondly that they’re foreign.)
5. On to the actual Downs. These are big hills. My American husband was shocked when he first saw them because he thought they were mountains. They aren’t (he comes from somewhere relatively flat), but they’re a good hike. They form a long, rolling ridge between the inland countryside and the sea. They’re made of chalk and flint, they’re covered in grass meadowland, rambling (hiking) trails and farmland. They are less inhabited than the surrounding Sussex countryside. You’ll find grazing animals; fields - mostly of barley, wheat, oats and oilseed rape; archaeological sites, ancient walkways and barrows; the occasional chalk figure; people walking, biking, horse riding and very occasionally even conducting Druidic rituals!
6. On that basis, please note that wherever Aziraphale and Crowley end up living almost certainly has a rural farmland type character and is definitely not a bleak, rugged headland. It’ll be archetypal English postcard territory in one of the counties that claims to be the ‘garden of England’. Think thatched roof and roses round the door, rolling hills, big old trees and a winding country lane that people down from London speed along like absolute menaces. They probably don’t have many near neighbours and are at least ten miles from the nearest town. Ten miles along ancient, narrow English roads is further than it sounds to someone from a younger country with straighter roads.
7. Broadly speaking, small towns in Sussex tend to be posh and full of old bookshops, tea rooms, antique shops, boundless history and teenagers desperate to leave. Big towns each have their own character. In terms of size, in my experience, most big towns in the UK are similar to smaller American cities, while American small towns are usually equivalent to what I would call a village, or even a hamlet.
8. Most cottages in England are built from brick or local stone (Sussex sandstone being very likely), but wooden clapboard is more common in Sussex than most parts of the country, because the south gets enough sun to occasionally dry out a little. Still unusual, though, because of deathwatch beetle, woodworm, damp and dry rot.
9. We have four distinct seasons, but rain can happen in any of them. If there’s snow in the winter, it’ll be the wet kind that easily turns to slush and ice, preventing travel because no one is prepared for it. In summer, the Downs get plenty of storms coming over from France, as well as taking the brunt of heatwaves. But generally speaking, if you paint a picture of the Downs, you will be using lots of bright blue for the sky, shades of green for the grass and woods, golden yellow for fields of corn* and hay bales, and perhaps some white for the chalk cliffs (think Dover). It looks like a postcard.
10. Retirement to the South Downs conjures up something chintzy and domestic for people who like the finer things in life but want to be left in peace to potter about harmlessly in a place that everyone agrees is utterly lovely.
*Corn, in traditional British usage going back centuries, denotes the local grain crop (eg barley, wheat, rye, oats) as opposed to maize, which used to be very rare here but is gaining in popularity.
(PS Sorry for the appalling formatting, Tumblr is weird.)
pendragony reblogged
anyway some absolutely hilarious concepts of crowley and aziraphale living in their cottage in the south downs:
- jehovah’s witnesses knock on the door. aziraphale frantically tries to get them to go away because if he doesn’t before crowley sees them, crowley WILL invite them in, he WILL talk to them for over an hour, he will give them the drive they need to visit twice as many houses as they otherwise would have today
- the neighbourhood kids absolutely seeing old mr fell with a gigantic snake around his shoulders, and rushing in to ask 10930 questions about its life and diet, to which he makes up completely implausible answers
- everyone in the village assumes that crowley is aziraphale’s sugar baby, which crowley finds hugely insulting and completely hilarious in turns
- aziraphale, multiple times, wakes up and looks outside to see crowley having long, philosophical arguments with their chickens
- whenever aziraphale finds pests in their garden - rabbits sniffing about crowley’s carrots, mice threatening to go through the fruit trees, even the single vixen that was going to menace their chickens and that crowley said he would kill with his bare hands if it touched any of his “little ladies” - he quickly and quietly takes them off somewhere much nicer.
- not because crowley would actually harm the rabbits or the foxes (the mice he’ll eat. he is a snake, after all), but because crowley wouldn’t ever - just to spare him the embarrassment of not doing so in front of aziraphale, after he said that he would
- they get some ducks that settle on their big pond, and crowley is ostensibly furious, but he still feeds them every day, and regularly uploads pictures of them to his instagram
I just ran the numbers and each and every one of these bullet points check out
pendragony reblogged
I colored in my favorite one of the sketches.