Real England

Oh it's all about the public services nowadays; a bus to take you into town so you can spend all night trawling the happy hour bars, a streetcleaner to mop up your vomit from the pavement, a policeman to give you a place to spend the night. No-one needed public services when an evening's entertainment consisted of watching the sun set over a russet autumnal hedgerow, lulled into a reverie by the carefree birdsong.

http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/UckFrisbyPiltdown03.jpg

"Searching for the Putdown Man"

is there a real england that is incapable of any sort of assimilation into colonned literature? a planar england that resists signification or commodification by interlopers from other englands

Interesting question which I wish I could answer.

I don't know if I would like that England even.

is there a culture that can't be commodified? and i have to be v. v. careful not to paint my cultures, or the cultures i've drifted along the fringes of, as the only real England. the problem is that the word is usually only spoken out loud by a certain kind of cultural capitalist, whose vision of it is just as tangential as mine. bullshit about fair play and honest toil and love of the land that i'd counter with a nation of sneak thiefs, factionalists and urban wastrels. the contestedness is always part of the Reality of the nation, any nation really.

for every sleepy Sunday C of E-attending agnostic Tory there's an apocalypse-welcoming hair-splitting anabaptist

Everywhere north of Enfield is basically a wasteland isn't it? Brrrr... Nothing there. Just a man collecting lumps of mud and putting them into a cloth bag.

yeah but the determination of that which is essential need not be a question of mere majorities

everybody shd read The Uses of Literacy to see how you can constructively get this wrong in a way that doesn't just mourn real heritage centres. obv Williams and E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall too

the determination of that which is essential need not be a question of mere majorities

quite so, how about the British Isles then as a dumping ground/refugee camp/Wild West for Europe and parts south-east, over millenia, fuelling endless negotiation and conflict over territory, and that is the quicksand underneath Real England that we think of as bedrock?

look mate there's no need to get fucking personal, alright

btw if i was gonna put forward one Real England it wd be old photographs of works sports teams or outings or other ceremonial jollies

it would be the commie permawheezing mustachioed drunk one in tinker tailor, tho no doubt they'd have you b'leev it's smiley or haydon

wait haydon was the commie?

SPOILERS

nah think he was the aesthete on a protest against the yanks more than anything else, wasn't the dude ciaran hinds played proper lefty in stated methods tho

the sparking point of Real England is where the plummy port-swilling foxhunter runs up against the chippy millenarian work-dodger and we drink each others' health and promise ourselves deep down that one day our kind will crush theirs

the phoenicians sailed up round to albion to trade tin for spice before the romans had even got out of bed, and if they weren't trading with aboriginal pre-celt and pre-pict inhabitants, then it was certainly aboriginal+1: an island of proto-druid shopkeepers since time immaterial

stonehenge is actually a kind of cashpoint machine

xp

oh, Roy Bland. yeah Bland is the angry Puritan I've been talking about, defending his country so's his people can crush the effete Squire class one day

but mark, who's to say the aborigines hadn't hopped off the boat from Boulogne just ahead of the celts themselves and so on and so forth??

irish close to turks dna-wise iirc

i think that's exactly what mark is saying, tbf

Of all the Tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry
The silence and the sun remain

xp he's called smiley, he has to be of outlander extraction

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2007/07/17/chalkhomer460.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Xw7LplzFws/TpDJGHBmFGI/AAAAAAAAArE/CCJlpL9TMeU/s1600/yeo+valley.jpg

^ I wasn't at that FAP

clun forest all-mercian jug band champions, tractor runs on wattle and daub

never get away with haircuts like that up in the Danelaw

post pictures of men who look like offa's dyke

for every sleepy Sunday C of E-attending agnostic Tory there's an apocalypse-welcoming hair-splitting anabaptist

― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:41 (58 minutes ago)

there is definitely a book to be written about those south-midlands dissenter sects, maybe in a sort of gently sardonic louis theroux tone, 'britain's very own wild east and its fire and brimstone pastors '

so a good effort, but not really real

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-CuQTcGVYo/TKdQeWpskMI/AAAAAAAAAoM/H64kcUh5Jjw/s1600/AvengersTV.JPG

real english dialectic demands picture of McGoohan dressed as hunt sab.

there is only one named wind in england

This suggests a few more. I sincerely hope that "custard winds" isn't made up.
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/wxfacts/British-Weather-Terms.htm

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/11/8/1320750745209/Members-of-the-public-wai-004.jpg

Sir Jimmy Savile's coffin goes on display - Members of the public wait to pay their respects

haha when i posted MES's mugg up-thread i genuinely didn't know his new LP was called "Ersatz GB"

nah i was deliberately misquoting "The Classical" and i haven't heard a new Fall album in most of a decade tbh

it has probably always been his topic, of course

the problem is the paucity of our national realnesses, we have nothing so resonant as la france profonde nor even REAL AMERICA

the place is too small and thoroughly gone over to sustain any really vital autochthonist fallacy

"Middle England" as a conceptual culture, rather than a geography, has a resonance with politicians. There's an element of it that links back to the idea of a 'real England', away from metropolitan fancies. Much more bound up with class than 'real America', though.

"Middle England" is a coy acknowledgment of the middle class that doesn't yet quite dare to speak its name

so here i sit in a real England on a sunny Friday morning, but trapped inside the gloom of the institutional looking out at the sun, of course.

is our realness a sense that authenticity lies outside? what kind of culture will we leave for the archaeologists that isn't a bastard-Norman legacy of tea-cups and arcane manners? fate of an island to be the sticking point for a lot of flotsam and jetsam maybe, a 5 mile high mountain of tide-stranded rubber ducks and fashions.

maybe real england is that real desire to never belong, to always get back to sea.

got a familiar soul-crushing view of our education "system" this morning, that impossible mixture of stolid, meaningless tradition frantically being stirred by idiots with no plan beyond the conviction that stirring in itself is the most important thing in the world, as long as you can do it on the cheap.

the most beautiful building in the panorama in front of me is a corn silo.

tbf that educational system perfectly prepares people for 95% of careers

that doesn't help :(

gramnivorous quadruped ftw

maybe real England is something to do with the grey, measured chunks of work as tedium shot thru with escaping to booze each night.

yeah you'd almost long for a good steepling in catholic guilt tbh

some fear of vengeance plus some contempt for order wd be a huge improvement i must say.

as a newly invested minor underling of the boss class i've got to say i'd like to stab the boss class in the throat

have to embrace the cunt to get that close, is the problem

May have mentioned before but coming out at Gatwick arrivals to immediately face a big Greggs (next to a Pret) does amuse.

To be clear here, Pret is also shit (though I do remember it being ok 25 years ago)

I'm still unclear on whether or not my brother has a friend called Greg, or if whenever he said he was "going to Greg's" over the years he was getting a sausage roll.

their chicken "oval bite" (never worked out if that was some kind of pun or not... overbite?) used to be a good budget option in my student days, and the tuna crunch rolls would've been amazing if they weren't always soggy to the point of the bread disintegrating.

yes most of their food would be good if it wasn't bad

Peacock terrorises 92-year-old Suffolk farmer's hens - link to article.

The composite picture on the BBC website of a peacock and the sad farmer should be the front cover of the next New Order album.

to be fair to your old lad, peacocks ARE total noisy dickheads

I lived just across the tracks from Holland Park (West Ken/Shepherd’s Bush side) for a year or so and the park’s peacocks were always wandering as far as Olympia station. They are noisy and shit EVERYWHERE.

kind of a sad, touching article on the death of a pub in Cumbria... I'm reminded of the Night Gallery episode They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2026/may/07/now-the-village-is-dead-its-awful-why-was-one-of-britains-best-pubs-forced-to-close

Lorry gets stuck in a hole that it was sent to fix in Somerset.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/12/lorry-gets-stuck-in-hole-walton-somerset

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/37/The_hole_in_the_ground.jpg/250px-The_hole_in_the_ground.jpg
There I was
A-parked in this hole
A hole in the ground
So big and sort of round it was

There was I
Parked in it deep
It was flat at at the bottom
And the sides were steep

When along comes
This bloke in a bowler
Which he lifted and scratched his head
Well, he looked down the hole
Poor demented soul

And he said
"Do you mind if I make a suggestion?"
"You should be fixing this hole, not driving your lorry into it."

xp nice highlighting of the company name in the second sentence.

do any houses in UK still have the bog/loo/toilet in the back garden? Always thought this was a great idea, keep the stinky stuff outside. I guess it could be miserable in the snow

Some pubs and cafes do

Yeah, some Cornwall pubs I've been to have the loo in a separate building

Memory tells me there used to be some very weird mid-century flat conversions in London; where modernity meant every flat needed a toilet but there was no obvious room inside for them - so they were built outside on the balcony, meaning people had to go outside in the middle of the night onto their balcony, to go into another little room. I swear this is not a dream but can't find right combination of google words to find a picture.

I was sure we used to have an outside toilet (shared btw) on the landing in the tenement where we first lived but my mum said we didn't.

... I remember it though?

my dad's house had an outside toilet and no bathroom when he bought it in the early 80s. he made the smallest bedroom into a bathroom and turned the outside loo into a shed to put the dustbin in (no longer used for that since they have wheelie bins now)

my in laws in norfolk have an outside loo (an indoors one too) and a house they're looking at moving to has one as well. but it is a backwards part of the country.

luckily the webbed feet make walking to the outside loo on a wet night feel quite natural

Our London house had a disused one, located along the outdoors passageway leading from the kitchen door out to the garden. So it basically jutted into the living room but the entrance was outside if that makes any sense. Anyway even by the 1970s it had been turned into storage and the proper bog was upstairs as it should be.

I know of a property in new malden that had an outside toilet as of ~5 years ago, but it wasn't the main/only toilet. There was an actual bathroom in the house too.

looks like there are whole facebook threads about 'remembrances of outdoor toilets'

https://alan001946.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/outsideloo.jpg

I know of a property in new malden that had an outside toilet as of ~5 years ago, but it wasn't the main/only toilet.

Huh, interesting, my only experience with outside toilets in the UK was a Korean restaurant in New Malden.

My house, which was built in early 1950s, has an indoor toilet and bathroom. Unusually, they’re next door to each other with a dividing wall. Thought a few times about knocking them through, but cost and hassle isn’t worth it.

That is fairly usual in flats and interwar housing in the UK.

A lot of old San Francisco houses have this^^^^, the toilet is alone and apart from the tub & sink