Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

his whole premise is violently anti-social.

Don't get me wrong, I think the guy's a jizz-flake. He just seems like a jizz-flake who's too proud to do the whole 'we've always been at war with Eurasia' thing like most of his tribe.

Laura Barton patronises the nation, part one.

Lincolnshire was once a land of Roman forts and RAF stations, a county famed for iron mining, cabbages, cauliflowers, Thatcher. Today it has a population that is largely white and increasingly elderly, and a cluster of fading seaside resorts: Cleethorpes, Chapel St Leonards, Skegness.

just terrible writing. lincolnshire used to be famed for its cabbages; now it has fading sea resorts like skegness. which was practically san fucking tropez during the dim and distant thatcher regime.

she stopped short of long shadows across cricket fields

Last year, Skegness was named the country's most traditionally British town, where Britishness is measured in tearooms, cricket clubs, pubs, chip shops, holiday camps, stately homes and theatres. In Skegness there is one of each for every 162 residents.

One cricket club for every 162 people is pretty astonishing, to be fair.

Largely white? She means it wasn't so white when the Romans were building their forts?

Caecilius would happily greet an RAF pilot on his way to the baths. Then later they would both play cricket against a team of slave girls.

a population that is largely white and increasingly elderly

images of white fatties aging before one's very eyes.

Caecilius would happily greet an RAF pilot on his way to the baths. Then later they would both play cricket against a team of slave girls.

Using a cabbage as a ball

This after fighting their way through high street pavements which were, it felt in those days, rammed with holiday camps and tearooms.

Sometimes you would wake in the middle of the night and have a cup of tea. Other times on your way home from digging cabbages, a small child would give you a cup. Other times still, a local priest would molest the child while the entire village was asleep.

But there is a sense of resilience here too, there in the gaiety of the pansies in the flower tubs

I know someone from Skegness, must ask her how accurate this portrayal is

http://www.bobpitch.com/anon/badbrains_skegness.jpg

Though the flowers remain, they are old flowers, struggling mightily against the dingy plastic sides of their tubs. It is tempting to see a metaphor here. In Skegness, the mainly white flowerkeepers have not quite succumbed to an irreversible slide into I know not what, but will modern Britain ever again allow them to climb out and breathe the pure air of cricket clubs and mown grass? I wonder.

Already there are some early visitors, zig-zagging like drowsy bees through the streets in search of fun, the air filled with the smell of chip fat, onion rings and marshmallow penises.

But there is a sense of resilience here too, there in the gaiety of the penises in the flower tubs

"Do we still measure ourselves in tearooms and theatres?"

"Do we still measure our penises in tearooms and theatres?"

Tracer Hand, don't you live in like FRANCE or something?

No. But if I did, it would certainly say something wistful about today's Britain.

LB's column on the back page of the Film & Music supplement always stuck in my craw too. Especially with this kind of thing:

It was the middle of a heatwave, and so, even at night, you could sit bare-legged on the porch-stoop eating peaches and honey and sipping wine. And we sat there a long while, talking and drinking and listening to the music of the street - to the shouts in the night and the chatter of the bugs and the bursts of distant car radios and, from somewhere up above, the sound of Django Reinhardt playing I'll See You in My Dreams. That evening in July seemed to me a time of perfect, ripened happiness.

Is she American?

okay i'm lost as to what's so craw-sticking about the heatwave quote?

The fact that it got published in a so-called "quality" national daily newspaper?

It's pretentious and devoid of insight. "Yeah, it was really hot so we sat outside and got pissed. Good times."

she's English but loves America, I think

it should be "porch" or "stoop", there is no such thing as a "porch stoop", much less a "porch-stoop"

but it seems mad to fix on LB when this is generic sentimental journalistic style?

"the chatter of the bugs"

LOL Amerophiles

IN FAIRNESS I think I was the first one really to make the effort to get so publicly riled at LB - I think I called her 6th-form Freaky Trigger, in 2007 or so? - since then it's become kind of standard (and I am happy to concur with the renewed barrage of annoyance: really looking forward to the rest of her UK series, as read by ilx).

This is one of my few ilx innovations along with 'A-level cliché' and, oddly, 'On The Money'.

hey TRACER HAND just cos they don't have PORCH-STOOPS in like "Bordeaux" or wherever!!

"The sweets have got a lot ruder," he adds, with a glance to the array of marshmallow penises. "Which isn't necessarily a good thing, but unfortunately they sell."

if he had grimaced at the array of marshmallow penises i might have enjoyed this part of the story.

He grimaced when Laura asked him for some salt water taffy and cotton candy

with a corndog and a can of root beer

she wants someone to take her out to the ball game!

and a large side of Five Guys fries.

x-post

if political correctness hadn't gone mad skegness would still have been a seaside wonderland today.

I hear PC brigade want to ban growing of pansies in municipal flower tubs

And install penises in their place!

You couldn't make it up

Remember the music of the Lancaster bombers leaving Lincolnshire airfields to drop perfect, ripened bombs on the tearooms of Germany to the sound of Django Reinhardt playing I'll See You in My Dreams, as we sat bare-legged on the old broken-down pier eating marshmellow penises and watching the long, long skies over Skegness and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Dresden I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty.

The stars bent over the little roof; smoke poked from the stovepipe chimney. Somewhere Michael Hann was playing the new Hold Steady record. Pianos tinkled like mashed beans and chili. The old man growled... Alexis Petridis woke up and cried at the English night, at his very Englishness, for Coloraro felt so very far away. That's what friends are for, I think - for dancing with. My friend Melissa is a much better dancer than me and when we dance together she points her fingers in time with the keyboard sounds. I remember teenage years of making tapes and marvelling, wide-eyed, at the sticky labels on them, then crying all the way home to a whispered Spandau Ballet song. A California home; I hid in the grapevines, digging it all. I drove a car with the new Neil Young record and thought of how Neil's voice summed up the Canadian emptiness where only the Canada geese fly. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.

She speaks in your voice, Amerophile, and there's a stoop in her street that's halfway porch.

but it seems mad to fix on LB when this is generic sentimental journalistic style?

haven't you answered your own question there?

I just find LB ultra trite, for all the excessive alliteration she never actually says anything profound, despite shooting for profundity with every word.

I honestly don't know why you all bother reading her week in week out.

It doesn't help that it seems like so much unnecessary effort to me because her prose is like wading through treacle.

wading through treacle is so historically british though

nowadays people wade through semen