Real England

where is it and what does it look like

Raymond Williams says somewhere that most people who live in it live in quite small towns, but there is next to no significant literature about same.

Of course he was writing before Midsomer Murders aired.

http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/64476/dscf1947scrsfr.jpg

^^^wiltshire apparently (i'm not sure i know where wiltshire actually is) < /the lex >

i don't know how the demographics break down now but i wd say that a significant majority at least want to live in quite small towns. also i suspect quite small towns are increasingly really dissipated cities.

Anyone bothered with Paul Kingsnorth's book on this very subject?

but y'knaa this whole problematic word "Real" - is this intended sarcastically, like is this thread about "what are the sort of people who use the phrase 'Real England' talking about?" or are we positing a defining core of Englishness that has history and still survives however tenuous?

i think it would be facetious to pretend the issue can be approached entirely unfacetiously

i was not aware of paul kingsnorth but now i see he has written a book called real england colon something else, i would guess it isn't the only book/treatise/pamphlet with similar title

work filter has thoughtfully blocked access to my first google search result, some blog with the delightfully making-me-want-to-stab-the-author subtitle "The Battle Against the Bland". i assure you guys if there is a Real England it is not battling against The Bland and that is an excellent virtue in itself.

oh right, that is the subtitle of Kingsnorth's book. okay then i will probably never read it since i infer from the book's post-colonage that the guy is a big douche.

the usual English attention to the wrong details

and some sadness for stuff passing that has not passed or was not what he claims it was before it passed

is john terry 'real england' dyou suppose

i infer from the book's post-colonage that the guy is a big douche.

― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 13:24 (1 minute ago)

h but f, nv, h but f

basically i was looking at the squad list for peterbrough town and noticed ryan tunnicliffe and lee frecklington and thought maybe those names were shibboleths that uttered in a certain way might usher you into the innermost real england

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01185/arts-graphics-2008_1185572a.jpg

the city hobgoblin as a good place to start! (of course he said british not english, right, re the wrong detail)

"... heir to an immense fortune, gifted by nature with a mind susceptible of noble cultivation, and a body endowed with admirable physical powers with the wretched drunkard who died in a gaol at the age of thirty-eight, a worn-out debauchee and drivelling sot... " <-- i am this very second ensconced in the village that surnamed this regency rake, tho he mainly lived on the other side of shrewsbury

nigel farage isn't real btw, he speaks for only his own constituency, which is seldom more than symbolic

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

south dublin iirc

leatherhead is a promotory over a large and brackish inland sea that is never spoken of

beneath the leylines, the true underground

"Winter, 1981: the headless, skinned bodies of two bears are found by the River Lea."

real england is all mates and and blood sausage and big bottomed birds reading thew newsie-wewsies

nah it's hedgerows and birds and complete lack of public services

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

You want some real England eh?

2 people going to the Food Bank, who are they voting for?

Conservatives, "They have helped us more than anybody."

"I'd be so gutted if Rishi Sunak lost"pic.twitter.com/MyhYKMCCMx

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) May 27, 2024

Yes, I saw that the other day!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GO0XlfuWcAAx38b?format=jpg&name=900x900

my stepdad sent me this short article about Dewsbury from the Hudds Daily Examiner to cheer me up. It opens with "It's a shithole - that's your headline".

😳🍺 I'm having a pint of Stella what are you Having? pic.twitter.com/hSvTaMJjm4

— Steady (@DeanoGorton) June 14, 2024

I once saw someone open the boot of their car, take out a family size squeezy bottle of heinz ketchup, and do just that. I was in England at the time.

Oh my god I am never using condiments at a restaurant ever again. Although lately in America you get yer "ketchup" in a little metal cup (for portion control I guess).

no it's a shot glass

Single origin ketchup, aged for 18 months in used sherry casks

Son #1 asked today if you could make wine from coca cola, I reckon the preservatives would stop it fermenting no matter how much yeast you get in there, someone's probably had a go though. (a brief look at youtube reveals yes, someone has)

my son drinks Frank's hot sauce/Encona/whatever tabasco/scirocco variant is there, straight from the bottle and frequently drains the whole bottle. It is his wine.

the thing I don't like about that vid is that it is intrusive and sneering, just leave the guy alone.

fair

Princess Anne, 73, suffered concussion and minor injuries, thought to possibly have been caused by being either headbutted or kicked by a horse on her estate at Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire on Sunday.

from a very old popbitch, technically Real Scotland but Charles & Camilla are Enlish so it counts.

Big Brother's Pete Bennett may be Britain's most famous Tourettes sufferer now, but in 1989 this accolade went to Scottish teenager John Davidson, star of ground-breaking BBC documentary, John's Not Mad.

A few weeks after the film was screened,
John was given an award by Prince Charles, for his bravery about publicising his illness. Before the ceremony John's friends helpfully recited the phrase "Big eared cnut" over and over to him in the hope he would say it.

John was determined he wouldn't show himself up but when he stepped up to receive his award from the Prince nerves got the better of him, and he couldn't stop himself from shouting out

... "Bad Horsey!"

John was talking about that incident in a program called Tourettes De France. He was also calling him "parasite" and yelled "Camilla's a shit ride".

the Jay Slater saga has been the Realest

ppl are portraying him as a machete wielding thug, if that actually was the case he would have got more than community service. His dad looks a wrong un, something unsavory about him. Or maybe his only crime was being in some crap baggy band in the 90's!

The whole gang apparently never had to spend a night behind bars.. weird stuff

I have to admit I'm a little bit hooked on Twitter for this, only thing I use the app for anymore

also the judge reprimanded them for larking about in court and not seeming to take the charges seriously - it was a curious case!

Yeah the victim went to “look for his sister”, and Jay Slater and his mates were all there waiting with fuckin medieval implements and chased him and cut his head open. Would like to understand what actually went on there

I mean apart from that

some phone footage has emerged of him looking absolutely shitfaced and staggering about on the dancefloor and falling over shortly before his disappearance. Which would be fine in England, but you go wandering off the beaten track in that state in a hot humid place, then you could be fucked.

xp

I feel like there must be some context in that case that you don't get from the reportage on it, there must be some reason the judge didn't convict at least some of them to custodial time in a YOI

Possibly because the whole country's so underfunded the borstals YOIs have begged them not to send any more of the little fuckers?

it could have been a Covid thing as well

class snobbery, check. randoms throwing money at a murky crowdfunder, check. aspersions cast on the efficiency of foreign police, check. people who've watched too much true crime shit, that's a big check.

it was bad enough when UK media did the "incompetent johnny foreigner police" thing on behalf of the transparently guilty af inficidal McCann grift project.

In this case, just as in Greece last month, it's stupid English ppl going missing in hot conditions and rugged terrain that is difficult to search. obv Brit search dogs can cope with sweltering heat much better than those useless foreign ones.

I'm assuming Michael Mosley wasn't boozed up and on drugs but who knows for sure?

transparently guilty af inficidal McCann grift project

I know people who obsessively believe this kind of tripe, experts one and all so I hear

xp

no, but he ventured out during an extreme, unprecedented heatwave into a remote place, which is something the locals are clever enough to avoid doing. Hence there was nobody there to assist him.

xp

when my kid went missing I just called the police, it never occurred to me to hire a PR adviser. But I'm just lowborn riff raff!

Just typical that one (1) English person goes missing and it's top of the news for a week when just about anyone could just list dozens of more consequential things off the top of their head.

uh how litigious are the mccanns btw?

the Spanish police have called time on the Jay Slater search. Perhaps not unrelated to the gobshite Brit influencer who turned up on the scene and confidently announced to his army of tik tok followers he'd find him in 3 days. Then when this didn't happen then it was time for him to repeatedly slag off those useless foreign police. I hope the McCanns have made a generous donation to the gofundme!

England fans leaving at 1-0. pic.twitter.com/Wx5GFQQhkO

— No Context Brits (@NoContextBrits) June 30, 2024

list of those petitioning @pontifex to save the traditional mass

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GRgxuxybcAA6q1f?format=png

LORD STIRRUP

OK

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jock_Stirrup

Stirrup (right) holding the Sword of State at the 2023 State Opening of Parliament

Stirrup, little darling, Stirrup

lord plant, lord trees, lord sugar etc

(sadly lady butter died in 2022)

lady butter will never die #ladybutter4eva

Famous melt.

Lady Garden

Ryan Wigglesworth interviewed by Jonathan Ross

cant belive i forgot LORD PICKLES 🫣

did we already discuss this?

ok pic.twitter.com/sJt3mlG7K8

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwiki) July 13, 2024

garden gnomes were short you say?

Real Europe, gonna bet the brits aren't the ones with the sickest relationship towards garden gnomes.

very pleasing that the linked wikipedia page traces them back to the statues that posh ancient romans had in their gardens of the demi-god PRIAPUS

tho this seems both unreal and unenglish in terms of this thread (daniel otm)