Real England

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

http://old-town.co.uk/piccadilly/

??

Ugh, found those Red Lion photos sinister and unpleasant. but it's five in the morning, tired hungover and dyspeptic, so a good time to catalogue some real England fragments.

I went to the countryside around Folkestone a year or so ago, to find the house a favourite author of mine had lived in (Jocelyn Brooke, himself a subtle unsentimental explorer of sentimental Englishness). But it prompted a lot of thoughts about Real England at the time. I'd got lost cycling out of Folkestone, and ended up a dead end, at an army base, with nissen huts and bored patrolling soldiers, on the other side was a light industrial warehouse/office building, the LoveWorld Conference Centre. Outside that there was a coach idling, with a bored looking coach driver (this image felt very English) and a couple of elderly people standing on a bit of scrub by the road, looking a bit blank. This was all behind an empty outpost of the massive Channel Tunnel complex that sits just behind Folkestone. The skies were very grey and there was a little light spitting rain and a slightly too cold for comfort breeze. That's one imagine of Real England for me - the slightly out-of-town light industrial 'parks', small offices with three or four parking spaces. And that untennanted feeling of places that don't get a lot of people passing through, from one place to another. Office labour with no places to go for lunch, so tesco sandwiches at your desk, while overcoming that wash of beery hangover, brought about by post work drinks and not eating properly.

When I cycled up onto the North Downs to find this village, I passed a field with a rotting caravan painted in UKIP colours in it. That rotting caravan by itself would have been enough to symbolise something about England, but the UKIP colours added an extra obviousness and curiosity to the symbol - THAT'S what you're fighting for? Tiny caravans stuck in a traffic jam on the way to Cornwall?

Then when I got to the village there was a village fete going on, an archetype of Englishness. But I couldn't shake the bad taste in my mouth (I had been arguing with my g/f it's true). The very fact it was an archetype of Englishness worried me. I talked to a few people to see if they knew where the house was, but most of them hadn't lived there a long time, not long enough to know about a very very minor 20th Century writer who might have lived there. And I got the impression that they were city types who had bought in to the English village thing. This isn't new of course (nor is it reprehensible, depending on yr capacity for 'city types') ! But the takeover - the buying into it - seemed complete, as if revived or maintained to keep up the fiction that had been bought into. I get the same feeling from farmer's markets. I like markets! I don't like expensive markets so much - why are these vegetables, and these eggs and this milk so expensive?

So yeah, what's this? The complete appropriation of village culture by the wealthy, as a sort of open gated community? I buy this to a certain extent, although I also know people who make a living from working in the countryside, itself not a romantic or sentimental activity obviously, and also clearly not totally redundant.

And of the rest - well NV's corn silo feels appropriate as an image. + boss class as a consciously boorish casual psychological bullies. A sort of frightened belligerence to them - male and female, although in different ways, and it still feels male driven. The whole lexicon that goes with that - the 'mate' and the 'footy', and the 'what you need to understand is' the mixed up with the dated, ford-sierra sleek meaningless facility of management speak.

Some fragments:

A roads (how you get to those offices, but also walking down them in the middle of the night because it's the only way to get home, drink wearing off, just the humming and clicking of the amber lights).

Complexes of artificial fishing ponds always strike me as bleak, but then I don't fish.

Middle-aged corporate car obsessed men who talk about women drivers. (A subset of the Top Gear world). Is there a part of Real England that they come out of? I mean surely you get the male superiority type in many many countries. But what's their flavour? I guess you get a strong sense of Imperialism from them. That dessicated 'common sense' that is in fact the hangover of a thousand and one fictions about Britain being morally great, right, and no need to reassess. There's the obsession with maps and how best to get places - surely an offshoot of Britain's tangled road system (see A Roads - a favourite topic of these men, with their bottlenecks, cut throughs, traffic lights and speed cameras).

Mark E Smith singing on live versions of Repetition in 1978/79 - (doing that seagull screech he does) ENGLAND! ENGLAND! (goes into bored dreary tones) Look over England, what do you see? LUST and DRUDGERY. (this seems more apposite than his definition of England as 'white bread and cynicism' which feels positively optimistic really).

a+

Wetherspoon News. Editorial. First sentence:

As we all know, a strong current of tribalism flows through the veins of humanity

― Fizzles, Saturday, April 7, 2012 5:30 PM (4 minutes ago)

it does in Wetherspoon's pubs tbf

http://i.imgur.com/cd07j.jpg

A simple solution to a taxing problem by Tim Martin: Successive governments’ misguided belief that increasing excise duties solves all ills within the pub trade actually threatens this vital British industry and the jobs and community benefits which it brings. As we know, a strong current of tribalism flows through the veins of humanity. Even in apparently orderly and well-behaved democracies, the vitriol of political differences is astounding, as witnessed now between democrats and republicans, in America, or perhaps even more vehemently among republican candidates themselves.

http://www.propelinfonews.com/pi-Newsletter.php?datetime=2012-03-30%2008:00:00

tim martin singlehandedly undermines the rationale behind your 'public intellectuals' thread

The Tim Martin pages of Wetherspoon News are incredible. The only writing which comes close to matching it is Ken Bates' programme notes.

Oh yeah, I actually read this article the other night.

In the last edition of our customer magazine Wetherspoon News, I discussed “euro tribalism”, whereby the highly educated elite of Britain and the continent sought to subvert the democratic control of the masses they distrust by diverting democratic powers to remote institutions, such as the European Central Bank and the European Commission. Another great tribal divide, more significant perhaps that Liverpool and Everton or City and United, is that between pub-goers and dinner-party-goers – and rarely do the twain meet. The last Labour government members were dinner-party-goers to a man or to a gal. Tony Blair was no lounge bar lizard, and none of his ministers resembled a pub regular that I’ve ever seen. Gordon Brown wasn’t a pub-goer, but, then again, he wasn’t a dinner-party-goer either, but that’s another story.

Made me spit out my pint of 'Veto Ale' I can tell you.

I was in central London yesterday and saw a young bloke wrapped in a Sports Direct-branded flag of St George taking a piss directly over the road from a pub while outdoor drinkers watched on

BLOOD-COVERED HORSES LOOSE IN LONDON

this is a Current 93 album and i claim my five pounds

Watch: How runaway Cavalry horses caused chaos in London

I guess that Jona Lewie was unavailable.

haven't read the article but...

https://i.ibb.co/T28sNXX/20240424-172537.jpg

local journalism at its best

Over the Edge, village-style

Yarn Bomber Nan Is Back

nobody told me she'd gone!

maybe luke unabomber should've gone for luke yarn-bomber when he downgraded his dj name, could've packed out the clubs with the balearic nan contingent

spinning those wheels of wool

could've crotcheted his own slipmats

I guess that Jona Lewie was unavailable.

Those horses could hardly have done more damage than he did in the 95 Rugby world cup semi final

Not really in the spirit of the thread, but anyway. I have been back in the UK now for 8 years and am positive that even in that short time everything already looks significantly worse. Just visiting different places, things are breaking and not getting fixed, no budget for councils to maintain roads and parks, loads of shops and pubs have closed and not been replaced, there are homeless people everywhere and nobody seems to be happy with how things are going for them. Just feels like the country is more and more fucked every year and only the charlatans in charge are saying anything different, and even they don't really believe it.

There's absolutely no doubt that the the UK is significantly worse than 10 years ago and getting worse every year. Every month almost.

with Labour fully committed to the Tory fiscal rules the roads and parks are going to be more fucked and more essential services will be degraded and cut. It's a fucking nightmare thinking about the future, as in just the next few years. I try not to.

if they ever do admit that anything is getting worse, it's only so they can blame it all on the chronically ill / people with disabilities / small boats / trans people / the wokes

speaking of, just read this Gary Younge piece that starts with this:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/21/small-island-gary-younge/

When we returned to London in 2015, after twelve years in the US, we could not get our son into the local elementary school. His class in Hackney, the neighborhood where we live, had the maximum of thirty kids in it, and none were leaving. Pretty much all the nonreligious schools in the area were at full capacity, too. He ended up getting a spot at a school two miles away. When our daughter started kindergarten a couple of years later, her class was also capped at thirty, and full.

Today her class has just fifteen kids in it. Next year the school—located, apparently without irony, on the borough’s first “21st Century Street,” with dedicated green space, bicycle parking, electric vehicle charging, and 40 percent “tree canopy cover”—will close. (It is merging with another undersubscribed school across the main road.) So will more than ninety across the country. Low birth rates and Brexit-induced emigration have forced these changes. On average, elementary school classes in England are at 88 percent capacity, but in some areas, including my fashionable but still quite poor quarter, the rate is far lower.

Not only are the schools shrinking and shutting down—the kids who go to them are getting smaller. After more than a decade of austerity, British five-year-olds are a full centimeter shorter now than they were in 2010, and they are becoming significantly shorter than children in other countries

remember when doctrinaire free marketeers used to argue that gutting public infrastructure was necessary because private enterprise would create more, better quality facilities and services?

you don't hear that said with a straight face nowadays

even in the sectors that were at the heart of private business in a mixed economy: retail, hospitality, entertainment for example, everything is shittier, narrower, more expensive