Real England

what's wrong with being racy?

This is why you never hear so much about the fifth Beatle

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

BNPS.co.uk

Those tea-towel slogans are like an ilx poll devised by a malfunctioning AI troll-bot.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFL4ey6XoAEvnO8.jpg

almost too real to bear

bring your kids and drink all day, to your social worker's dismay

I’ve given up on J.D.Wetherspoon’s Sir Robert Peel pub in Bury. For years I’ve gone on Sunday afternoon for a meal and a few pints. Now I’ve moved to another pub nearby, less choice of beers, more expensive food, but with some idea what customer service means, which Wetherspoon’s seem to have lost altogether.

They need more and better-trained staff. It’s common to stand at the bar for several minutes waiting for a staff member to appear, only for them then to serve their mates first. How do I know they’re their mates? Because they call them by name, and serve them all before asking “Who’s next?” Even if you walk up to an empty bar you have to wait for the bar staff to finish their chit-chat. Once, when I asked one of them if I’d suddenly become invisible, I obviously had, as she walked the length of the bar to serve somebody who hadn’t even reached it yet.

Now winter’s here the pub is bitterly cold, as it is every winter. Almost everybody sits in topcoats, and there appears to be no source of heating.

The cold also applies to the food. You can sit near the kitchen and see meals emerge only to spend five or ten minutes getting colder before someone arrives to deliver them to a table. Incidentally, the tables are cleared with the frequency of petrol price reductions, and with the same reluctance.

Still on food, Wetherspoons make much of their Steak Night, but if you order a steak dish on Sunday, you’ll get an ordinary knife, completely unsuitable and unusable. If you ask for a steak knife they can’t find any, even if you’re the only person eating food of any sort. Do they hire the cutlery for Tuesday nights only?

Amazingly, this pub serves a whisky in a half-pint glass. It’s true. When I asked for it to be changed I was told they didn’t have whisky glasses, always served it that way, and nobody else complained. Really? Everybody I’ve told is frankly incredulous. Eventually, having been shown every type of glass behind the bar, I got my whisky in a wine glass, unsatisfactory, but the best they could do. This aberration also applies to the Wetherspoon’s on Piccadilly in Manchester! As with steaks, I can’t understand why Wetherspoon’s boast about their whisky selection and prices, when they haven’t a clue how to serve them.

I do miss the guest ales, I admit, but not enough to sit all afternoon without heating or eating or being able to finish off with a whisky in a proper glass. Until I hear things have improved I won’t be back.

Yours regretfully

Ex-customer

Just discovered the Wetherspoons dress code and now I can't stop laughing pic.twitter.com/5DgXl6yEHw

— Mark Wilding (@mark_wilding) June 29, 2017

Incidentally, the tables are cleared with the frequency of petrol price reductions, and with the same reluctance.

nice

The manager of one of my closest Wetherspoons being quizzed by the local newspaper.

He said: “We have implemented a dress code. No tracksuit bottoms and no baseball caps.”

Didn’t that exclude half of Chatham?

“Yes,” he conceded,

My actual local Wetherspoons has large Rod Hull and Kelly Brook infographics on the walls. It's good, though.

large Rod Hull and Kelly Brook infographics on the walls

i uh i'm gonna need you to expand on that pls

just regular ol' pictures of both of them would be baffling enough but infographics???

The building they converted used to be Rod Hull's mansion (not the one he fell off the roof of) and Kelly Brook is the only celebrity the area has produced in the last sixty years who isn't Billy Childish so it does kind of make sense.

this is the rod hull infographic

https://thumb1.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/80483/80483,1228166731,8/stock-photo--d-render-real-estate-concept-21377155.jpg

lol

sv's wetherspoon's sounds like it might be the realest in all of england

Cheap beer is not a good enough reason to go to Wetherspoon pubs because Brexit Tim.

Still find it hilarious that a whole eight pages of Wetherspoons News(which usually consists entirely of comment free promotional advertorial bumph) was devoted to the virtues of leaving the EU in the run-up to the referendum, with a single grudging page given over to the remain side(in the interests of balance).

Of course knowing the political leanings of Tim Martin this not should come as too much of a surprise, but just the fact that it was that venue he chose to make them felt. It's like if you opened up a TV Quick and inexplicably found a 15 page rant about immigrants just before the crossword.

Yep, there are very good reasons to avoid / boycott Wetherspoons but, tbh, living in an area where a lot of the other pubs have all natural light blocked out by giant flags of St George in the windows, it does sometimes feel like one of the more politically neutral places for minorities, art students, goths, etc to be on an evening out.

the irony being, of course, that the presence of wetherspoons has probably crushed other local pubs where those minorities, art students, goths, etc might have found a more natural home

Find out where UCA Rochester students drink - there must be a non-Spoons place?

My mum was a barmaid in more than a few of the local pubs that Martin helped out of their misery in the 90's. I'd like to think she might have pulled a pint or two for Nairn when he was filming in the area. Because he did film a couple of 100 yards away from The Burns Tavern where she worked at the time. Nairn would have fucking hated Wetherspoons and Tim Martin with a visceral passion!

Seriously , the south of the UK is incredible. Men who voted Brexit trying citizen arrest 11 year olds. Amazing pic.twitter.com/nhAZlYIpTL

— Dale (@DaleRobertsDR) July 23, 2017

ah middle England, god's own country

i'm having this one before anybody else gets any ideas

anyone exhibiting my man's puffed up sense of entitlement and acting like such a prick wouldn't last very long where I live. Some people act like they have never been in a police cell before!

I was having a conversation with my brother about this after his posho old neighbour tried to attack him. They were have a border dispute and I probably made the situation worse by putting up a big wooden fence + padlocked gate over the disputed border for him. People on council estates tend to have a better sense of the possible dire consequences of escalating situations and an aversion to getting the police involved for every argument, or ending up in cells. Well, this is my flimsy homegrown theory, and is subject to being completely wrong sometimes.

I think your guess that he doesn't live on a council estate is accurate, what do you reckon?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/24/get-ready-die-video-shows-tv-producer-shocking-road-rage-incident/

lol! beautiful.

Not only are BBC employees overpaid, they're dangerous.

the fergus beeley GiS page is fun:

2 days ago:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFRgxXwXcAAaC1k.jpg

14 hrs ago:
http://i3.bristolpost.co.uk/incoming/article231739.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200/Fergus-Beeley.jpg

state-subsidized cocaine is a helluva drug

i think it's time we faced the truth: men in mustard trousers and pink shirts have ruined this country

3. (2) Add: 3. (2) (ii)

Gsw. 1985 Michael Munro The Patter 10:
beelin Absolutely furious: 'Mind the aul man dizny get ye — he's beelin the night.' Also used to describe a spot, boil, etc., that is full of pus

wm.Sc. 1985 Liz Lochhead Tartuffe 19:
Ah'm fair beelin'
At no bein' able to say whit Ah'm feelin'.

Gsw. 1987 Peter Mason C'mon Geeze Yer Patter! 51:
Ma mither wis beelin when the auld man came hame paralitic. My mother was very angry when my father came home drunk.

Gsw. 1988 Scotsman 28 Feb 12:
"Ats right hen, so it is, nae wunner the Embra foaks is aw beelin"

how did the telegraph manage to avoid putting an estimate of the value of fergus beeley's house in that piece tom posted? shockingly lax journalism there

info coded into the distance from said house that david somerset duke of beaufort kennels three of his packs of hounds

there's an app you can download

If i had a cat I would call her Liz Lochhead Tartuffe

Weird editing on this advert, the way the camera lingers on James Whale a few nanoseconds too long at the end of each of his scenes makes it slightly disturbing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZyNUDAEE6Y

... put this on here because I believe this is where Pimlico Plumbers made their grand entrance on ILX.

Fuck me, they actually have proper NIC electrical accreditation now, going up in the world! Charlie han't been a totally happy plumber this year. He lost a high profile Employment Tribunal and was whinging about the High Court ruling on legal reform aid the other week. It is hard out there for a millionaire Tory donor, held together by botox.

He also financed Gina Miller's anti-Brexit campaign, which hasn't done him any favours with his natural constituency...

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-4167438/I-live-abuse-Brexit-says-millionaire.html

... put this on here because I believe this is where Pimlico Plumbers made their grand entrance on ILX.

nah, i distinctly recall being in london last year, seeing a pinlico plumbers van and being like 'oh aye that's that prick from the ilx politics thread'

http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/iprblog/2017/08/01/im-not-english-oh-yes-you-are/

a good article (which I don't agree with) about leftist distate for englishness

^^^barnett is almost always worthwhile but yikes at calling benedict anderson ben, this will not stand

Is Paul Mason anti-Brexit?

I think he warily accepts it

Their immediate island neighbours were recruited into what became a joint project: the British, not the English Empire.

Recruited in the 18th/19th century sense of being either bribed or press ganged.

AB's argt is i think* that since PM is unwilling to acknowledge he's english he MUST be anti-brexit in the sense that brexit conceives itself

(which seems to me the nub and also the flaw of the essay, which covers a lot of extremely interesting ground -- the mob he cites, benEDICT anderson and tom nairn et al -- were/are all very good in detail (hence undeluded) on the specifics of how Gt Britain had fashioned its sense of itself, w/o ever being very good on what could be done abt this

(my own gloomy opinion: nothing can be done abt it from within, we have to take the lumps the once-invaded world -- or anyway the three quarters once painted red -- hurls at us, until they tire of this and we work out what shape we've ended up)

*i need to read it again though

the article almost seems to be arguing that the current world system is english british and that all other national identities were forged in reaction to it

something not unlike that was more or less the new left review's position in the 70s and 80s: that modern nationalism emerged as a counter-hegemonic activity on the colonial peripheries first (in particular the americas in the 18th century), before it fully developed in europe (in the 19th century)

^^^very over-simplified and i forget how this analysis was applied in the far east re e.g. japan in particular: benedict anderson's expertise was very tied up in his knowledge of the story of indonesia over the last 3 centuries