Real England

xp if I express my disappointment at that not being a website dedicated to Oxford drum'n'bass I won't be veering off topic right

There were some great photos on that link earlier, particularly the one where it looks like Hendrix has stepped out of the tardis at the 1923 Epsom Derby. They're gone now, must have been some copyright issue.

ignore I clicked on the wrong link.

I once saw a guy do the whole of "Star Trekkin'" by the Firm pitch-perfectly in a karaoke bar in Ilfracombe, Devonshire.

― Pingu Unchained (dog latin), Thursday, 27 June 2013 13:02 (1 hour ago)

Accidental Partridge is thataway

How Rupert Grint became a £13million property wizard: Harry Potter star, 24, magics up a huge portfolio of houses
    Harry Potter star sets up new company Eevil Plan Properties
    Rupert Grint, 24, has a £12.9million property portfolio in Herfordshire
    Includes his own £5.4million mansion and his parents' boutique hotel

http://i.imgur.com/D0zUHgJ.jpg

http://www.kckrs.com/wp-content/uploads/A5_BU9zCUAEuDMj.jpg

is this real or

http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/robbie-williams-concert-fight-sickening-2021035

it's amazing anybody can have anger in their bones after an evening of support act Olly Murs and great pop songs from the 90s and 00s done badly

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50126000/jpg/_50126108_-7.jpg

haha yes

http://i.imgur.com/N8TR122.png

omg weather pic

I sniggered at this standard xenophobic thread title on a football message board: "Hope Andy batters the pole now."

The Camerons - along with their children Nancy, Arthur and Florence - shared a private lunch with the estate’s owners before heading to the main arena at the festival.

The Conservative leader was then seen admiring a stall of colourful tutus with eldest daughter Nancy before the family were whisked away from the festival’s campsite.

The festival boasts music across four stages and also has an exclusive VIP area.

On the festival’s website, the 'eclectic and eccentric' event is described as a 'dynamic summer festival disguised as a country fayre - a lovingly crafted, top notch, very English open air party, tailor-made for the whole family'.

The site adds: 'Like the best of England, Cornbury is eccentric, charming and irresistible - a homespun melting pot where music-lovers share pies and a glass of champagne with superstars, toffs, rockers, crooners, Morris dancers, farmers, urbanites, fashionistas, gourmet chefs and the little old ladies who make exceptional cakes.'

http://i4.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/incoming/article4310872.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/3-Dale-Cregan-4310872.jpg

ws of shame

Haha on my way back from Cornbury. Will report later.

Was in the exclusive VIP area, saw Clarkson and Alan Davies there.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8475/8124223488_d4009237aa_z.jpg
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4026/4686074900_9d72e8b3ce_z.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8392/8643551935_edbb979921_z.jpg
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2232/1870487492_c799da1458_z.jpg

RFI: micro-item in this week's NME about David Cameron and Jeremy Clarkson watching HMHB perform at the Cornbury Festival, whatever that is

― DJ Mencap, Wednesday, 16 July 2008 17:04 (4 years ago)

I hadn't really heard of Cornbury Festival before. My gf got press tickets for it + presented it to me as a good thing to do with the kids, so I agreed a few months ago without investigating beyond a glance at the suspiciously boring line-up. As this weekend approached & I found out more, I realised I was going to a music festival for Tories & that there were no bands I actively wanted to see. Obvs the 'right thing to do' was smile & take one for the team & find something to enjoy, but I had been doing that several weekends running & I am selfish. I came up with various plans as Cornbury approached, mostly involving finding and taking hallucinogens and walking into the Oxon. countryside on my own, or hide in tent and read about the Great Tew Circle (since festival is actually at Great Tew) (it was too hot to do this).

On arrival, I realised that I was in a Real England zone, and thought about this thread.

Did my best to 'be present', but I was drifting off even by the appearance of Imelda May (who has played 8/10 Cornburies) and my dislike of that monied Cotswold world was too clear. I quietly pointed out that it was unusual for a festival to be sponsored by an estate agent (Savills), which provoked a blazing row with my girlfriend, right before Beverley Knight. We more or less reconciled, but agreed I had to sort myself out. The next day, I went – without hallucinogens – for a long walk to the Rollright Stones. It was fun: Range Rover twee of those villages; dream-idyll country lanes; friendly yokels who could not comprehend that I had not driven to see the stones; finding a fawn with its neck broken as I was making my way along the pathless verge of the A44 (then almost getting killed by an Ocado van myself); stinking out a farm shop/tea room gas centre w/ my foul and sweating body (I think I saw a chef laughing at me); crossing wheatfields, still green, with massive mobile masts at their edge; a miscalculated route that meant I was still miles away from the festival, & was waterless, sunburnt, dying in the heat when two little old ladies from Woodstock who were stewarding the festival and had popped out to find copies of the Oxford Mail (forgetting it was Saturday) stopped to pick me up (I wasn't hitching; they were just being kind, thoughtful) and brought me to the gates. I drank water, then beer, made proper peace with my girlfriend, then went to see Echo and the Bunnymen. I imagine Cameron was there somewhere too.

I don't really want to rant but it's a terrible festival to me. I mean I really don't enjoy the 'do the hits, like they are on the record, and make sure there's a bit where we get to sing along' atmosphere at this sort of thing & even for the smaller acts I can't really be among tanned Cotswold dads listlessly applauding The Silver Seas. It does something bad to me.

Actual best thing: Wilko Johnson.

This has only been a bit of a real England post.

sounds like living through A Field in England without the comfort of being a spectator

Good old Beverley Knight.

I felt really sociopathic for enjoying her set tremendously, despite the destructive + difficult argument I'd just had.

finding a fawn with its neck broken as I was making my way along the pathless verge of the A44 (then almost getting killed by an Ocado van myself)

this is going beyond real into the realm of contrivance, nothing could be that real

ha, was just scrolling down to c/p that part - mental image of a mutant Ocado van roaming the Oxford countryside running things over

A career criminal who committed his first theft during World War II and has spent 50 of the past 56 years in prison was back behind bars today – aged 75.

Dennis O’Brien is one of Britain’s longest serving criminals and boasts 35 convictions for 70 crimes since he was caught stealing aged nine years old in 1945.

The petty criminal, who is described by fellow lags as ”a bit of a rascal”, has been locked up 13 times for burglary, forgery, arson and handling stolen goods

Your Real England smalltowns which actually have railway stations, you don't know how good you have it. Or maybe the areas which got thoroughly Beechinged are insufficiently Real for this thread.

The realness of beeching'd towns was something i was thinking about a while ago when i visited the South Downs round Folkestone.

A spurious excursion - i'd gone to to see a place of childhood significance for one of my favourite authors - Jocelyn Brooke, the equivalent of Proust's Malbec.

He had this passage about going there:

In the ordinary way our annual pilgrimage to the cottage - that remote outpost of civilisation beyond the hills - was accomplished by train (S.E. & C.R., Elham Valley Line); the journey, moreover, necessarily began at Folkestone, and from long habit I had become so accustomed to it that I should have found it hard to believe that the village could be reached by other means, or from any other direction. This year, however, we were to approach it not from Folkestone but from London; odder still, we were not even to travel by train, but were to be drive down in the large green van which delivered wine for my father's firm. Mr Mummery, the driver of the van, was a bluff, fatherly figure in whom, if the circumstances had been less extraordinary, I should have had the utmost confidence; yet the journey before us was so strange and unprecedented that I was privately convinced - for all my faith in Mr Mummery's sterling qualities - that we should never reach our destination. In the first place, I still couldn't quite believe (despite my newly-acquired metropolitan sophistication) that our village could really be reached except by way of the Elham Valley line…

Notions of place are dependent on how you get there.

That line was closed in 1964, so there's now no easy south-north route out of Folkestone for the motorist (as far as I could tell):

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/folkestone-map_zps953bf14e.jpg

The main road out of Folkestone is an effective barrier to anyone not in motorised transport, and cuts Folkestone off from its curious hinterland - both in the physical and psychological sense.

Brooke tends towards a psychological interpretation of landscape and place so that once Beeching's Axe dropped Brooke's village ceased to exist - falling into an alternate universe and maintained only by his books (themselves characterised by the preservation of delicate margins of uncertainty).

Once you've negotiated through the boundary zone and are in the downland proper the roads constantly interconnect so they form a series of triangles that are quite confusing to navigate - you can easily make two left turns and end up where you started without having quite understood how you got there.

The roads felt like networks of memory and forgetting, a pattern of mental processes, of going back and forth to the same points, rather than the process of an A road or a motorway.

Yet these lanes had fallen into desuetude - they had grass down the middle, a decroissance of infrastructure - the people who had moved into the village usually needed to get to the nearest A road in order to get to London - for this the network of lanes was useless. This conception of them as a pattern of remembering, or a network might seem fanciful, but I don't think it is - after all, the reason for that pattern is because they formed networks of communicating between farms and villages - supportive of the area's economy. that economy has changed considerably, the main money in those areas is commuter money and, I got the impression, City money. The network of memory becomes an expression of forgetting. There are farms of course, but they are no longer part of an interconnected local economy - not the little triangles between named fields, named farms, named copses and woodland. Though whether the intangible concepts that can associated with local names and places also die with the last memory of them is perhaps a different matter. It may be the case that things which are less tangible and have less physical presence in the first place are more likely to persist past the demolition of their locus classicus (see Kipling's Dymchurch Flit and They for opposite points of view on this.)

Brooke writes in The Dog at Clambercrown that 'the village of Acrise (pronounced Ay'kriss) evoked more disquieting phantoms' and writes that as a child he was particularly afflicted by night terrors:

On such occasions I would be afflicted by a species of convulsion or nervous paralysis: my whole body would become rigid, my limbs immoveable, and I would lie thus, transfixed with terror, for an hour at a time.

What was curious was when I was navigating these roads in the area of Acrise, there was a definite gloom, a sense of psychological damp, of feeling disheartened, of unwelcomeness, darkness, chill - as if the sensations Brooke felt persisted across notions of the subjective notion of place. In fact these sensations of psychological disquiet, of haunting if you like, are the things that do persist when the infrastructure of their reality is dismantled, and passed into landscapes of the imagination.

The following day I watched Chris Petit's Content, his motorised appreciation of England, and of memory and forgetting, where he speaks of how the main roads of England are also its main landscape, its area of memory, the viaducts down which our thoughts travel as well as our bodies.

Places such as that area of the South Downs are unreal England if you like.

With the forgetfulness of their content they are easily projected upon by incomers (and these places have for centuries had people coming to then in search of their own notions of pastoral). This is the rural gated community, with ersatz fetes and expensive markets - money recreating what it perceives to be a continuity.

Does this perception of 'play-acting' matter - does it render real england unreal england, or real england only in terms of the propensity for it to take typical English characteristics? A sort of peevish morality, which is associated with notions of decency and the 'good old days' - white, monied, a tacit Ukipism that need not admit it:

-- I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

-- Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

-- Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

The trip ended up in absurdity, as I realised a couple of weeks later that I'd misidentified the village from his description, a Nabakovian failure of literary comprehension.

In fact I had never been to the place I had decided did not in reality exist.

Sometimes feelings such as these become extreme, and psychologically destabilising - standing on Clapham Junction, the platform you are on containing an inherent subjective determination of destination, all other platforms containing the meaningless portent of the rails curving out of sight, with even known destinations having the same fictional quality as those forgotten fields and lanes that I’d explored on that day.

Also went to Thorpe Park with my brother recently. V Real England.

Strange serpents and flowers infesting Mountbatten's former new educational Eden/parkland utopia:

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2013-06-21125216-1_zps1d984d0a.jpg

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2013-06-21122054-1_zps4e8b7817.jpg

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2013-06-21125330-1_zpsef36b86b.jpg

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2013-06-21144442-2_zps7050ec4a.jpg

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2013-06-21135708-3_zps6a12fa46.jpg

i was unable to find a suitable picture of alton towers, but it's another english mutant

I can imagine.

I myself am often in a position to hear its screams.

Fizzles that long post is one of the most extraordinary things I've read on ILX

practically moved me to tears

Is it fucking tragic nobody else has commented on this? I'm a bit drunk but fuck it; Fizzles yer a bloody marvel

well it's a hard to act to follow and my initial thought of responding with a marriage proposal seemed a little hasty and might perhaps have been thought peculiar

<3

bravo fizzles

the DSA's Hazard Perception test videos are excellent realness simulators. a dream-like purposeful motion sweeps you from one anywhere/nowhere ringroad, bypass or mini-roundabout on to the next, breaking only for the odd black-trousered schoolgirl on a puffin crossing
http://www.driving-test-success.com/hazard-perception-test03/hazard-perception-test-03.htm
http://www.driving-test-success.com/hazard-perception-test07/hazard-perception-test-07.htm
http://www.driving-test-success.com/hazard-perception-test09/hazard-perception-test-09.htm

Lol I did those earlier this year

Real Scotland bonus edition, welcome to my hometown.

http://s21.postimg.org/qcoufmbpz/IMAG0164.jpg

more realism

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/P1000511_zps49640b63.jpg

As league champions, the players of Hoghton Cricket Club are well versed in teamwork and presenting a united front in the face of adversity.

And it was those traits – with a bit of “Ashes spirit” thrown in – that stood them in good stead when a group of travellers invaded their pitch and even tried to set up home on the square.

If the gypsies thought they were in for an easy ride dealing with a bunch of genteel cricketers, they were sorely mistaken.

Caught unawares by the first four caravans, the players and volunteers formed a human barricade at the ground’s entrance to stop more of the gypsies getting onto the pitch.

Now they are celebrating by not only holding back “dozens” of travellers, but managing to evict the group who had set up home within 24 hours of them arriving.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10182627/Village-cricket-team-form-human-barricade-to-deter-travellers.html

I happened to visit the estate where I was born this weekend. The first photo is of the back of the chippy (recently closed down), right opposite my Primary school. The place that is now a pharmacy in pic two was where I went to play school about three times before my screaming fits convinced my mum that I hated it.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/0721354036345faa079a242cd12fce74/tumblr_mq8x0aam5J1sy67obo2_1280.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/8f50e678db6b5c16ea283fa6001d2c24/tumblr_mq8x0aam5J1sy67obo1_1280.jpg

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2106/2241733381_5706f52050_b.jpg

I should've taken a photo of my old local chippy, which around ten years ago was knocked down, along with all the other shops and houses alongside it, with the massive pile of rubble and now weeds still remaining. But then I can only offer this thread so much Real Scotland before I get kicked out.

http://i.imgur.com/YRcwjtk.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/HNpgqlV.jpg

Now that one hits home

http://www.flickr.com/photos/90896760@N08/sets/72157634786255146/