Real England

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/

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-g2-C1fZ9x40/Ufgs2d3ijUI/AAAAAAAAC6k/kwYdVdFpGO8/w894-h557-no/Brit.Front.jpg

i thought it was some kind of joke when i saw it last night

still not sure what the fuck its about

slow news day?

greenslade explains: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/jul/31/sun-paywalls

obviously there's the possible leaking of some tapes in the offing too

typically crass branding exercise

ah right

dunno man, i'd go with extraordinarily crass meself

Xp weirdly its their way of launching their online paywall. cool that jt made it. cld say wayne bridge is more real but is be kidding myself. mb that "got a new name for a snake" song cld go in the time capsule as the definitive document

this is so full of awful gold:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/5042756/At-dawn-of-Sun-where-The-Sun-stands-on-issues-vital-to-us-readers-and-Britain.html

" The Tories are trying hard to dig us out of the economic mire.

But that didn’t stop us giving them a kicking when they tried to tax working people’s pasties."

The version in the Scottish Sun is the same but different - I don't know if they have their own editor but it looks like they were sent the English piece and asked to give it a lick of tartan paint.

http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/sun_says/1460642/The-Scottish-Sun-Says.html

Interesting that the English version doesn't say "And we certainly hold no truck with the swivel-eyed fanaticism of Nigel Farage and his UKIP crew."

the question "who the fuck do they think they are kidding?" springs to mind

Scottish Sun also seemingly blithely unaware of the renewable energy industry/sector in Scotland and how it is (A) a big thing and (B) pretty broadly supported.

fracking is the new green

As for Ireland, the north gets the wraparound

Hmm...

Witness the sheer excitement created by Celtic’s heroics against the cream of Europe last season

Lol 15% possession in the Barca win and got spanked 5-0 by Juve after surviving the group stage.

so? It was still exciting

Accepted but not enough to gloss over the appalling state of Scottish football.

Get this fucking Scottish shit off this thread.

"Northern Britain" shurely

Get this fucking Scottish shit off this thread.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 31 July 2013 12:07 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ real English

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51czgLpJn2L._SL500_AA280_.jpg

We're Northern Uproar, we're dead real we are

need the full size to appreciate the photoshop work

http://static.flavors.me/dynamic_images/background/5ea0577840074063846e95ccfe004887

Funnily enough, you know, given the state of culture in the city depicted on that album sleeve, it wouldn't be so out of place if those banners on poles actually did just say 'Northern Uproar'

the famous "purple aki" (idk about this nickname) is in the news again:

Akinwale Arobieke, 52, approached well-built men in Manchester city centre, Trafford and Bolton and touched their arms or shoulders, prosecutors allege... He was jailed in 2003 for 15 charges of sexual harassment and on his release he was given a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO). It bans him from certain activities, including feeling a person's muscles or getting them to carry out 'squats' in public

“Mr Arobieke has had, and continues to have, an interest in bodybuilding.

“His interest extends beyond that which is legitimate and manifests itself in a way that we say is criminal.”