Real England

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

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

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

Some heavy relief

The roast beef of Old England. pic.twitter.com/iAQ1jBKEfE

— david wheatley (@nemoloris) April 27, 2024

This is a ridiculous story…

Former Port Vale player Ryan Burge hates the club so much, he flew a plane over their ground on Saturday with a banner MOCKING their relegation from League One.

He got a pilot’s license, JUST so he could do it.

All new levels of pettiness 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/Da6IhMIozg

— Ryan Dilks (@RyanDilks1) April 29, 2024

might actually be fake england fml

Looks like there's a shortage of police sketch artists in Tunbridge Wells.

Investigators have released a computer generated image of a man they would like to identify in connection with a burglary in Tunbridge Wells. https://t.co/hPrbjaLeyU pic.twitter.com/D35VA8TfQd

— Kent Police TWells (@KentPoliceTWell) April 29, 2024

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Buttigieg

Can’t believe this app is free pic.twitter.com/CpuRlny2Mo

— Ant (@M0kujin) April 30, 2024

Hope somebody can stop Brian Cox's crime spree in Tunbridge Wells soon

https://www.tiktok.com/@globetrots/video/7362198488857218337

West Yorkshire failing to get to get into the top two again!

hackney moleman klaxon:
https://www.ft.com/content/fe13350f-6522-4892-b67e-301828b10070 (needs registration but it's free)

“tunnelling is something that should be talked about without panicking”

wow, a worthy addition to the lore

related (actually conger hill in toddington):
https://i.imgur.com/w2yb889.png

let her cook imo

the levels of dgaf on display are pretty impressive tbh pic.twitter.com/Eq1rbSMIaG

— Owain (@orhunt) May 16, 2024

Love it when people threaten to report something to the council. Like have you ever tried phoning the council? Yeah, good luck with that, pal

Thanks to the austerity the old woman's beloved Tories put in place!

Someone tell starmer that strict anti-harp legislation is a surefire winner with his target voters

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GOpV1XeXMAAOjni?format=jpg&name=medium

jesus wept

I think you mean "Jezzy w"

50/50 on whether that is intended as savage mockery

Perfect for the Relly Engz thread

wait what is 'salad cream'?

nevermind, I don't wanna know

it's great is what it is

A variant on mayonnaise (no oil, or less oil).

I didn't even know what mayonnaise was when I was a kid, even "egg mayonnaise" sandwiches were made with salad cream.

I thought mayo and salad dressing were the same thing as a kid, and at a shockingly old age I finally googled it and discovered salad dressing is made without egg yolks.

yeah, "kid" in my case was probably well into my late 20's, lol

salad cream is like a runny, more vinegary mayo. best in a (*vegan) fish finger sandwich with a bit of lettuce, its acidity helps it cut through better than mayo

huh, perhaps like our Miracle Whip but it's actually kinda sweet

miracle whip is an abomination, salad cream is ok

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".