Real England

that makes me want to drink v much.

yah me too

Realest of Englands

the conviviality and licentiousness of daytime drinking is a thing of beauty and wonder, especially on a hangover, barreling about town, and laughing a lot, which I simply cannot sustain any more.

i love that feeling that the pub was still the pub 650 years ago

but for me, for now, ze war is over

hallowed ground. but also v expensive ground these days, wch is why Wetherspoons is such a locus classicus for this thread.

it's a war I can't participate in either - my health is too shaky I'm afraid to say.

would be seriously interested in organising a long-distance walk through some unexpectedly archetypical corner of England in the warmer months ahead - the hard bit would be to nose out a region of potential and then accidentally-on-purpose discover its English integrity

how about walking round the whole of the M25?

not sure you can find real england with a flaneuring/dériving head on. wetherspoons has to own a part of you.

That said, I'd be on for a walk.

Real england dont walk, wtf is this tammylan bullshit

"integrity" dodgy I'd say too. cynical distrust of authority, self-interest and greed, + whacko religion and socialism. the last to I suppose might be considered out of the way, tho for religion there's always east grinstead.

walks always good. High Weald of Sussex holds my heart, tho their Englishness is mixture of projected past and actual past, conserved and surviving thru not being noticed (still just-about-lucrative traditions of coppicing n woodland industry.)

fuck, darragh - u remind me of a thing - that Chris Petit update to his documentary driving round England. thought it was quite good and wis going to do a comparison of that and the weird triangular track/road system around South Downs where Jovelyn Brooke used to live. Forgetfulness and the modern pastoral or something. But it was baloney you'll be surprised to know + required effort. Still might have a go at some point. Got the notes somewhere.

Christ, just seen a chap i think cark it on Paddington Station. Deserved an in memoriam on this thread perhaps. There was an avenue of onlooking smokers formed for the paramedics. it was quite touching.

fine, High Tea at Spoonies it is then. dear christ @ that last post (or Last Post if you will)

RIP Man of Paddington

Yere a wonderful race all the same, full of oddities. Is it protestantism or is it a locality based historical or genetic thing i wonder

ooer xp

RIP Paddington Man. I was listening to Lie Dream of a Casino Soul and posting itt when you went. You will never know.

Older brother was on the piss in edinburgh few years back, auld fella sez gimme that seat lad i'm dying, done and done

we were Protestants before Protestantism, Pelagius baiting the Pope before England existed tho I guess he's a Brit or a Celt not an Angle, like Fizzles said half-cracked millenarian sects bordering on anarchism or communism is the stock in trade and all it all amounts to is two fingers at the lord of the manor and his thugs really

the latter pair as english as the rest of ye

aye well power is its own nation really but i suppose a lot of them was imported French if we want to split European tribes about it

Dont tell the mail

well that is a strong integrity is it not, unless you double-up as one of the thugs xxxp

Requiescat In Paddington, big man

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2013-02-28203922_zps0bc76e44.jpg

I recognize Mike Gatting. Who are the other two? (Phil & Frances Edmonds?).

John Emburey, right-arm spinner, one of the main cricketers behind the two apartheid-breaking tours (only one to go on both?), and Wendy Richard, Are You Being Served and v long-running Eastenders actress.

It was partly for the people, and partly for the look and feel of the people and the pub. Not that I have any particular love for any of them, but it's a photo saturated with childhood nostalgia for me.

WR also famously featured on "Come Outside" (1962). I didn't realise (or had forgotten) that she was such a big Tory supporter. I also wasn't aware that she had died.

The photo looks like a Lord's Taverners fundraising for children's charities kind of thing. Taken in the early 1980s by the look of it.

Bit later, I'd say. And it's from The Windsor Castle, which I think must have been WR's local by the looks of the other photos on the walls, and is nearish Lord's. It's an excellent pub, rammed with curious memorabilia, but not self-satisfied about it - it's clearly been a well-run, well-liked local for a long time, and so has a sort of atmospheric patina or provenance, that can carry off any amount of eccentricity. If it had been newly-designed that way it would be insufferable. The bar staff also have an excellent inclusive reticence about them.

It's a bit difficult to describe exactly what I mean about that patina. It's something perhaps you get more on the continent. I remember a very clean well-ordered, not expensive but smart restaurant I went to in Rome. It had an unchanging history of being well run, being kept clean and smart, with a professionalism that is not professionalism, but a quiet undefensive pride in knowing that a thing (in this case feeding and briefly housing customers) is being well done. And it's as if the good habits that come with that have worn grooves in the place - there are things there that have stood the test of time and do not need changing. When you find pubs like that, or bookshops, or restaurants in this country, it is a rare and precious thing, and redeems even the most indifferent of pubs. We seem bad at it in England - maybe that's just London, with the pressures of rents, and high-density transient population making it hard or meaningless to maintain it. I think a national indifference to food, which isn't entirely unpleasing, is possibly to blame for the restaurant side of things.

I understand exactly what you mean, including what you say about things that have stood the test of time and don't need changing. I don't know about restaurants but there are still pubs that have the quality you're talking about, but there are far fewer of them (especially in London, as you say) due to so many being part of chains. When I go out for a walk in the country, I like, if possible, to end up at a village pub. I reckon about 20 to 30% of the time the pub (if there is one) will still have that feel about it. But the outlook is not good, obviously, with so many pubs shutting down due to dramatically falling business.

Here are a few pubs that I've liked, for similar kinds of reasons to those you mention:

The Red Cow, Harpenden, Herts
The Red Cow Inn, Pontsticill (S. Wales)
The Royal Oak, Paull, Yorks
The Tudor Rose, Upnor, Kent
The Three Horseshoes, Cheddington, Bucks
The Fox and Goose, Hebden Bridge, Yorks
The Half Moon Inn, Balcombe, Sussex

That list is making me thirsty to go to those places and walk around then drink in the pubs in those places. Yes, and agree I think with your figure of about 20-30% and the outlook not being good.

yeah i dunno you can wander any city and find shitty restaurants in great locations, and be surprised by the odd hidden gem, i don't see it as an englande thinge

it was more wendy richard photo > in nice pub > this is why i like it > why isn't there MORE dammit?

i still think there are some specifics beyond there are more shitty things than nice things, which agree is unlikely to be a national characteristic of anywhere (tho the proportion of the two may be significant - feel vaguely gesturing to the 'high street' thread here). i do think there's an indifference to food, which may be to do with the entire archipelago than being strictly English, but is more than a n. of viticulture cultural difference shared by all countries north of that Danube/Rhine boundary. restaurants are a special occasion, not a place to congregate - or rather 'we' tend not to congregate around eating, but drinking.

I always feel sorry for tourists clustering round the menu outside my lunchtime local, clearly not recognising it is English Chain Pub and that tells you everything you need to know.

There is significant otm deposits in each of those posts, but then tbf fascism

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-21753748

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2XRVt9Clo

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

just want this itt for posterity

Will these hands ne'er be clean?

http://i.imgur.com/T79alD6.jpg

the edl photos from this weekend are redolent of realness but they are far too contrived to be really real, their mourning for salman rushdie and their banners misspelled so ludicrously that they suggest some cheap internet parody of themselves

they even have an lgbt sub-faction, no lumpen street thug can submit to this communitarianism in good faith

in terms of realness

gary bushell's england nationalism party or whatever the fuck it's called >>>>>> ukip >>>>>>>>>> bnp >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> edl

The white working classes are so alienated from society that they should attend citizenship ceremonies with immigrants, according to David Cameron’s poverty tsar.

Frank Field said some working class people were increasingly unsure of their identities.
He suggested that going to the ‘wonderful’ citizenship ceremonies could help them feel like they were part of British society again.

Tuesday 27 June 2006 16:16

Children’s charities and campaign groups have welcomed the appointment of a child poverty tsar following the government’s failure to meet its own poverty targets.

Lisa Harker, who previously worked for Save the Children and the Child Poverty Action Group, has been recruited by the Department of Work and Pensions as an independent adviser on child poverty.

Chris Huhne has asked the Labour Lord Whitty to take up the position of fuel poverty tsar, the Financial Times reports. Malcolm Wicks, former Labour energy minister, and Lord Adonis have both turned down the job.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michael-wincott/sets/72157609644291183/with/3081002958/

big thing on Twitter of ostensible lefties and centrists picking on any and all antifascist protesters for being middle-class posers, one is only Real if one at least dabbles in fascism, even just a wee bit.

http://i.imgur.com/E0G6NSA.png

Didn't know there was an lgbt EDL! They always claim to have members from minority communities but every single one I saw yesterday was white and male. One guy was wearing a Liam Fontaine shirt which I guess you might not get with the BNP.

It looks to me like they are, to a man, displaced football hooligans - nostalgics largely too young to have fought on the terraces or fucked up small French cities but want to feel like they're part of a firm. They are the antithesis of realness.