how about walking round the whole of the M25?
― Neil S, Tuesday, 26 February 2013 11:52 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― woof, Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:07 (eleven years ago) link
Real england dont walk, wtf is this tammylan bullshit
― lance armstrong will have been delighted (darraghmac), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:10 (eleven years ago) link
"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.)
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:12 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:17 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:20 (eleven years ago) link
fine, High Tea at Spoonies it is then. dear christ @ that last post (or Last Post if you will)
― c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le beurre (imago), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:21 (eleven years ago) link
RIP Man of Paddington
― woof, Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:23 (eleven years ago) link
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
― lance armstrong will have been delighted (darraghmac), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:24 (eleven years ago) link
RIP Paddington Man. I was listening to Lie Dream of a Casino Soul and posting itt when you went. You will never know.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:25 (eleven years ago) link
Older brother was on the piss in edinburgh few years back, auld fella sez gimme that seat lad i'm dying, done and done
― lance armstrong will have been delighted (darraghmac), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:27 (eleven years ago) link
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
― tochter tochter, please (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:34 (eleven years ago) link
the latter pair as english as the rest of ye
― lance armstrong will have been delighted (darraghmac), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:38 (eleven years ago) link
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
― tochter tochter, please (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:40 (eleven years ago) link
Dont tell the mail
― lance armstrong will have been delighted (darraghmac), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:45 (eleven years ago) link
well that is a strong integrity is it not, unless you double-up as one of the thugs xxxp
Requiescat In Paddington, big man
― c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas le beurre (imago), Tuesday, 26 February 2013 12:45 (eleven years ago) link
http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2013-02-28203922_zps0bc76e44.jpg
― Fizzles, Saturday, 9 March 2013 11:02 (eleven years ago) link
I recognize Mike Gatting. Who are the other two? (Phil & Frances Edmonds?).
― dubmill, Saturday, 9 March 2013 11:40 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 9 March 2013 11:49 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 9 March 2013 11:52 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― dubmill, Saturday, 9 March 2013 12:01 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 9 March 2013 12:20 (eleven years ago) link
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, HertsThe Red Cow Inn, Pontsticill (S. Wales)The Royal Oak, Paull, YorksThe Tudor Rose, Upnor, KentThe Three Horseshoes, Cheddington, BucksThe Fox and Goose, Hebden Bridge, YorksThe Half Moon Inn, Balcombe, Sussex
― dubmill, Saturday, 9 March 2013 13:00 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 9 March 2013 13:08 (eleven years ago) link
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
― i don't have to be fair, i'm *right* (darraghmac), Saturday, 9 March 2013 14:02 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Saturday, 9 March 2013 14:24 (eleven years ago) link
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.
― ledge, Sunday, 10 March 2013 09:56 (eleven years ago) link
There is significant otm deposits in each of those posts, but then tbf fascism
― i don't have to be fair, i'm *right* (darraghmac), Sunday, 10 March 2013 12:35 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-21753748
― Neil S, Tuesday, 12 March 2013 14:22 (eleven years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2XRVt9Clo
― http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDRdCdW_k3A (Noodle Vague), Friday, 3 May 2013 12:34 (eleven years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/CpvTSdJ.jpg
just want this itt for posterity
― treeship journey to aja (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Friday, 3 May 2013 20:44 (eleven years ago) link
Will these hands ne'er be clean?
― Rowdy Rathore (Noodle Vague), Friday, 3 May 2013 20:46 (eleven years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/T79alD6.jpg
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 02:55 (ten years ago) link
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
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:02 (ten years ago) link
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
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:05 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:18 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:23 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:24 (ten years ago) link
http://www.flickr.com/photos/michael-wincott/sets/72157609644291183/with/3081002958/
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:31 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Bob Bunsen (Merdeyeux), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:31 (ten years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/E0G6NSA.png
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 03:38 (ten years ago) link
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.
― хуто-хуторянка (ShariVari), Tuesday, 28 May 2013 07:59 (ten years ago) link
yeah not many girls for Saturday's big do; this was their own photo too.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BLRzR6lCUAEYe5r.jpg
― piscesx, Tuesday, 28 May 2013 09:37 (ten years ago) link
Wanderers this afternoon confirmed a two-year deal with the pay-day loan company.
QuickQuid - replacing online bookmakers 118BET, whose deal with the Trotters expires this summer - will have its logo on Bolton's matchday and training kit and will also be involved in club-run initiatives across the community.
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Wednesday, 29 May 2013 23:17 (ten years ago) link
QuickQuid @QuickQuid 14 May
Not a fan of Caribbean Chicken? Check out recipes from our customers here to find one you fancy more: http://bit.ly/Z6QcnC
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Wednesday, 29 May 2013 23:20 (ten years ago) link
http://www.flickr.com/photos/michael-wincott/3080167369/in/set-72157609644291183/lightbox/
thought this one was a Steve Coogan character for a second
― the league against cool sports (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 29 May 2013 23:22 (ten years ago) link
http://i.imgur.com/R6GpzNK.jpg
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Wednesday, 29 May 2013 23:28 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_izjAoetZY
― r|t|c, Saturday, 8 June 2013 02:48 (ten years ago) link
Greene King striking a blow for Real England:
http://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2013-06-07/suffolk-brewery-accused-of-cultural-vandalism-after-scrapping-more-than-200-traditional-pub-signs/
― nagl dude dude dude (ledge), Tuesday, 11 June 2013 08:42 (ten years ago) link
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Feckenham_High_Street.jpg
Feckenham in the 21st century is a rural community with a traditional English village green, and is a starting point for several bridle ways, established country walks, and rambling routes based on Ordnance Survey maps, including the long-distance public footpath, The Monarch's Way, that passes nearby.
― ghosts of erith spectral crackhouse slain rudeboy (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 11 June 2013 09:19 (ten years ago) link