nah it's hedgerows and birds and complete lack of public services
― blind pele (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 November 2011 14:08 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― ceci n'est pas un nom d'affichage (ledge), Thursday, 3 November 2011 14:17 (twelve years ago) link
http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/UckFrisbyPiltdown03.jpg
― mark s, Thursday, 3 November 2011 14:19 (twelve years ago) link
"Searching for the Putdown Man"
― ceci n'est pas un nom d'affichage (ledge), Thursday, 3 November 2011 14:21 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Ned Trifle X, Thursday, 3 November 2011 14:29 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:39 (twelve years ago) link
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 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Glo-Vember (dog latin), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:42 (twelve years ago) link
yeah but the determination of that which is essential need not be a question of mere majorities
― blind pele (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:43 (twelve years ago) link
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
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:43 (twelve years ago) link
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?
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:46 (twelve years ago) link
look mate there's no need to get fucking personal, alright
― blind pele (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:49 (twelve years ago) link
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
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:49 (twelve years ago) link
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
― blind pele (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:52 (twelve years ago) link
wait haydon was the commie?
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:54 (twelve years ago) link
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
― blind pele (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:56 (twelve years ago) link
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
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:57 (twelve years ago) link
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
― mark s, Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:58 (twelve years ago) link
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
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:59 (twelve years ago) link
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??
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:00 (twelve years ago) link
irish close to turks dna-wise iirc
― blind pele (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:03 (twelve years ago) link
i think that's exactly what mark is saying, tbf
― blind pele (darraghmac), Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:04 (twelve years ago) link
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
― mark s, Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:13 (twelve years ago) link
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2007/07/17/chalkhomer460.jpg
― mark s, Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:17 (twelve years ago) link
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Xw7LplzFws/TpDJGHBmFGI/AAAAAAAAArE/CCJlpL9TMeU/s1600/yeo+valley.jpg
― you don't exist in the database (woof), Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:31 (twelve years ago) link
^ I wasn't at that FAP
― R. Stornoway (Tom D.), Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:34 (twelve years ago) link
clun forest all-mercian jug band champions, tractor runs on wattle and daub
― mark s, Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:34 (twelve years ago) link
never get away with haircuts like that up in the Danelaw
― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:36 (twelve years ago) link
post pictures of men who look like offa's dyke
― mark s, Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:37 (twelve years ago) link
― 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
― Nigel Farage is a fucking hero (nakhchivan), Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:45 (twelve years ago) link
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-CuQTcGVYo/TKdQeWpskMI/AAAAAAAAAoM/H64kcUh5Jjw/s1600/AvengersTV.JPG
― mark s, Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:53 (twelve years ago) link
real english dialectic demands picture of McGoohan dressed as hunt sab.
― you don't exist in the database (woof), Thursday, 3 November 2011 17:01 (twelve years ago) link
there is only one named wind in england
― Nigel Farage is a fucking hero (nakhchivan), Friday, 4 November 2011 17:02 (twelve years ago) link
This suggests a few more. I sincerely hope that "custard winds" isn't made up.http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/wxfacts/British-Weather-Terms.htm
― Stevie T, Friday, 4 November 2011 18:12 (twelve years ago) link
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/11/8/1320750745209/Members-of-the-public-wai-004.jpg
Sir Jimmy Savile's coffin goes on display - Members of the public wait to pay their respects
― Lars and the Lulu Girl (NickB), Tuesday, 8 November 2011 13:05 (twelve years ago) link
haha when i posted MES's mugg up-thread i genuinely didn't know his new LP was called "Ersatz GB"
― mark s, Tuesday, 8 November 2011 13:11 (twelve years ago) link
nah i was deliberately misquoting "The Classical" and i haven't heard a new Fall album in most of a decade tbh
― Bond 23: Skyrim (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 8 November 2011 13:15 (twelve years ago) link
it has probably always been his topic, of course
― mark s, Tuesday, 8 November 2011 13:21 (twelve years ago) link
the problem is the paucity of our national realnesses, we have nothing so resonant as la france profonde nor even REAL AMERICA
the place is too small and thoroughly gone over to sustain any really vital autochthonist fallacy
― Nigel Farage is a fucking hero (nakhchivan), Friday, 11 November 2011 02:19 (twelve years ago) link
"Middle England" as a conceptual culture, rather than a geography, has a resonance with politicians. There's an element of it that links back to the idea of a 'real England', away from metropolitan fancies. Much more bound up with class than 'real America', though.
― Mohombi Khush Hua (ShariVari), Friday, 11 November 2011 08:01 (twelve years ago) link
"Middle England" is a coy acknowledgment of the middle class that doesn't yet quite dare to speak its name
― Bond 23: Skyrim (Noodle Vague), Friday, 11 November 2011 11:13 (twelve years ago) link
so here i sit in a real England on a sunny Friday morning, but trapped inside the gloom of the institutional looking out at the sun, of course.
is our realness a sense that authenticity lies outside? what kind of culture will we leave for the archaeologists that isn't a bastard-Norman legacy of tea-cups and arcane manners? fate of an island to be the sticking point for a lot of flotsam and jetsam maybe, a 5 mile high mountain of tide-stranded rubber ducks and fashions.
maybe real england is that real desire to never belong, to always get back to sea.
― summer sun, something's begun, but uh-oh those tumblr whites (Noodle Vague), Friday, 27 January 2012 10:04 (twelve years ago) link
got a familiar soul-crushing view of our education "system" this morning, that impossible mixture of stolid, meaningless tradition frantically being stirred by idiots with no plan beyond the conviction that stirring in itself is the most important thing in the world, as long as you can do it on the cheap.
the most beautiful building in the panorama in front of me is a corn silo.
― summer sun, something's begun, but uh-oh those tumblr whites (Noodle Vague), Friday, 27 January 2012 10:12 (twelve years ago) link
tbf that educational system perfectly prepares people for 95% of careers
― teaky frigger (darraghmac), Friday, 27 January 2012 10:32 (twelve years ago) link
that doesn't help :(
― summer sun, something's begun, but uh-oh those tumblr whites (Noodle Vague), Friday, 27 January 2012 10:33 (twelve years ago) link
gramnivorous quadruped ftw
― teaky frigger (darraghmac), Friday, 27 January 2012 10:40 (twelve years ago) link
maybe real England is something to do with the grey, measured chunks of work as tedium shot thru with escaping to booze each night.
― summer sun, something's begun, but uh-oh those tumblr whites (Noodle Vague), Friday, 27 January 2012 10:44 (twelve years ago) link
yeah you'd almost long for a good steepling in catholic guilt tbh
― teaky frigger (darraghmac), Friday, 27 January 2012 10:45 (twelve years ago) link
some fear of vengeance plus some contempt for order wd be a huge improvement i must say.
as a newly invested minor underling of the boss class i've got to say i'd like to stab the boss class in the throat
― summer sun, something's begun, but uh-oh those tumblr whites (Noodle Vague), Friday, 27 January 2012 10:47 (twelve years ago) link
haven't read the article but...
https://i.ibb.co/T28sNXX/20240424-172537.jpg
― Bernard Quidbins (NickB), Wednesday, 24 April 2024 19:52 (two weeks ago) link
local journalism at its best
― Bitchin Doutai (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 24 April 2024 20:56 (two weeks ago) link
Over the Edge, village-style
― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, 24 April 2024 21:04 (two weeks ago) link
Yarn Bomber Nan Is Back
― prog ain't no religious cult (Matt #2), Wednesday, 24 April 2024 21:11 (two weeks ago) link
nobody told me she'd gone!
― Bernard Quidbins (NickB), Wednesday, 24 April 2024 22:56 (two weeks ago) link
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
― Bernard Quidbins (NickB), Wednesday, 24 April 2024 23:10 (two weeks ago) link
spinning those wheels of wool
― kinder, Thursday, 25 April 2024 10:24 (two weeks ago) link
could've crotcheted his own slipmats
― Bernard Quidbins (NickB), Thursday, 25 April 2024 10:31 (two weeks ago) link
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
― Ethinically Ambigaus (Bananaman Begins), Thursday, 25 April 2024 10:48 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― This is Dance Anthems, have some respect (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, 25 April 2024 17:11 (two weeks ago) link
There's absolutely no doubt that the the UK is significantly worse than 10 years ago and getting worse every year. Every month almost.
― Not waving but droning (Tom D.), Thursday, 25 April 2024 17:15 (two weeks ago) link
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.
― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Thursday, 25 April 2024 17:24 (two weeks ago) link
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
― Bernard Quidbins (NickB), Thursday, 25 April 2024 17:28 (two weeks ago) link
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
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
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, 25 April 2024 17:29 (two weeks ago) link
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
― Bitchin Doutai (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 25 April 2024 17:32 (two weeks ago) link
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
― Bitchin Doutai (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 25 April 2024 17:36 (two weeks ago) link
Some heavy relief
The roast beef of Old England. pic.twitter.com/iAQ1jBKEfE— david wheatley (@nemoloris) April 27, 2024
― glumdalclitch, Saturday, 27 April 2024 13:11 (one week ago) link
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
― LaMDA barry-stanners (||||||||), Monday, 29 April 2024 12:23 (one week ago) link
might actually be fake england fml
― LaMDA barry-stanners (||||||||), Monday, 29 April 2024 12:30 (one week ago) link
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
― Wry & Slobby (Portsmouth Bubblejet), Tuesday, 30 April 2024 14:01 (one week ago) link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Buttigieg
― glumdalclitch, Tuesday, 30 April 2024 14:06 (one week ago) link
Can’t believe this app is free pic.twitter.com/CpuRlny2Mo— Ant (@M0kujin) April 30, 2024
― glumdalclitch, Tuesday, 30 April 2024 14:15 (one week ago) link
Hope somebody can stop Brian Cox's crime spree in Tunbridge Wells soon
― Bitchin Doutai (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 30 April 2024 15:34 (one week ago) link
https://www.tiktok.com/@globetrots/video/7362198488857218337
― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Wednesday, 1 May 2024 19:17 (one week ago) link
West Yorkshire failing to get to get into the top two again!
― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Wednesday, 1 May 2024 19:20 (one week ago) link
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”
― mark s, Saturday, 4 May 2024 10:27 (five days ago) link
wow, a worthy addition to the lore
― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 4 May 2024 11:18 (five days ago) link
related (actually conger hill in toddington): https://i.imgur.com/w2yb889.png
― mark s, Saturday, 4 May 2024 19:31 (five days ago) link
let her cook imo
― Bitchin Doutai (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 4 May 2024 22:17 (five days ago) link