Real England

"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

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4-CuQTcGVYo/TKdQeWpskMI/AAAAAAAAAoM/H64kcUh5Jjw/s1600/AvengersTV.JPG

real english dialectic demands picture of McGoohan dressed as hunt sab.

there is only one named wind in england

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

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

haha when i posted MES's mugg up-thread i genuinely didn't know his new LP was called "Ersatz GB"

nah i was deliberately misquoting "The Classical" and i haven't heard a new Fall album in most of a decade tbh

it has probably always been his topic, of course

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

"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.

"Middle England" is a coy acknowledgment of the middle class that doesn't yet quite dare to speak its name

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.

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.

tbf that educational system perfectly prepares people for 95% of careers

that doesn't help :(

gramnivorous quadruped ftw

maybe real England is something to do with the grey, measured chunks of work as tedium shot thru with escaping to booze each night.

Real England thread: xl bullies are child eating monsters
Dogs thread: xl bullies wouldn’t hurt a fly!

They are also smaller dog-eating monsters.

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

Interview with Mark Molesley of Gosport Borough

https://i.ibb.co/MGHNc6T/Screenshot-2024-02-28-at-12-45-51.png

This happened in Glasgow but still: 'Angry families turned up to find me dressed as Willy Wonka'

The only thing that's not Real England about this is that the organisers of the event apologised and refunded everyone's money.

more here:
fyre festival is going well

Also, Glasgow's not in England

More and more are saying this

'cyberflashing' lol.. dude totally looks like a cyberflasher

Court jails first person convicted of cyberflashing in England

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/19/court-jails-first-person-convicted-of-cyber-flashing-in-england

Ian Beale – 2024 Wall Calendar

Becky for PM.

Hi Backy. Thanks for highlighting this, we will find the officer responsible and make sure that they are disciplined

— Sandford Police (@Sandford_Police) April 1, 2024

April Fool, and highly English

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKpEc7YWAAAcREG?format=jpg&name=small

can always count on the local community centre for some top class signcraft

H
O
t
f
O
O
D

graphic design is my passion

It's like having an eye test

Those flags look like teeth

one thing I've learned is that the ppl that put posters up for the line-dancing and martial arts have much better grammar and visual flair!

is tombola (a) a mobile phone service for the deceased, (b) bribery of the clergy to secure a more desirable plot, or (c) a product for removing those stubborn coffin juice stains?

I can't remember if this thread covered the Woolaston Mystery Mime Man back in 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/25/mystery-mime-artist-vanishes-fete-goers-cash-asking-pay-guess/

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/0*tsHeNEee-T-AjT8e

A self-styled "Mystery Man" who asked village fete-goers to donate money to guess his identity literally turned out to be a mystery when he vanished after pocketing their cash.

Revellers at Woolaston Carnival in the Forest of Dean assumed the individual was a local resident when he wandered around the fete dressed in a full body morph suit communicating only in mime.

Carnival co-ordinator Andy Morgan Watts who led the parade in his vintage car dressed as a ringmaster, said: "He just appeared.

"Everybody was applauding him because it seemed such a clever way of raising money,"But when he disappeared it left a bad taste because people thought they had been giving money to charity.

Does anyone know about this 'Auditing' thing on YouTube (and probably elsewhere, no doubt) YT has been presenting these clips and I watched a couple but the general conceit is baffling to me.

Blokes wandering around dreary industrial estates, filming and with the seemingly sole intention of winding up the security firms, who they condescend to and occasionally have silly shoving matches, just so they can pointlessly film or fly a drone over, a completely nondescript factory or warehouse building, am I missing something?

I don't mean to use ILX as Google, but I bravely clicked on a Daily Mail article and found that it's an American trend that has found its way over here and while under the banner of 'protecting public photography and drone filming rights' it's just some excuse to boringly needle security firms and the police for YT revenue by dull pricks.

seems like just another flavour of the attention economy, couple of degrees from freemen, couple of degrees from paedo hunters

One of these auditors recently came to one of our offices (not mine thankfully) to start a fight and the video i saw on Tiktok of them trying to batter a security guard is the most embarassing thing I've ever seen

They need to try it at a military base or airport, might even be tempted to watch the resulting video.

the US version of this seems to be about 1st + 2nd amendment rights knuckleheads pushing white privilege to the limits by wandering about with guns in public + trying their best to provoke police interventions so they can loudly challenge them on their knowledge of constitutional rights while filming it. I don't what the hell it is doing over here!

US law applies everywhere don’t ya know. During the Ottawa truckers thing there were some people asserting their “1st Amendment Rights”.

I'd guess the UK version is anti-vaxx types from Hove who got radicalised during lockdown and are now looking for that buzz again

Racegoers fight each other as they scuffle on the second day of the Grand National Festival horse race meeting at Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool, north-west England (2024)#GrandNational pic.twitter.com/5F5wfCFexJ

— Great British Getty Images (@shitbritishpics) April 13, 2024

the video reveals it to be just a bit of playground shoving and a few soft taps exchanged and is over in seconds, the stills make it look more dramatic. I've harder hits from my son when he was 8 years old!

*had*

real scotland

This city ain’t appreciated enough pic.twitter.com/lzQOmQZOSI

— J67 (@Joyce6788_) April 12, 2024