Real England

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.

yeah you'd almost long for a good steepling in catholic guilt tbh

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

have to embrace the cunt to get that close, is the problem

http://old-town.co.uk/piccadilly/

??

Ugh, found those Red Lion photos sinister and unpleasant. but it's five in the morning, tired hungover and dyspeptic, so a good time to catalogue some real England fragments.

I went to the countryside around Folkestone a year or so ago, to find the house a favourite author of mine had lived in (Jocelyn Brooke, himself a subtle unsentimental explorer of sentimental Englishness). But it prompted a lot of thoughts about Real England at the time. I'd got lost cycling out of Folkestone, and ended up a dead end, at an army base, with nissen huts and bored patrolling soldiers, on the other side was a light industrial warehouse/office building, the LoveWorld Conference Centre. Outside that there was a coach idling, with a bored looking coach driver (this image felt very English) and a couple of elderly people standing on a bit of scrub by the road, looking a bit blank. This was all behind an empty outpost of the massive Channel Tunnel complex that sits just behind Folkestone. The skies were very grey and there was a little light spitting rain and a slightly too cold for comfort breeze. That's one imagine of Real England for me - the slightly out-of-town light industrial 'parks', small offices with three or four parking spaces. And that untennanted feeling of places that don't get a lot of people passing through, from one place to another. Office labour with no places to go for lunch, so tesco sandwiches at your desk, while overcoming that wash of beery hangover, brought about by post work drinks and not eating properly.

When I cycled up onto the North Downs to find this village, I passed a field with a rotting caravan painted in UKIP colours in it. That rotting caravan by itself would have been enough to symbolise something about England, but the UKIP colours added an extra obviousness and curiosity to the symbol - THAT'S what you're fighting for? Tiny caravans stuck in a traffic jam on the way to Cornwall?

Then when I got to the village there was a village fete going on, an archetype of Englishness. But I couldn't shake the bad taste in my mouth (I had been arguing with my g/f it's true). The very fact it was an archetype of Englishness worried me. I talked to a few people to see if they knew where the house was, but most of them hadn't lived there a long time, not long enough to know about a very very minor 20th Century writer who might have lived there. And I got the impression that they were city types who had bought in to the English village thing. This isn't new of course (nor is it reprehensible, depending on yr capacity for 'city types') ! But the takeover - the buying into it - seemed complete, as if revived or maintained to keep up the fiction that had been bought into. I get the same feeling from farmer's markets. I like markets! I don't like expensive markets so much - why are these vegetables, and these eggs and this milk so expensive?

So yeah, what's this? The complete appropriation of village culture by the wealthy, as a sort of open gated community? I buy this to a certain extent, although I also know people who make a living from working in the countryside, itself not a romantic or sentimental activity obviously, and also clearly not totally redundant.

And of the rest - well NV's corn silo feels appropriate as an image. + boss class as a consciously boorish casual psychological bullies. A sort of frightened belligerence to them - male and female, although in different ways, and it still feels male driven. The whole lexicon that goes with that - the 'mate' and the 'footy', and the 'what you need to understand is' the mixed up with the dated, ford-sierra sleek meaningless facility of management speak.

Some fragments:

A roads (how you get to those offices, but also walking down them in the middle of the night because it's the only way to get home, drink wearing off, just the humming and clicking of the amber lights).

Complexes of artificial fishing ponds always strike me as bleak, but then I don't fish.

Middle-aged corporate car obsessed men who talk about women drivers. (A subset of the Top Gear world). Is there a part of Real England that they come out of? I mean surely you get the male superiority type in many many countries. But what's their flavour? I guess you get a strong sense of Imperialism from them. That dessicated 'common sense' that is in fact the hangover of a thousand and one fictions about Britain being morally great, right, and no need to reassess. There's the obsession with maps and how best to get places - surely an offshoot of Britain's tangled road system (see A Roads - a favourite topic of these men, with their bottlenecks, cut throughs, traffic lights and speed cameras).

Mark E Smith singing on live versions of Repetition in 1978/79 - (doing that seagull screech he does) ENGLAND! ENGLAND! (goes into bored dreary tones) Look over England, what do you see? LUST and DRUDGERY. (this seems more apposite than his definition of England as 'white bread and cynicism' which feels positively optimistic really).

a+

Wetherspoon News. Editorial. First sentence:

As we all know, a strong current of tribalism flows through the veins of humanity

― Fizzles, Saturday, April 7, 2012 5:30 PM (4 minutes ago)

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