Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Though the flowers remain, they are old flowers, struggling mightily against the dingy plastic sides of their tubs. It is tempting to see a metaphor here. In Skegness, the mainly white flowerkeepers have not quite succumbed to an irreversible slide into I know not what, but will modern Britain ever again allow them to climb out and breathe the pure air of cricket clubs and mown grass? I wonder.

Already there are some early visitors, zig-zagging like drowsy bees through the streets in search of fun, the air filled with the smell of chip fat, onion rings and marshmallow penises.

But there is a sense of resilience here too, there in the gaiety of the penises in the flower tubs

"Do we still measure ourselves in tearooms and theatres?"

"Do we still measure our penises in tearooms and theatres?"

Tracer Hand, don't you live in like FRANCE or something?

No. But if I did, it would certainly say something wistful about today's Britain.

LB's column on the back page of the Film & Music supplement always stuck in my craw too. Especially with this kind of thing:

It was the middle of a heatwave, and so, even at night, you could sit bare-legged on the porch-stoop eating peaches and honey and sipping wine. And we sat there a long while, talking and drinking and listening to the music of the street - to the shouts in the night and the chatter of the bugs and the bursts of distant car radios and, from somewhere up above, the sound of Django Reinhardt playing I'll See You in My Dreams. That evening in July seemed to me a time of perfect, ripened happiness.

Is she American?

okay i'm lost as to what's so craw-sticking about the heatwave quote?

The fact that it got published in a so-called "quality" national daily newspaper?

It's pretentious and devoid of insight. "Yeah, it was really hot so we sat outside and got pissed. Good times."

she's English but loves America, I think

it should be "porch" or "stoop", there is no such thing as a "porch stoop", much less a "porch-stoop"

but it seems mad to fix on LB when this is generic sentimental journalistic style?

"the chatter of the bugs"

LOL Amerophiles

IN FAIRNESS I think I was the first one really to make the effort to get so publicly riled at LB - I think I called her 6th-form Freaky Trigger, in 2007 or so? - since then it's become kind of standard (and I am happy to concur with the renewed barrage of annoyance: really looking forward to the rest of her UK series, as read by ilx).

This is one of my few ilx innovations along with 'A-level cliché' and, oddly, 'On The Money'.

hey TRACER HAND just cos they don't have PORCH-STOOPS in like "Bordeaux" or wherever!!

"The sweets have got a lot ruder," he adds, with a glance to the array of marshmallow penises. "Which isn't necessarily a good thing, but unfortunately they sell."

if he had grimaced at the array of marshmallow penises i might have enjoyed this part of the story.

He grimaced when Laura asked him for some salt water taffy and cotton candy

with a corndog and a can of root beer

she wants someone to take her out to the ball game!

and a large side of Five Guys fries.

x-post

if political correctness hadn't gone mad skegness would still have been a seaside wonderland today.

I hear PC brigade want to ban growing of pansies in municipal flower tubs

And install penises in their place!

You couldn't make it up

Remember the music of the Lancaster bombers leaving Lincolnshire airfields to drop perfect, ripened bombs on the tearooms of Germany to the sound of Django Reinhardt playing I'll See You in My Dreams, as we sat bare-legged on the old broken-down pier eating marshmellow penises and watching the long, long skies over Skegness and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Dresden I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty.

The stars bent over the little roof; smoke poked from the stovepipe chimney. Somewhere Michael Hann was playing the new Hold Steady record. Pianos tinkled like mashed beans and chili. The old man growled... Alexis Petridis woke up and cried at the English night, at his very Englishness, for Coloraro felt so very far away. That's what friends are for, I think - for dancing with. My friend Melissa is a much better dancer than me and when we dance together she points her fingers in time with the keyboard sounds. I remember teenage years of making tapes and marvelling, wide-eyed, at the sticky labels on them, then crying all the way home to a whispered Spandau Ballet song. A California home; I hid in the grapevines, digging it all. I drove a car with the new Neil Young record and thought of how Neil's voice summed up the Canadian emptiness where only the Canada geese fly. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.

She speaks in your voice, Amerophile, and there's a stoop in her street that's halfway porch.

but it seems mad to fix on LB when this is generic sentimental journalistic style?

haven't you answered your own question there?

I just find LB ultra trite, for all the excessive alliteration she never actually says anything profound, despite shooting for profundity with every word.

I honestly don't know why you all bother reading her week in week out.

It doesn't help that it seems like so much unnecessary effort to me because her prose is like wading through treacle.

wading through treacle is so historically british though

nowadays people wade through semen

Churchill, maiden aunts riding bicycles, cricket on the village green, wading through lakes of treacle.

nowadays people wade through semen

― Local Garda, Tuesday, 7 April 2009 13:54 (21 seconds ago) Bookmark

Or so the gay mafia would have us do.

It would be really thrilling to read something like NickB's or pinefox's LB parodies, in a newspaper? I mean, as writing, not parody?

Churchill, maiden aunts riding bicycles, cricket on the village green, wading through lakes of treacle.

http://upperjames.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/dog.jpg

A+ since revive, folks

Most of the big shore places in Skegness are closed now and there are hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a fishing boat across the bay. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old town here that flowered once for sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the old world.

Its vanished teashops and cricket clubs had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of Skegness, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought "is this 600 words yet?".

^too well written!

I was flicking forlornly through a jumble of long forgotten digital TV channels, taking a simple joy in their oft-ignored wares, when I chanced upon a faded flick from my youth. A dapper Richard Gere strode proudly though Manhattan, his bride to be a hopeless whore. Pretty Woman, oh oh, as Orbison intoned many Christmases ago. This woman, a prostitute by trade, yet bravely sailing against that sea of sin to find a man fit to captain her in marriage. She, at times in leather trousers ressembling chaps and a lurid red rinse, yet never to succumb, and he the dead eyed businessman, never before in such seas, who yet knew the course to plot. As I watched, huddled in a blanket before my time, I reflected on love in an age of finance. We all have our individual ships to sail, and yet we know not, no nae never, whether we head towards hookers or schooners.

:D

>A+ since revive, folks

And across the misty waters of memory I heard a voice, distant at first but then more distinct: it was the voice of ILX past, the voice of The Pinefox, with those words that my made the hair on my neck prickle:

'On The Money'.

The mainly white barkeep who worked The Crow's Nest on Tuesdays and Thursdays - with the occasional Sunday when he hadn't much to do or was feeling the bite of recession - had come to feel that the MOT process in Skegness was becoming a bit of a disaster. Or so he said to this reporter as he vigorously wiped down the bar top with the same cloth he'd just been using on the ashtrays, an endearing custom that appeared - today, at least - to have survived the ravages of central government's neglect. As he continued speaking, using words to express his feelings, words which came from his mouth and went through the air towards me, I let my attention wander to the pansies in the window box. They were brave little pansies, thought I. And how different were they, really, from all the pansies that have ever striven in this corner of Britain to raise their meek faces to a sky that might have once contained the jangling rhythms of a jazz combo, or rained its quaint little raindrops down upon the heads of children who had never even heard of knife crime, let alone participated in it.

Did she talk to anyone except the sweetie man? Did she even go there? Or just google Skegness?

And her summing up?

...Britain has changed immeasurably in those 100 years. The sweets are ruder, the flower beds are newly planted, the song on the radio plays a different tune, but will we still find the Britain we remember?

Who? 100 year old people? No, they will undoubtedly find a different Britain to the one of 1908.

the song on the radio plays a different tune

huh?

hee

Radio was certainly different in 1908, can't quibble with that