Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

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

alex song was playing the ukelele on radio 2

1909!

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?

I don't know, better ask Henry Allingham

http://www.portraits.co.uk/images/henry1.jpg

Radio then consisted of one channel, and the only programme was Marconi reminiscing about his childhood holidays to Skegness.

Visiting the Roman forts built by his ancestor Pansius Marconius

Still, it was better than Chris Moyles at least.

Back in the days before Django lost his fingers toasting a marshmallow penis on a peat fire.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/08/italy-earthquake-survivor-crochet

Last night, rescuers celebrated after a 20-year-old girl was found alive 42 hours after the quake under the rubble of a four-storey building ...

"Wahay, we've rescued a 20 year old girl!"

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v449/wendylady1/Fashion%20Police/Serpentine%20Gallery%20Summer%20Ball%202006/GraysonPerry.jpg

That's where the 'similarity' lies: If it hadn't been for that mobile phone vid, the "Police tried to rescue a man who fell in the crowd and got trampled to death" line would have held.

(xpost) Oops, our mistake, put back into rubble...

Is that normal phraseology in Britain? In America 20-year-old girls are usually called "women", or "young women" if you really want to emphasize how nubile they are.

Mmm, yup that's about it.

Usually with visions of their A-level results...

Seems kinda sexist cos you'd never talk about a 20-year-old boy without thinking of that Peter Pan guy off the internets or something.

"20-year-old woman" sounds kind of odd to me?

mostly her age just seems an unnecessary detail: could they not have said 'young woman' and left it at that?

Age is the ultimate unnecessary detail in most newspaper journalism though.

mentioning the 98-yr-old's age was pertinent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/g
girl
female under 18

Maybe someone who works there should read their styleguide instead of just trying to sell it to readers for some reason.

mostly her age just seems an unnecessary detail: could they not have said 'young woman' and left it at that?

― horses that are on fire (c sharp major), Wednesday, 8 April 2009 09:34 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Well, exactly.

For fuck's sake, people. We hacks don't necessarily have time to consult the style book for every word, especially with breaking news (and I speak as the author of two in-house style guides). In this instance, does it really matter at all? No.

Glad everyone's got so much to occupy their minds this morning. Jesus fucking wept.