Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

never heard of this columnist before sounds hillaria

one of my faves of this genre of myopic priv-class blathering was when the late Deborah Orr was pondering something like: why is everyone so critical of zero-hour contracts? what about people like my friend who likes to teach Yoga part-time occasionally and not be constrained by something as vulgar as a full-time working week.

i thought spare rooms were luxurious and this guy's got a spare flat!

"oh, this old thing? i run it out every few months just to keep the rust off"

this from the guardian’s “analysis” of the new BBC chairman appointment:

Sharp’s appointment to the BBC could be a sign of the “Sunakification” of the British establishment, whatever that means.

well i think you’ve really nailed that. identified a really important process in the framework of institutional governance. if it is a process. and idk governance what the hell is that is it just a word? not really sure what i mean by framework either like a climbing frame maybe i guess.

>>> Our house was still not ready when the lease on the rented flat expired and – having gambled on readiness – we had nowhere to live. Days before we had to move out, we were desperately casting around. With immense kindness, my best friend stepped in. He has a tiny, spare, one-bedroom flat opposite our house, in which family members stay when they come to London.

Where's that from? Not ms Barton!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/29/crammed-tiny-one-bed-flat-realised-i-loved-my-home

So bad it needed to be posted twice.

Didn't he used to post here or am I confusing him with someone?

yes he did!

He has a tiny, spare, one-bedroom flat opposite our house, in which family members stay when they come to London (yes, I know, a spare flat. But all I can do is thank goodness he has it).

does everyone at the Graun have a friend who just happens to have a spare fucking flat in London?

Boggling at the Hann article. All the 'what i learned during lockdown' pieces have a base of privilege, which is fine tbh, but 'after being mildly inconvenienced, i learned that i love my spacious Victorian house in London' is fabulous.

(PS did I mention I'm a music journalist)

Down and out in a one bedroom flat in London

Someone who had previously spent 20+ years as a staffer and has an Oxbridge spouse with an even better staff job should probably not be regarded as a precarious freelancer, yet this is every self-employed, married 40s/50s music writer I know. They’re all in houses or large flats which they bought because they married another middle-class person with a flat bought for a song in the ‘90s, consolidated, and if they have a mortgage at all it’s substantially lower than the price of a room in a flatshare. Boo fucking hoo.

it's not that I disagree with what she's saying so much as that she is writing this article, now, while living in the USA. you know, that USA

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/britain-used-to-be-my-home-but-its-beginning-to-look-unrecognisable-to-me

lol, the request for money at the bottom of the page is longer than the article.

Boggling at the Hann article.

Don't even know where to start with that, it reads like a parody and then the accompanying photo just pushes it over the edge.

temporary living in a one bedroom flat when you own a spacious London townhouse must be a bit of a bind tbf, maybe he should have had a crowdfunder link at the bottom of the article - help fund for him and family for a weekend in Provence to psychologically recuperate from such an ordeal

Just think, they might have had to live near some working class people.

that kitchen he's standing in is probably bigger than half the flats I've lived in tbh

...then the accompanying photo just pushes it over the edge

Indeed, it's almost as if it supplied by an AI:

epitome of middle class middle aged wankerdom - check
smug expression - check
immaculate kitchen unit and fittings - check
sense of spaciousness - check
rest of house in shot hints at the epitome of guardian lifestyle aspiration - check

Gotta give the cozy catastrophe soft-left crowd some comfort food, let them believe the world isn't completely going to hell in a handB&Q cart and keep the advertisers happy.

The kids – 20 and 16 – couldn’t tolerate how cramped it was; once lockdown loosened even a little, they went to sleep in any house that would let them in.

Was there ever a period since March that it was okay to sleep over in someone else's house??

Nothing to do with being confined with this nitwit for hours at a time.

These fucks live on another planet

lol but this reminds me of last year some actor shared a video of a zoom audition he did where this cunt director (I think confirmed to be Matthew Vaughan which makes sense) didn’t realise he had his mic on and was overheard saying “these poor people, they live in these awful tiny apartments, no space” & the actor told him off & was saying “yeah I know I have a shitty flat, give me the fuckin job so I can get a nice one!”

But the whole time I was watching it I’m like “that’s a shitty flat?!” I swear these ppl should see my place

OTM... er, apart from the bit about your flat, that I can't comment on.

Even visiting it after hours to check on its progress could be disastrous – such as when I discovered the builders had left a bottle of milk on top of a box of records, but hadn’t secured the lid. This was a box containing my oldest vinyl, the stuff from my teens. Now the records were stained and stank of sour milk. I went through the Discogs website calculating their worth. There was a 12in single from 1987 that had been in near mint condition – an unblemished cover, barely played. It had been worth £120. It wasn’t now.

tenner says it's mbv - strawberry wine

fucking builders eh???

Reading between the lines, the klutz knocked over a bottle of milk ruining his own records.

Of course it would never have happened with a carton of Oatly.

I was a bit rude towards him on a football league thread and told him to fuck off with his jester hat/face-paint middle class smugness when he used to post here. But give me a break I was young and angry at the time, well maybe 40-41 years old lol!

I'm assuming he was a QPR fan judging by the mug he's drinking out of? Or Reading.

From Reading, QPR supporter.

Even that is annoying.

yeah he was a QPR fan when they got to the final at Wembley, he just didn't post at all during the regular football season though, he saved all his smugness for a Wembley report.

Thought the producer was Tr1stram $hapeer0

Was there ever a period since March that it was okay to sleep over in someone else's house??

It's perfectly fine as long as you call it a 'bubble' apparently

director, even

Bubbles are for people who live alone. In theory this household could form one with someone on their own, but only one person

(Ah ok re director, I saw someone say MV & didn’t question)

(My flat is not shitty, it’s nice! But like a tenth the size of these allegedly tiny ones)

When I lived in Plumstead and Woolwich in the 90s it broke my heart paying what you could get a 3—4 bedroom house in the North for a squalid pokey bedsit where you share a kitchen with despardos and psychopaths!

Bubbles are for people who live alone.

You can have a support bubble if you have a <1yr old child or for various other reasons, and a childcare bubble (where meeting socially is disallowed though this seems like a fine if not meaningless distinction) if you have kids under 14. Not if you have large adult children though.

Right, the 16 and 20yos on a sleepover rampage are not having a bubble

Sorry, I was being a bit facetious with the bubble talk. It's definitely needed but I've seen the term thrown around completely out of context. and some people in my family have had other relatives round on and off all the time (including those with symptoms but didn't realise this meant they should test), don't think they're aware of the bubble concept anyway, and continue to moan about how we're in this mess because of everyone else breaking the rules.

Irish film Arracht eschews Brit bashing to tackle famine taboo https://t.co/5JMZAJrzo9

— Rory Carroll (@rorycarroll72) January 9, 2021

It centres on a fisherman in the west of Ireland who battles to survive when disease ravages potato crops in 1845, plunging the country into a cycle of starvation, misery and emigration that halved the population.

Many in Ireland think the British government’s indifference and bungling amounted to genocide.

The makers of Arracht however have sidestepped explicit politics and finger-pointing. The film depicts the land-owning gentry not as villainous agents of British colonialism but as people with deep ties to local communities.

”I always dislike moustache-twirling bad guys in films,” said Tom Sullivan, the writer and director. “The landlords had intimate relationships with Irish people for generations. I leave it to other people to vilify the Brits.”

The film showed the atrocious consequences of authorities who viewed the famine as God’s will or the result of native fecklessness, but it also showed the close bonds between Irish and British people, said the director. “Sometimes we don’t accept our history in an honest way. We’re intrinsically linked to the British and the English. The Brit bashing and the victim thing that is sometimes played out – we need to move beyond that.”

jfc

jesus

fucking

christ

Coming soon, a movie about how English troops cuddled Gandhi

The lighter side of colonial violence