This Weather : Classic Or Dud

You didn't mention fat lobster people half naked.

I didn't see any lobster people was the amazing thing! I did, however, see one of the whitest human beings I've ever seen in my life. I mean, white as in the colour of a piece of paper. I expect if I'd walked back the same way about an hour later, I would have seen them turn into a lobster person.

It's a bit too hot for me right now, I have to admit.

Now, rain: that's a different matter. Rain is GRATE.

What I object to is the British "winter". It never gets so cold in London that it actually snows, so instead you are forced to look at grey ground, grey trees, grey skies, and that hard, pelting, nasty sort of rain that soaks you to the skin and freezes you to the bone for six months of the year. If it would snow, that would be great. I love snow, it makes everything so clean and white and tranquil. I was happy this past winter because it snowed properly in London for the first time in what seemed like a decade. (I even saved the "snow chaos cripples south" newspaper placards cause they were so funny.)

I can take cold, I can take snow, I can take certain kinds of rain, but it's that bloody depressing, ennervating, miserable GREYNESS that goes on for months at a time that just makes me mad.

Today is lovely, though. I walked all the way back from Streatham in glorious sunshine. And all that nonsense with the doctor, and missing the Oxford thing only to be told that I am finally HEALTHY. Almost seems like a waste, if I'm going to miss fun, it should at least be *for* something!

Tho actually, I think "extreme weather~" is just the mechanism/pretext for more of the UK's many many undeclared, unofficial, winked-at holidays. I expect to live to see the xmas shutdown last from Guy Fawkes to Valentines.

x0x0

Summer in London is very dud indeed as everyone (including and especially me) just gets more bad tempered than usual.

Oh for the rural Home Counties idyll of my childhood........

It always happens. I get ill and I hanker for the bosom of my family.

Things aren't like that anymore, Mark. There's a curious denial round here of the flexibility of modern society. I can't imagine the amount of bandwidth that gets wasted by this stuff ...

Anyway, this is nothing to do with "flexibility", this is to do with stupid stuff I DON'T EVEN WANT WHEN I'M IN THE CITY. I wake up sweating: WHY ARE THERE NO CAR ALARMS GOING OFF? WHERE OH WHERE IS THE EVER-PRESENT HACKNEY SMALL-ARMS CRACKLE OF GUNFIRE?

Now that you have pointed out that you meant the world your parents have recreated rather than the world as it is now (when did they marry? I'm guessing the mid-late 50s, and that countryside is indeed vanished forever) I can understand exactly what you mean. I have encountered many people who have created their own little private parallel universe: it is, in fact, pretty much the definition of the Mail / Telegraph / Times idea of the countryside. I can also understand being totally stupidly irritated by the absence of trivial background things you don't even like much, because I've experienced that myself (often feel like telling seagulls to shut the fuck up, but when I *don't* hear them ...).

I do find it interesting, though, that the Tories now only hold one out of the five seats in Shropshire (Lab = Shrewsbury & Atcham, Telford and The Wrekin, Lib Dem = Ludlow, Tories = Shropshire North), when they held all five seats in 1983. Do you think this is down to the dying off of those who wish to create such a private existence, or just the Tories seeming so disorganised and incoherent?

Tom: I don't dislike London at all, it's just that certain things that would once have seemed incredibly distant and exciting to an out- of-towner like myself no longer seem so. Or maybe I've just changed. Whatever, I enjoy it, but it's nothing special at all. Just another place.

Still hate Channel 5 though :).

However I can't help you on, say, Labour's position in 1945 and 1966 or the Tories' position in 1959. I hate myself for knowing this, but the Tories won The Wrekin with a *tiny* majority in 1955.

Funnily enough, although London is demonstrably 'just another place' in so far as it is no more or less *a place* than anywhere else, I don't agree when you say it's nothing special. It seems to me that London feels palpably different to anywhere else in the UK (possibly the world) and certainly has a greater range of communities and, er, stuff available. By stuff, I suppose I mean culture: not high culture necessarily, but the products of human life, and particularly the products of so many people living in a relatively confined space (and that's not even beginning to consider the City, central Government and the core of the UK art and media world, none of which exist in comparable form elsehwere in the UK with the possible exception of Edinburgh's parliament).

Obviously there's a lot wrong with the place; obviously it doesn't offer everything the UK has to offer; I think it's the only place in the UK which isn't really like anywhere else on these islands, which would be my definition of special. I could understand you thinking it was specially bad where I think it's specially good, but to say it's nothing special seems contrary to the point of just being wrong.

I deliberately exaggerated certain tendencies in that questionnaire (and if you think that's bad, you should read the one I did on Wherever You Are at a particular personal low ebb ...) and I don't actually dislike London as much as I probably did earlier this year: indeed, I would agree with you that there is much unique about it, and in the end I might conceivably live there. But I don't totally agree with your implication that all the other places in the UK are broadly indistinguishable from each other. While I don't like the homogenising tendencies at all, I would say that the suburban / quasi- urban places are broadly indistinguishable, but I would say that the geographical extremes (Cornwall, west Wales, northern Scotland, north Norfolk) are still pretty much unique, whatever your opinion on the merits of such "uniqueness".

You may have a point that there are certain places where geographical features are unique (north Norfolk I would imagine being one), but I'm not especially interested in geographical features, much more in the way people behave.

I think if I were to judge a place on certain superficial criteria - which shops were there, for example, or what music you could hear playing in them - you might assume everywhere was homogenising. But places remain distinct and distinctive if you look a little more carefully.

Where I agree with you Robin is that suburbia can look depressingly uniform, and it's in this area that I think the ideas of your Common Ground lot could be really useful. They can still keep their publications concerning rivers and trees, though.

(I once mentioned a/b to fab rising novelist Nicola Barker formerly resident in Ely and she sed GOOD!)

I think Raymond Williams is probably still right, though I think a very high percentage of the population live not so much in "small towns" (this was probably truer 40 or 50 years ago) as in areas that are neither overwhelmingly rural nor particularly urban. The first and fundamental limit of the whole "urban and rural Britain at war" rhetoric is that most people don't live in the extremes of either (if anything, more people than ever live "somewhere in between" in that inner cities are less populated than they were in, say, the 1930s, and there are fewer truly isolated rural communities).

Tim: when I was thinking of "suburban / quasi-urban" places where differences are very minor, I was largely thinking of places closer to London than those you mention. I would agree with you in that there is a *huge* difference between Taunton (still largely a traditional county town) and Yeovil (highly suburbanised / industrialised / more "rootless"). This can often come from movement into the town: for example the character of Yeovil (and, perhaps not coincidentally, its political representation in Westminster) changed when it received a lot of the Bristol overspill, so you got a considerable black and Asian influx into what had previously been effectively an all-white community.

Now I'm not saying that there are no differences *at all* in the south-east, but I don't remember Dartford and Maidstone, Brentwood and Chatham, or Southend and Margate, feeling fundamentally different in the same way. Maybe I'm recalling it badly, but I remember the differences being on the surface level (something totally trivial like the design of the trains) rather than something that stuck in my mind.

I think you're right that you have to look harder and harder to find the differences these days - it's just a case of looking behind the saminess of a lot of what you see *instantly*. From your post I get the impression that you'd identify more with the artistic / literary / musical side of Confluence / Common Ground (Well Being, Lutra Lutra, Silver Messenger etc.), the activities that are less specifically rural. I know I find them more *instantly* relevant.

Of course big differences between smallish towns close to each other can still come from particular organisations / movements that are present there. I know you dislike the subculture I use as my example here, but Totnes, for example, has a strong hippy / New Age-type presence which, say, Barnstaple seemingly doesn't have, because of the influence of Dartington Hall: were Dartington just outside Barnstaple I'm sure it'd be the other way round. Likewise the very similar difference between Wells (strong Middle England heritage culture with the cathedral etc.) and Glastonbury (well, enough said).

More importantly, I would want to see more than worthy words from Common Ground. I want to see how they think they can apply pressure so local councils grant planning permission for low cost housing which is distinctive *and* cheap to produce; I want to see them present cases for driving distinctiveness via economic means rather than the kindness of people's hearts. That's the economics of the craft fair.

I'm absolutely not interested in the artistic side as presented on the websites: choral works to celebrate the return of otters to rivers I've never heard of, no thanks. Poems about fields, nein danke. More power to the elbows of anyone who wants to do this stuff, and anyone who enjoys it. It's nothing to do with me or with my life and I'm very happy for that to remain the case.

I admire the rhetoric of encouraging (not enforcing) local distinctiveness, but thus far I've seen no evidence of them employing any effective techniques to make it happen. There's also no evidence of any interest in urban distinctiveness at all, aside from a few cursory mentions of Whitechapel.

The interesting thing is that I sort-of agree with you about Common Ground. I took part in the rehearsals of "Lutra Lutra" for 3 months until, for reasons too long and convoluted to even *attempt* to explain here, I couldn't take part in the final performances. Now while I enjoyed every moment, I found myself wondering exactly what it was going to change, what it was going to do. It was great fun, but in what way did it actually make Wimborne a more distinctive or a more progressive place? None whatsoever. So I'd agree with you that a lot of the artistic activities don't actually change anything, while disagreeing with you on their merits judged by other criteria.

Fundamentally I agree with you that it would take effective, practical *economic* measures to make these things happen, and I would agree with you that, on the surface, Common Ground seems lacking in these things (I think *underneath* they have interesting ideas for bringing these changes about *but* they don't push them to the forefront of their public image as much as they might). Would you be interested if I forwarded your comments to them and asked for some kind of response?

Mark: can you tell me what the other words were? Offlist, if you like. I like the idea of "human goofy culture".

And I only came on here to say that the weather was Still Classic.

Sleet in London by Wednesday! Wahoo!

The effects of the clocks going back...

Fuck Glasgow and its fucking weather. Always blowing a fucking gale or pissing with fucking rain or freezing fucking cold or some combination of all fucking three. I'm fucking sick of it and it's not even fucking November yet.

Pardon my french.

why would anyone like sleet? it's just a colder thicker rain and it will turn the leaves to a mulch resembling liquid shit

classic, because i saw an excellent moonbow tonight. never seen one before, wondered what the fook it was at first.