Real England

where is it and what does it look like

Raymond Williams says somewhere that most people who live in it live in quite small towns, but there is next to no significant literature about same.

Of course he was writing before Midsomer Murders aired.

http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/64476/dscf1947scrsfr.jpg

^^^wiltshire apparently (i'm not sure i know where wiltshire actually is) < /the lex >

i don't know how the demographics break down now but i wd say that a significant majority at least want to live in quite small towns. also i suspect quite small towns are increasingly really dissipated cities.

Anyone bothered with Paul Kingsnorth's book on this very subject?

but y'knaa this whole problematic word "Real" - is this intended sarcastically, like is this thread about "what are the sort of people who use the phrase 'Real England' talking about?" or are we positing a defining core of Englishness that has history and still survives however tenuous?

i think it would be facetious to pretend the issue can be approached entirely unfacetiously

i was not aware of paul kingsnorth but now i see he has written a book called real england colon something else, i would guess it isn't the only book/treatise/pamphlet with similar title

work filter has thoughtfully blocked access to my first google search result, some blog with the delightfully making-me-want-to-stab-the-author subtitle "The Battle Against the Bland". i assure you guys if there is a Real England it is not battling against The Bland and that is an excellent virtue in itself.

oh right, that is the subtitle of Kingsnorth's book. okay then i will probably never read it since i infer from the book's post-colonage that the guy is a big douche.

the usual English attention to the wrong details

and some sadness for stuff passing that has not passed or was not what he claims it was before it passed

is john terry 'real england' dyou suppose

i infer from the book's post-colonage that the guy is a big douche.

― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 13:24 (1 minute ago)

h but f, nv, h but f

basically i was looking at the squad list for peterbrough town and noticed ryan tunnicliffe and lee frecklington and thought maybe those names were shibboleths that uttered in a certain way might usher you into the innermost real england

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01185/arts-graphics-2008_1185572a.jpg

the city hobgoblin as a good place to start! (of course he said british not english, right, re the wrong detail)

"... heir to an immense fortune, gifted by nature with a mind susceptible of noble cultivation, and a body endowed with admirable physical powers with the wretched drunkard who died in a gaol at the age of thirty-eight, a worn-out debauchee and drivelling sot... " <-- i am this very second ensconced in the village that surnamed this regency rake, tho he mainly lived on the other side of shrewsbury

nigel farage isn't real btw, he speaks for only his own constituency, which is seldom more than symbolic

is there a real england that is incapable of any sort of assimilation into colonned literature? a planar england that resists signification or commodification by interlopers from other englands

south dublin iirc

leatherhead is a promotory over a large and brackish inland sea that is never spoken of

beneath the leylines, the true underground

"Winter, 1981: the headless, skinned bodies of two bears are found by the River Lea."

real england is all mates and and blood sausage and big bottomed birds reading thew newsie-wewsies

nah it's hedgerows and birds and complete lack of public services

Oh it's all about the public services nowadays; a bus to take you into town so you can spend all night trawling the happy hour bars, a streetcleaner to mop up your vomit from the pavement, a policeman to give you a place to spend the night. No-one needed public services when an evening's entertainment consisted of watching the sun set over a russet autumnal hedgerow, lulled into a reverie by the carefree birdsong.

http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/UckFrisbyPiltdown03.jpg

"Searching for the Putdown Man"

is there a real england that is incapable of any sort of assimilation into colonned literature? a planar england that resists signification or commodification by interlopers from other englands

Interesting question which I wish I could answer.

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

In that case, Josh, you would 100% definitely have walked past our front door! Hope you paid a visit to Blind Jacks pub in the market square; it’s our local, and basically the best pub in the world.

Is that where you live, Knaresborough? Next time I'll do better planning for a meet up (if anyone wanted it, lol).

Doing the public art trail on the Leeds campus. Some really thoughtful pieces.

Yep, we live in the middle of Kboro, very close to the train station; the back of our house overlooks the viaduct, waterside and castle.

beautiful

Ah no - the Tetley is no longer an art gallery! Sorry, should have made that clearer.

Brazilian judge goes full Real England:

Police in the Brazilian state of São Paulo have uncovered that a judge spent 23 years working under a false identity – and a distinctly British one.

Born José Eduardo Franco dos Reis – a name fairly typical in a country once colonised by Portugal – he entered law school and served for over two decades as a judge using the false name Edward Albert Lancelot Dodd Canterbury Caterham Wickfield.

I'm sorry but this is a fucking travesty, revolutions have happened for less

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/apr/24/taking-the-biscuit-for-100-years-weve-been-eating-chocolate-digestives-all-wrong

Whether dunking, nibbling or munching a chocolate digestive, it seems common sense to keep the biscuity side down.

But we are getting it all wrong, according to Anthony Coulson, general manager of the McVitie’s factory in Stockport, Greater Manchester.

He insists that the chocolate should be on the bottom and the biscuit on top.

what

[...] even for factory boss Coulson, old habits die hard.

“I still do [eat it chocolate side up] if I’m totally honest,” he admitted.

this is so 5 live/Stephen Graham/fucking outright bullshit by horrible folks. It makes me want to dip my head, facey side down - into a bucket of sulphuric acid.

I'm sure I've heard them come out with this bullshit before, guess the marketing team don't have a lot of ideas

It kind of ignores the visual stimulus of the chocolate vs. the biscuit side.

chcocolate was put on the top to placate trypophobes

why do biscuits have holes in them anyway?

Something to do with the baking process I imagine.

Biscuits are just so fucking unhealthy and unpleasurable to eat - there is just no win with them.

like a chocolate bar - yes. An unhealthy treat. Biscuits are trash!

It seems to be a rerun of this story from 2020, and in turn this story from 2014. In each case a McVitie's spokesperson points out that the biscuits are made with the chocolate side down. And yet when I take them out of the packet and turn them over so that the chocolate is on top they are always chocolate-side-up. What's up with that.

The latest orbit appears to have been produced by a journalism trainee who was presumably asked to come up with something lightweight to appeal to stupid white people and old people. A bit of googling suggests that the story is a side-effect of Twitter. No-one seems to have cared about the orientation of biscuits pre-Twitter. Although I did find this bizarre story in which Penguin decided to nix a pack design post-9/11 because it had "a picture of a (giant]) penguin at the Empire State building with two planes in the distance, mimicking the film King Kong". Sadly not the Dino De Laurentiis version of King Kong, where Kong ends up being shot by helicopter gunships and there's blood everything and he ends up looking like an overripe peach but with blood instead of peach. That was awesome.

It reminds me of the quote craze unquote for Dubai Chocolate. Why is there a craze for Dubai Chocolate? The answer is that there isn't. It's a fictional craze based on planted stories, an example of the media creating a big lie and writing about it like something from Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.

I actually got into an argument with family members on the chocolate-side-up subject a few years ago, it's a real thing! I was stunned.

xp in other words, a confection

I made this very observation myself in the "things you were shockingly old when you learned" thread a couple of years back. I'm firmly chocolate side down:

Things you were shockingly old when you learned

which side of the toilet roll do you wipe the old arsehole with?


my passion in life is earnestly engaging with virtual marketing campaigns and this one was alltime

I use the bottom side

you set 'em up, etc.

I use the bottom chocolate side

Ah yes, the biscuit-munching whites xposts

VE celebration posters are up. has this ever been a thing before? with street parties and 2 hours extra pub time. it's what they would've wanted.

people actually involved in the war would be 95+ now.

People who talk as if they were involved in the war 55+

2020 was curtailed by COVID but I think people were encouraged to have street parties in 2015. I don’t really recall it being a thing before then, other than the 50th anniversary, I guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VE_Day_70:_A_Party_to_Remember (2015)

just heard a BBC newsreader without a trace of irony refer to May 9 as "a huge propaganda day" in Russia because obv that's totally different to opening the pubs for an hour

might be a good day to dress up like a jackbooted 40's Soviet commissar

Now, eight decades on, neighbours are being invited by Brent Council to apply for their street to be closed to traffic to hold a VE Day party with that famous British wartime spirit.

The council is waiving the usual fee for road closures as a patriotic gesture.

lol, these sanctimonious wankers are enough to turn anyone into lord haw haw

when you compare pics of 40's street parties with ones from the last decade, there seems a significant increase in crowd size and much more unrestrained cuntishness in the latter ones - that post-covid conga one is so vile. Probably plenty of wankers in the 40's as well, but at least these flag waving fuckwits weren't cosplaying as ppl from the Napoleonic era!

I mean of course ppl would celebrate that the war was OVER ffs although I’m sure it would have been a quite complicated feeling for many… the “wartime spirit” otoh was quite likely feeling miserable and furious at the shitty govt which does seem right for the moment yeah, less of this triumphalist flag fucking thon

I actually meant to write thon, educate yourselves on nb pronouns please and thanks

yeah, there was absolute widespread hatred for the government. And the only openly fascist candidate was banged up. In our timeline, things sure done got worse.

The queen was fucking booed!

(xp) More Churchill than the actual goverment tbf.

well yeah not all the wartime govt was hated obv

this was an era when Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London. Was absolutely touched, almost to tears to see a crowd of working class folk on the tube singing The Internationale to him when someone spotted who he was. I love shit like that, even taking into account of what a terrible genocidaire uncle Soso was!

Uh oh

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/ve-day-80-a-celebration-to-remember-live-from-horse-guards-parade

Stage design really not at all fascist I don't know why you'd say that

Toploader!

Joan Collins! Larry Lamb! er, The Darkness!

Stage design somehow reminds me of a Japanese samurai helmet

Now, eight decades on, neighbours are being invited by Brent Council to apply for their street to be closed to traffic to hold a VE Day party with that famous British wartime spirit.
The council is waiving the usual fee for road closures as a patriotic gesture.

lol, these sanctimonious wankers are enough to turn anyone into lord haw haw

― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Tuesday, April 29, 2025 3:11 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Given this is Brent I encourage any local residents to apply to close the north circular for a street party.

i looked closer at the local VE street party posters and they feature a union flag on the left side and this silhouette at the bottom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Flag_on_Iwo_Jima

Curiously the only VE sign I've seen recently was on a noticeboard in a field, which gave it a sinister air because I associate that kind of noticeboard with the Handford Parish Council, and angry old people rubbing their hands with glee - just like Mr Burns from The Simpsons - as they refuse permission for kids to have a skate park.

Apparently Jackie Weaver did not have authority. And yet she did, because she had total control over the streaming app. She controlled the present, and by extension the past, and by extension the future. That's a good example of the difference between de facto and de jure power.

On a tangent I've always wanted to visit Flensburg, just so I can say that I've visited Flensburg. After VE day what remained of the German government moved to a schoolhall and barracks in Flensburg, where they essentially pretended to be the official German government for about a fortnight, with Karl Donitz in charge, as per the Mitchell and Webb sketch. They botched everything, failed to project authority, and after a fortnight the British sent a bunch of soldiers to arrest them, so the thousand-year Reich ended up like the pirate at the end of Captain Phillips.

But unsurprisingly Flensburg is out of the way - nestled up against the border with Denmark, because there weren't many parts of Germany left under Germany control circa 1945.

https://www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/news/25115144.fears-chippenham-kebab-van-make-roundabout-f1-track/

In the physical edition, the headline was KEBAB VAN PLAN SLAMMED which demands to be said allowed.

Aloud. Aloud!

Something about the phrase "probably the busiest roundabout in Chippenham" is quintessentially English. The mention of roundabouts. The unwillingness to be definitive. Chippenham.

Chippenham has a gyratory, which is right slap-bang in the middle of the place when you look at it on Google Maps. It's a kind of large oval roundabout with traffic lights and multiple lanes designed to confuse outsiders and make people fail their driving test. It has lanes that appear from nowhere. It even has a small car park inside it, which must be a nightmare to get out of.

The mention of biscuits got me to thinking. Yorkshire Tea has branched out. They used to sell tea. Then they sold hard water tea. Now they have a full range, including biscuit-flavoured tea. I tried it and hated it. Why? It dawned on me. The reason. The biscuit is supposed to taste like tea. Not the other way around. The tea isn't supposed to taste like the biscuit. That means that the biscuit has broken up in the tea. Which is wrong.

Ever since they stopped making my beloved Jam & Toast Tea, everyone's been urging me to try that but I'm not sure I'll like it.