forclosure

Well-known member
alright so i feel like some variation of this conversation has been a long time coming but i wanna hear from everybody in here who grew up in some kind of small town village or whatever, i want to hear about growing up in the experiences you've had and what you feel might be different now.

Especially with trump and the eu refferendum there's been more of this focus since then on "forgotten people" well forgotten white people the jobs that aren't there the kids who have fuck all to do but listening to middling indie bands/pop punk and shoot up skag and drink scrumpy jack in the park the anger they have at city dwellers like myself who feel like their constantly condescended to(and like wise some of the people who did a full 180 and bought into the rhetoric put out by reactionary forces), people leaving from those towns to gentrify cities and then look back in horror when their towns vote conservative. Kids putting their energy into stuff like donk or trying to be Aitch cause if not they'd be doing home invations i want to get deep inna dis.

and like i've brought up before the fact that no matter how bad it gets. I want to hear about all of it because as a black man living in London the english suburbs may aswell be Mars for all i fucking care cause things that were taken deeply seriously there i looked at as cornball shit (e.g. Marilyn Manson) @shakahislop 's little story in the dancehall thread about why Jamrock is better than rural Berkshire inspired this and i want to understand why this shame why this embarassment, the fact that there's no middle ground between either burying it 20 feet deep or looking like a charicature of some small town oik.
 

forclosure

Well-known member
There's a person i talk to from time to time who lives in Leak and the only notable thing about that place is Anna Watkins who won the gold in Rowing and William Morris are from there.

Straw Dogs is a very flawed movie imo but i think it definitly captured that kind of passive aggresive distrust that people from them parts of the UK have to outsiders that sometimes flairs into this sort of underhanded seething aggresion spraypainting "go home" on peoples doors who just moved in which i have to wonder if that's still a thing since as a result of housing prices in London,African families are moving into parts of Essex and the like.
 

forclosure

Well-known member
it dawned on me when i decided to go fuck it and listen to this album imo it's bad and the songs come off like more digestible versions of songs made by death metal bands in the 90s like Suffocation with laughable attempts from Cory Taylor at doing a "rapping" style cadence, but if i grew up in a small town and had no friends who had access to "cool music" petrified and determined to get out of this place i call home cause i don't wanna live my entire existence in it? fuck yeah i'd hold this thing close to my heart
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
shoot up skag and drink scrumpy jack in the park the anger they have at city dwellers like myself
Small town (actually small village) is very much me... but, this is what I think makes it particularly boring in places like this in the UK, there are no drugs as far as I know. I can't really be saying "I wish Uffington had had a heroin problem" but there is just... nothing. If you've ever seen This Country, that is exactly like where I grew up, right down to the Swindon tops. Primary school with fewer than a hundred kids, no secondary school, highlight of the week when I reached about sixteen was waiting for the chip van to come round of a Friday. Quite literally, that was it. It would drive round and stop at various places and you would walk to where it stopped first and then go...No, I'm gonna hold off, ration out this bit of excitement so it lasts as long as possible, and then you would walk off and meet it again at a later part of the route.

Yeah, it was a pretty place to walk round (on the whole), the white horse hill was nearby and there were some nice old houses and stuff. If you have a car or access to a car then it's doable, I can understand why people might retire there, buy a nice thatched country cottage with a big garden and so on, as long as they had the ability to go to other nearby villages and towns for pub dinners, Shrivenham for a curry, maybe Oxford for the theatre, a weekly shop in Swindon and so on. But when you're young and you don't have that or the money for a taxi to get to those places you are stuck. OK I was lucky to have understanding parents who would pick me up if i stayed in Wantage after school or take me to play football on a Saturday or Sunday, but without that your world quickly shrinks to a 2 mile by 2 mile square with nothing in it except for a few nice things to look at and which you have seen so often by the time you're five years old that you very quickly stop noticing them. Arguably you could make a case saying that if your parents do choose (I'm speaking specifically of those who chose to live there) for you to grow up there then they owe it to you to give you the lifts to the activities that make life bearable... but of course not everyone sees things that way.
 

forclosure

Well-known member
yeah your description living sounds more realisitic than the cartoonishly bleak pieces i somethings saw in the guardian when i bothered to read it.

i only know of Uffington cause of a Half Man half biscuit song (Uffingtion Wassail) and i only bring up the skag stuff cause that's what a friend from Wales said his experience growing up there was partially that also from the stories i hear about american rust belt places that's a thing that get's brought up every family member on drugs be they prescription or illegal and all the kids in the area can think of 4-5 friends that died from OD on fentynl poisoning or one of them's just still waisting away on smack
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
I grew up in a small town and one of the strange things about it, in hindsight, was that no one really cared or thought about where they lived. I live in Yorkshire now and pretty much everyone is like this stereotypical proud Yorkshire person who thinks it's god's own county etc etc. And before that when I lived in London theres a pretty strong sense of pride, or at least attachment, to the city, or the particular bit of the city where you live. Likewise Liverpool. Wales and Scotland have a lot of that too

But there's large swathes of small town England where it's a very transactional relationship to where you live. It's just where you do your shopping and go to work, but there's no sense of it being part of your identity or even being particularly interested in it.

This is all sounding a bit like a Prospect magazine article about how we need a New Progressive Patriotism. But I don't mean that exactly...more that it does odd things to the psyche to feel an indifference to where you live. To see it just as place to "access" services and shops. Not even caring enough about it to hate it.

Thats what growing up in a small town was like for me
 

luka

Well-known member
youre right about welsh skagheads. i dont know anyone from London who has even tried heroin but Craner lost half his friendship group to it. All dead.
 

wild greens

Well-known member
I've gone the other way, in cities all my life and now we're out in the sticks for the first time really. Haven't been out here long enough to really understand it yet tbh. Some of the pubs are really weird.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
yeah your description living sounds more realisitic than the cartoonishly bleak pieces i somethings saw in the guardian when i bothered to read it.

I suppose there are many places that are much bleaker than Uffington. I don't want to be too down on it. Like I said, there are lots of picturesque villages nearby and some of them have great gastropubs and stuff. If you have wheels to access that and you have a beautiful and comfy house plus a lot of friends in the village too then I could see how you might build yourself a nice life. If you have no car - which was more common than you might think if I remember correctly - then you are pretty much trapped in town apart from the extremely infrequent and slow bus service BUT the fact that it is at least green and attractive probably does make that easier to deal with than if it was an unremittingly ugly purgatory made up of grey pebble-dashed boxes with their greyness further brought out by the constant drizzle and chilling winds of a Welsh summer.

i only know of Uffington cause of a Half Man half biscuit song (Uffingtion Wassail) and i only bring up the skag stuff cause that's what a friend from Wales said his experience growing up there was partially that also from the stories i hear about american rust belt places that's a thing that get's brought up every family member on drugs be they prescription or illegal and all the kids in the area can think of 4-5 friends that died from OD on fentynl poisoning or one of them's just still waisting away on smack

I don't know that song. What's a wassail? I think it's like a celebratory piss-up isn't it?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
This is all sounding a bit like a Prospect magazine article about how we need a New Progressive Patriotism. But I don't mean that exactly...more that it does odd things to the psyche to feel an indifference to where you live. To see it just as place to "access" services and shops. Not even caring enough about it to hate it.
Interesting point. Not something I have ever really thought about properly but now you say it there wasn't really that pride of place that you might have expected. Never saw anyone with a white horse or the like tattooed on their shoudler.
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
youre right about welsh skagheads. i dont know anyone from London who has even tried heroin but Craner lost half his friendship group to it. All dead.
Heroin was sort of big where I grew up as well. As in, everyone knew someone who was on smack, not like everyone was doing it. But it was kinda present in the life of the place in a way that wasn't true at all in London.

But in other ways it was much less obvious than in London. Like there were no junkies on the street begging for cash. I don't know how they afforded it actually. There's only a few shops so it's not like shoplifting is a viable long term option
 

forclosure

Well-known member
I grew up in a small town and one of the strange things about it, in hindsight, was that no one really cared or thought about where they lived. I live in Yorkshire now and pretty much everyone is like this stereotypical proud Yorkshire person who thinks it's god's own county etc etc. And before that when I lived in London theres a pretty strong sense of pride, or at least attachment, to the city, or the particular bit of the city where you live. Likewise Liverpool. Wales and Scotland have a lot of that too

But there's large swathes of small town England where it's a very transactional relationship to where you live. It's just where you do your shopping and go to work, but there's no sense of it being part of your identity or even being particularly interested in it.

This is all sounding a bit like a Prospect magazine article about how we need a New Progressive Patriotism. But I don't mean that exactly...more that it does odd things to the psyche to feel an indifference to where you live. To see it just as place to "access" services and shops. Not even caring enough about it to hate it.

Thats what growing up in a small town was like for me
reading this makes think about what living in Blackpool and Brighton must do to the psyche, always being near to the beach and the fun fairs that are these stop gap places that used to be associated with fun" the beaches especially only time you really get some sense of how bustling those places were is in old archive footage of post WW2 Britian
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Shoplifting only gets you so far, dealing and fencing were far more profitable. When hydroponics kicked in, easy pickings. You could rob a grow just as long as it wasn’t a face, clear about 4grand by selling it on elsewhere, split it and get a few ounces of raw in. 3-4 grows a year picked off is a decent living if all you want to do is bump H

Heroin has been endemic across Britain for decades, although fentanyl isn’t doing anyone any favours, Scotland particularly
 

forclosure

Well-known member
I suppose there are many places that are much bleaker than Uffington. I don't want to be too down on it. Like I said, there are lots of picturesque villages nearby and some of them have great gastropubs and stuff. If you have wheels to access that and you have a beautiful and comfy house plus a lot of friends in the village too then I could see how you might build yourself a nice life. If you have no car - which was more common than you might think if I remember correctly - then you are pretty much trapped in town apart from the extremely infrequent and slow bus service BUT the fact that it is at least green and attractive probably does make that easier to deal with than if it was an unremittingly ugly purgatory made up of grey pebble-dashed boxes with their greyness further brought out by the constant drizzle and chilling winds of a Welsh summer.



I don't know that song. What's a wassail? I think it's like a celebratory piss-up isn't it?
yeah as far as i know its to do with either going door to door singing carols and offering drinks of hot mulled cider in exchange for gifts or going to orchards in parts of England that produce cider

here's the song @IdleRich i've learnt alot about small town Britian by way of HMHB songs now that i think about it
 

forclosure

Well-known member
i just remember the unfunny cunt who did that Unknown P freestyle that Americans love to post saying "This is what all British rappers soundlike" i found out a while back grew up in some tiny village that has a population of 153 that's 4 miles Southeast of Norwich

Once i found that out it explained EVERYTHING to me why i've found that breh as funny as cot death
 

wild greens

Well-known member
reading this makes think about what living in Blackpool and Brighton must do to the psyche, always being near to the beach and the fun fairs that are these stop gap places that used to be associated with fun" the beaches especially only time you really get some sense of how bustling those places were is in old archive footage of post WW2 Britian

Brighton is hugely more affluent than Blackpool, makes a big big difference. Many years ago we had a job on in late January and it was like Silent Hill or Deadly Premonition etc

The blackpool illumination switch on is a big deal though which is probably a big indicator of how repressed the area is, the amount of booze flying around that week is mad
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
yeah as far as i know its to do with either going door to door singing carols and offering drinks of hot mulled cider in exchange for gifts or going to orchards in parts of England that produce cider

here's the song @IdleRich i've learnt alot about small town Britian by way of HMHB songs now that i think about it
Nice one. I will check it out. I always thought Trouble Over Bridgewater was a great name for an album but I never got round to listening to it.
 
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