luka

Well-known member
i remember some business BTEC students at 6th form college organised a trip to Blackpool as part of their course and me and the boys i was hanging about with at the time decided to go for some reason. it was mid-winter and we met about 5am. everyone smoked weed on the coach for the whole trip and when we arrived the winds were too high for the roller coaster to be allowed to run and we had about an hour of daylight left.
 

forclosure

Well-known member
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
booy you're not lying the fact that Brighton hosts alot of festivals during the summer and has a rep of being the UK's gay capital definitly adds to that Blackpool's got nuttin like that unless you count the "grime scene" it had that looked like it was only made up for 4 people (2 of them being kids)
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
one thing about the countryside that people don't talk about very much is that the villages and towns are different from one another. like for example in one village near me kate winslett has a house apparently, 'lovely' little places where most of the houses are a million quid or whatever. my village is nothing like that, loads of (former) council houses, the kids of farmers, trades etc. there's an interesting way that people in these two worlds hardly interact, i met girls that has grew up ten minutes down the road for the first time when I was like 20 coz they're at private schools, they're not going to go to the guides or (for the boys in those days) play for the football team and so on. and you're not going to be at thier riding school.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
so socially speaking like in every geography, there's lots of different things going on at the same time, networks of people sharing the same A roads but not that connected to one another otherwise
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
i can think of a couple of people about my age in the village who had heroin problems, I think, I mean I wasn't mates with them by then but that's what I heard. And then a couple more from a different village I knew from school that I was actually mates with at the time, but again while they were well into drugs when I knew them by the time they got into heroin I didn't know them and to be honest it's hard for me to even imagine it, though it's definitely true.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
drugs in general were massive where I'm from though. I think it was a freak anomoly. even when we were like 16 everyone was high on Fridays at school, well not everyone but it seemed like it. And then from 16 to 18 a load of people I know were properly getting into it, building thier identity around it, I guess I thought it was totally normal, that that was a thing to be into and a route you could go down, and to be honest I still regret a bit that I didn't go down it with them, my brain was way too highly strung to be able to hack it, but a lot of those guys in the end I think has a whole lot of fun, I'm jealous
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
In retrospect though, it does seem like an incredibly bad idea for kids that age to be using ketamine, mdma, acid on the regular. Or at least, now that its denaturalised, and everyone that I'm around would be totally shocked by something like this, it takes me a second to remember that beyond the language of it, how heavy those nouns for those drugs sound to me now, actually a load of people I know seemed to have a great time doing all that
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
drugs unite Britain in various ways, still think small town north is very different to small town south

old victorian coastal resorts have undergone drastic deterioration, some more than others
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
actually that's more or less the reason I stopped hanging out with those guys, they were all getting into that and I was more interested in books. Bit of a fork in the road, actually now that I think about it, it was a bad mushroom trip when I was 17 and then a strange re-living of that trip on some mdma that made me very wary of all that stuff for a long time, never knew which way it was going to go after that
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
er.....yeah so the rural bits of england. one of the other things I think is interesting about that is that culturally speaking, in terms of representation in various media I mean, it flies under the radar. It's like the opposite of being from California. there's no media reflecting your world back at you, no stereotypes, nothing like that. there is the idea of the 'home counties' and in films made by people from London they sometimes go out and visit the contryside, and obviously rural northern england is well represented as well, but the poor bits of the south outside the cities are just totally absent from everything (except Black Mirror interestingly)
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
the other thing as rich has said is that there is basically nothing to do. I'm kind of amazed by how normal it was to go and sit in fields, wander around footpaths, sit at the bus stop. lots of house parties though
 

luka

Well-known member
me and craners friend Fat Jim grew up in a village on the Blackwater Estuary and all his friends from there are dead or gone insane. the death toll is insane. much safer to raise you kids in the city. the boredom just corrodes the soul. although one interesting thing he said is theres no generation gap in the village. if youre a freak there's so few of you you have to band together so youre 14 smoking hash and listening to Faust in the home of some 60 year who grows cannabis and lives alone with a cat
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
speaking about villages specifically, to me they always feel like the aftermath of something, they feel like places that have been retrofit, all the pubs turned into houses, double or triple the number of cars there used to be, one thing being converted to a new purpose (specificly a new economic structure)
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
I don't think these are particularly nihilistic places to be honest. It's just a load of people getting on with things. Depressing places probably, in the winter anyway.
 

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
Bit of a con that the lyrics don't even mention Uffington though, there must be thousands if not millions of people who listen to that cos they want to hear a song about Uffington and then it turns out to not even be about Uffington at all, it's basically fake news.
I think maybe I will get a tattoo of the Uffington white horse on my shoulder, show some pride in where I came from.

1431736113455-whh-yq3w2924-nt-commission-air.jpg
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
It’s why Jez Butterworth is a cunt. He doesn’t get close enough to the darkness lurking about this island, its coves and folds in forgotten maps. Not by a long way

Away days at football where it got surprisingly tasty - Chester, Peterborough, Plymouth, Gillingham
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
one thing about the countryside that people don't talk about very much is that the villages and towns are different from one another. like for example in one village near me kate winslett has a house apparently, 'lovely' little places where most of the houses are a million quid or whatever. my village is nothing like that, loads of (former) council houses, the kids of farmers, trades etc. there's an interesting way that people in these two worlds hardly interact, i met girls that has grew up ten minutes down the road for the first time when I was like 20 coz they're at private schools, they're not going to go to the guides or (for the boys in those days) play for the football team and so on. and you're not going to be at thier riding school.
Yeah this is true. In the street where I lived there were some other kids but they went to Abingdon Boys (where Radiohead formed) or one of about three other private options so I didn't really interact with them that much apart from one boy who lived pretty much next door to me.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
In retrospect though, it does seem like an incredibly bad idea for kids that age to be using ketamine, mdma, acid on the regular. Or at least, now that its denaturalised, and everyone that I'm around would be totally shocked by something like this, it takes me a second to remember that beyond the language of it, how heavy those nouns for those drugs sound to me now, actually a load of people I know seemed to have a great time doing all that
But I got a friend in Lisbon who went to a public school in Dulwich or something and the stories he had were horrendous compared to the boredom of my childhood. They had a mate whose parents split up and then the family had no money so he had to go to a different school and basically his mum was a junkie and she would let all the kids go round their house and use the living room as a drug den - loads of kids boshing alcohol, speed, mdma etc - while she got bombed in her own way upstairs, as long as every now and again she could come downstairs and demand money and they would all chuck her a pound or two and then she would go out and score.

The worst story was when they invited this girl form a school that was twinned with theirs and then they cut out a line of washing powder and told her it was MDMA or something, tricked her into snorting it.... they were lucky she didn't die.
 
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