#To show that not all British accents are posh south england accents

[britishaccentcharacterpoll]

Ok imma be real it's getting to the point where I hope Demoman goes out (I love him) just so I never have to read another tag comment about how he's not British ever again

[c3stlav1e]

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥   basics 

♡ .  stage name: anya

♡ .  birth name: na eunhye

♡ .  birthday: july 28, 1996

♡ .  zodiac: leo

♡ .  birthplace: seoul, south korea

♡ .  ethnicity: korean

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥   personal

♡ . personality

anya genuinely has good intentions 90% of the time, her biggest problem is getting them across correctly after leading such a spoiled life. she is exceptionally generous, never knowing to want for anything herself, she never allows those closest to her to want for anything either. however, this can sometimes get under people's skin when they view it as pity or think that she sees them as a charity case (which, honestly, she does sometimes). she is very straightforward, saying what she means and meaning what she says. she is also the first to defend her own character or that of her friends should anyone try and start something with her or someone she cares about. she is never afraid to ask for something she wants and will absolutely advocate for others should they need her confidence. simultaneously, she is never one to accept a “no” easily, and is exceptionally good at using charms or logic to negotiate out of any rejection. she makes a great hype woman because she tends to be incredibly objective, but if she doesn’t think something is working, she will try her best to offer solutions for improvement. she can be a bit of a try hard sometimes, but she really just takes her passions seriously, whether it be her career, talents, or relationships.

♡ . family

. sim sunyoung “ shannon “ ; mother

. na junghoon “ gordon “ ; father

. na eunsung “ sebastian “ ; brother

. hong soonhee ; grandmother

♡ . physical

. height: 163 cm ( 5’4” )

. faceclaim: im nayeon

. body mods: single lobe piercings, a tiny tattoo of a butterfly on her hip

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥   professional

♡ . label: rainbow entertainment

♡ . training period: 9 months

♡ . group position: lead vocalist

♡ . idol persona

anya is the princess of kpop, truly. she is rich, beautiful, talented, and charming, someone who is hard to outmatch in the public arena. she is the most popular member of the group, never failing to make waves with a simple instagram post. she is constantly in some deal or campaign with luxury brands, however her ambassadorship with yves saint laurent is currently her longest running and arguably most iconic. she is also widely known for having several high profile dating scandals, from exo’s kai to jean arnault. her princess role is consistent within the group, however it is more of a lighthearted joke with her members and fans than how seriously the press and the public tend to take it. she attended private school in england for her entire education, so her english speaking voice has a very posh british accent that most fans adore, however it adds to the whole princess bit. her members love to poke fun at her by copying her accent or certain words she uses, but it is always in good fun. she is not one to get her hands dirty if she can help it, and she often catches teasing for that as well. in games and challenges they do on variety shows, she will go all in for puzzles or mental battles but as soon as it’s something physical, the rest of her members do not want her on their team.

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥   history

na eunhye is the eldest daughter to the youngest son of a powerful chaebol family. she was never very close to her immediate family, her father largely absent, her mother far too overbearing, and her little brother off in his own world, especially during the school year she spent off in england at school. but the one person in her family she worshipped more than anything was always her grandmother. her father’s mother, hong soonhee, was the matriarch of the family and lived in a huge mansion in the mountains outside seoul, where anya spent her summers more often than not. being the youngest girl of the family, she was always soonhee’s favorite. when she had her grandmother in her corner, anya never even need ask for anything she wanted.

her mother, who honestly married into the family for he connection to the money, was almost jealous of the relationship she had with soonhee. anya’s grandmother never liked her mother and had a knack for disagreeing with her on most things. when anya announced that she decided she wanted to pursue singing, her mother was absolutely against it. although she had taken ballet and piano lessons all her life, and had a rather beautiful voice, her mother believed it to be a very improper profession and entirely useless in life. but her grandmother loved to hear her sing, constantly asking her to give her little concerts every time she visited her house. although she wouldn’t normally agree with the idol life as a career, she simply wanted her favorite granddaughter to be happy and if performing did that, then she would back it 100%. especially if her mother was particularly against it.

she was accepted into both sm and yg entertainment, and was struggling to pick between the two when the small, newly rebuilt rainbow entertainment offered her a spot in their newest lineup that was set to debut in less than a year. her grandmother was hesitant, knowing that sm and yg would both provide the best shot at fame for her granddaughter, but anya knew she could train for years and years at those companies and never debut. she wanted her shot at fame as quick as possible, and took the leap with rbe. it was hard getting along with the other girls at first, some trainees treating her as if she had bought her way into the lineup, but going through the trials and tribulations of debut together brought them all that much closer.

[weirdly-specific-but-ok]

I put this in the replies but I want to be sure about the Southern part, considering that my source the pansy part is Drarry fanfiction. The Southern part I figured out making some assumptions from my knowledge of the UK:

Some people aren't understanding the Southern = posh part which is completely valid confusion for all of us outside the UK. If I'm not wrong, this is because in the UK, or more specifically in England, southern accents tend to be closer to the Queen's English/Received Pronunciation (RP). If you're not sure what that is, listen to Emma Watson talk, her speech is close to RP. Logically, this accent would tend to be associated with the nobility/royalty/'posh upper class folks' in general.

Moving north, the accents tend to become what is typically called 'broader', and this is associated with a more rustic/rural/farming life. Think about the Yorkshire dialect, for example. If you're looking at the entire UK, you could compare RP with, in Scotland, the typical Scottish accent for English (I'm not including other languages here, such as Scottish Gaelic, because I don't know enough about them).

Of course I'm sure this is a gross generalisation, simply because of the way accents work. Not only is there no single 'British accent', even within London, moving from area to area will give you widely different accents. The song 'Why Can't the English Learn to Speak' from My Fair Lady (1964) captures this, while also showing the snobbery within the language, where accents and dialects deviating from RP are called 'bad English', rather than acknowledging them as individual and valid evolutions of the language. Thus the divide is, at its core, between the 'working class' and the 'upper class', rather than just 'north' and 'south'. [Edit: Also between rural and urban areas, and due to the history of England and Scotland, and a lot of other things]. Language has a long and bloody history.

Anyway, so yes, I hope that was mostly correct, I'd be delighted if someone pointed out any mistakes I may have made, since English is my first language but I'm not from the UK.

actually i wasn't sure what he meant by /southern/ pansy specifically. he's an angel wouldt he have said northern pansy?

HA, that would have been a good twist actually, but it’s specifically an English expression, southern pansy meaning “posh English homosexual” because the English southern accent is stereotyped as being the posh accent, which Aziraphale definitely talks that way.

[ellrond]

I know others have said it, but there is something so lazy about the accents in Rings of Power.

Harfoots and Irish accents: they're wild travelers, they don't have infrastructure, they are widely uneducated, they're insular and vulnerable, they're visibly dirty, they're primitive. These are all harmful stereotypes that were prevalent in Great Britain in the 19-20th centurties about the Irish. Anti-Irish Traveller sentiment is still widespread and almost completely accepted openly in British society.

Men in the Southlands and northern English accents: dirty, hostile, primitive, descendants of those who allied with evil, and they have strained relations with the elves who are self-appointed 'watchers of peace' and act as a military presence. For hundreds of years in England, there has been tensions and unrest between the north and central government and the ruling class. Propaganda against these tensions has always been in favour of the ruling class (or Westminster, or the south, or London, or the government, whatever you want to say) and is seen as recently as August 2022 with the RMT strikes. While this propaganda is not exclusive to the north, as this is a nationwide issue, you just need to look back at the Miners' Strikes in the 1980s to see how effective this was. The north is disproportionately affected by government cuts, and remains the most economically deprived region in England, hence a more prominent working class. This is why northern accents are more commonly associated with the working class. Popular media, classic media, history, politics, will all attempt to write the working classes as dirty and hostile and primitive in England. There have always been hostilities between them and the 'benevolent' police or army or lords of the land who are only there for the working classes' 'own good'. Do you see the problem?

White Eldar: the Eldar (high elves) are all white and all have 'posh' English accents. This is an incredibly lazy trope that is weaponized to ensure the middle and upper classes in England are seen as responsible and benevolent and righteous and more intelligent and Good. They're also all white. They are the only race without diversity in skin-tone. Silvan elves, dwarves, humans, Harfoots, all have diversity in skin tone. It does not seem accidental that the 'wisest and fairest' are exclusively white.

PoC Silvan elf: the only PoC elf is a Silvan elf, a 'lowly' race of elves who never saw the light of Valinor, who are 'more wild, less wise'. This fits into the racist narrative that people of colour are more instinct-driven, less rational, less educated, and lowlier than whites.

Dwarves with Scottish accents: dwarves are shown to be impolite, hostile to outsiders, inelegant, and insular. These are stereotypes perpetuated by the English to dehumanise Scottish people and culture. There is an enormous amount of propaganda that aims to 'prove' Scotland is incapable of self-governance in order to undermine the push for independence, and the aforementioned is often what can be found by reading between the lines.

It's great that Amazon has hired a diverse cast, but it has slipped into lazy and harmful tropes in its writing. It's great that they are defending their cast against racist attacks, but they are only perpetuating classist and racist and xenophobic stereotypes in the show itself.

Antisemitism and dwarves is a whole other issue that has been much more clearly articulated by those more informed than I.

[gelfbog]

headcanons for the gelfling clans accents !!

As someone who is really interested in languages and linguistics, one thing I always wish AOR did was give all the clans different accents. So, I decided I would do it myself! I’ve basically been researching different (mainland) UK accents and I’ve put an accent to each clan. This is based a lot on my own headcanons, but I’ve taken into account different information we’ve gotten about gelfling accents and languages, as well as the geographical placing of the clan’s settlements, and their clans status and culture. I’ve linked videos with each clan to give you an auditory idea of what I think they would sound like. All under the cut!!

(!! disclaimer !! : I am Irish, not from the UK, so I’m sorry if my description of/videos I have chosen to display any of the accents are inaccurate. I’ve tried my best not to generalize with the accents too much, but I know that a lot of accents change from town to town, so unfortunately I have given just a broad umbrella description of some accents. I’m sorry if I get anything wrong!!!)

Vapra - Queen’s English/Received Pronunciation

I think the Vapra are the only clan to have been canonically distinguished as having a particular accent, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s mentioned a lot in the books about how the Vapra have a very distinct accent, SkekSa even noticing Tae speaking with one, when she was taken over by Tavra. Their accent is “distinct and noticeable” according to the Songs of the Seven Gelfling Clans, and is similar to the Skeksis accent. I think that maybe the normal gelfling of Ha’rar speak with a type of Received Pronunciation, whereas the aristocrats, and the Royal family themselves, would speak Queen’s English. It would make sense that the Vapra would speak in Received Pronunciation, an accent associated with privilege and education, as they are known for.....well, privilege and education. Each word is articulated very clearly, and it is a sharp, almost cold accent - which suits their climate nicely. It is often thought as the “proper” way to speak, and those gelfling who speak with this accent automatically present themselves as a higher class, although other clans may just associate the accent with snobby-ness. Naturally, the Vapra coming from the capital city of Ha’rar, the seat of the All- Maudra, I think Queen’s English is very fitting.

Here are some videos of people speaking Queen’s English/Received Pronunciation!

Old RP

Received Pronunciation (RP)

R.P. ACCENT (REAL EXAMPLE)

Received Pronunciation Dialect Breakdown

Upper-class Accent Examples

Stonewood - Brummy (Birmingham Accent)

I was between Cockney and Brummy for the Stonewood, as I think both accents suit the wood-dwelling clan. However, I think Brummie is better suited, as Birmingham is is situated in the central midlands of England - like how Stone-in-the-wood is “the hearth of the Skarith Land”. The Brummy accent is quite nasally, due to the amount of industry that used to be in the city. Industry is something the Stonewood are known for, with their weapons, tools and instruments their blacksmiths create being well-renowned and sought after across Thra. The accent is sort-of a mix of a southern and northern English accent, which I think this suits the Stonewood well, in terms of their clan status. As much as they are a rough, warrior and battle focused clan, they are of a very high standing, second to only the Vapra. Therefore, the mix comes from Vapra/Skeksis influence, and then their own woodland charm. Although other clans may see the Stonewood accent as brash and arrogant, the warrior clan is proud of their dialect, and don’t try to hide it!

Here are some videos of people speaking with a Brummy accent!

A Brummie Accent

Birmingham "Brummie" Accent (Female) AccentBase File #41

NO F*CKING FIGHTING - Peaky Blinders S03E01

Alison Hammond's Funniest Moments | This Morning

Birmingham: Reputation vs Reality Part 1 @ 2:50 - 5:44

Spriton - Yorkshire Accent (South, West and East)

I have a good bit to back up my headcanon here. The Spriton are a widespread clan, about 1/3 of them living outside of Sami Thicket, some families living over a days journey from the main village. For this reason, I think the different Yorkshire accents suit them very well. Since the Spriton live all over the Spriton Plains, some nearer to Stone-in-the-Wood, some nearer to the Swamp of Sog, and some even living at the edge of the Dark Wood (rip kylans parents), it would make sense that they all have variations of a similar accent. I imagine that it can be hard for other clans to tell each of the different Spriton dialects apart, but the Spriton themselves can hear a clear difference in the voice between someone who was born in Sami Thicket, and someone who was born on the outskirts of the plains. You can see, as we move further south down the Skarith Land, the presence of the posh Ha’rar accent, is slipping away, with different vowels sounds and timbre, even different grammar. The Yorkshire accent often omits words and letters to make speaking faster, which is a practical way of speaking for the busy farmers and soldiers of the Spriton Plains. 

Here are some videos of people speaking with Yorkshire accents!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOOuqHMY-_tXV8t9mcQt4PtF8S3s577NI

School Of British Accents – YORKSHIRE

interview with millen eve - true yorkshire accent!

South : Louis Tomlinson Gets Quizzed On Yorkshire Slang

West : Zayn Malik Sounds Off on Fashion, Fame, and the Meaning Behind His Home Studio | Vogue

East : Best of Jenny and Lee on Gogglebox

Drenchen - Edinburgh Accent

Now, this is a headcanon I will fight for. I will eternally feel that we were ROBBED of the Drenchen having a Scottish accent. I was deciding which Scottish accent would suit them best, and I finally landed on an Edinburgh accent. As much as I think that my favourite swamp dwellers would have a strong accent, I don’t think it’s overly realistic. While they are isolated from the other clans, which would naturally cause them to speak differently to them, I don’t think they are isolated enough to have a drastically contrasting accent. Therefore, I thought that the Edinburgh accent, said to be softer and less intense than other Scottish dialects, would be perfect. They still have a similar tone to the rest of the clans, but their soggy lilt is unique, and is still noticeably different of a timbre to the other clans of the Skarith Land. I also presume that their gills would have some sort of influence on their intonation, another reason I chose the Edinburgh accent, which comes almost from the back of the throat - closer to the gills!

Here are some videos of people speaking with an Edinburgh accent!

Outlander | The Many Scottish Accents | STARZ @ 1:25 - 2:05

Shirley Manson's Guide To Swearing

Sean Connery 1971: The BBC Interview HD

12 Times Professor McGonagall Was a Boss Ass Witch

Ewan McGregor on being recognised as Obi-Wan | The Graham Norton Show - BBC

Sifa - West Country

I think this is a pretty obvious accent to assign to the Sifa, as it’s the origin of the traditional “pirate” accent. They have a distinctive way to say their “r”s , and it can sometimes be a harsh sounding accent, suiting the sometimes dangerous lifestyle of the rogue clan. However, the rounded vowels and somewhat cozy feeling you get from the intonation of the West Country accent, shows the mythical and peaceful side of the Sifa. I headcanon that it’s uncommon for a gelfling to have a truly Sifan accent, due to the influence of other gelflings with other dialects that join the Sifa, therefore with most Sifa ending up with an amalgamation of gelfling accents. However, with families that have sailed with the Sifa for generations, the accent is still very much alive. For those gelfling who run away to the Silver Sea for a while, they always return home with a subtle sea-faring twang.

Here are some videos of people speaking with a West Country accent!

Learn Hagrid's British Accent (HARRY POTTER) | West Country Accent

Learn how to do the West Country accent - Sound like Hagrid from Harry Potter.

Harry Potter - Best of Hagrid

School Of British Accents – WEST COUNTRY

LOTR The Two Towers - The Tales That Really Mattered...

Dousan - Lancastrian English

It took me a while to decide which accent would be best for the Dousan. I wanted an accent that didn’t draw out many sounds, and was spoken quickly, as the Dousan try to preserve as much moisture in the desert air as they can. After looking through hours of footage of different English dialect videos, I decided on the Lancastrian accent. They have shorter vowels than other dialects, and also shorten a lot of words to make them quicker to say. I thought this was perfect for the Dousan, a clan which avoids speaking for long, if they can. It is quite a unique accent, especially in terms of grammar, which makes sense, as the Dousan rarely socialize with other clans, meaning they would not pick up other slang or pronunciation. The Dousan use the Language of Silence, a type of sign language, which is sometimes used in unison with audible speaking. I thought that the unique Lancastrian grammar went well with this, as in The Songs of the Seven Gelfling Clans, it says that “more was being communicated when both hands and tongues worked together”. Perhaps the reason the Dousan grammar is created to be much shorter and quicker to say, is because the Language of Silence allows the Dousan to communicate in full, meaning there is no need to speak with long sentences? Either way, I think the accent is a perfect fit for the nomadic clan.

Here are some links and videos of people speaking with a Lancastrian Accent!

Lancastrian English: Dialectable Episode 4.

Listen to accent  of Lancashire England

Lancashire Dialect Poem - Northern English Accent

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOOuqHMY-_tVnuxrODGw0BEdZlC9RNHcw

https://www.mykp.co.uk/learn-lancastrian-accent/ (this breaks down what I mean about the shorter grammar)

Grottan - South Wales Accent

Deet’s tendency to sing often made me think that the South Wales accent would be perfect. It is a naturally sing-songy type of accent, with a musical intonation. This is because the South Welsh accent is heavily influenced by the Welsh Language. I thought that because the Grottan have been isolated from other Gelfling, and rarely go “topside”, they would have very little impact on their dialect from the Skeksis, something their sister clan, the Vapra, have been hugely influenced by. This led me to think that perhaps the Grottan accent would have a lot more in common with the old-gelfling language, giving it that sing-songy and particular lilt. Like the Dousan, the Grottan have their own language, Finger-talk, which is incredibly difficult to learn for non-Grottan gelfling. Maybe the reason it is so difficult, is because of, again, the influence of old-gelfling, something the other clans have slightly lost a connection to. But perhaps, the Grottan accent may also play a part in why it is so difficult for daylighters to learn this peculiar language. As the accent has such musical intonation, with lots of high and low sounds in it’s speaking, perhaps finger-talk is based more on these high and low sounds, and less on the actual words themselves, which is why Grottan find it so easy to learn, as these high and lows are built into their accent regardless. Nevertheless, the South Wales accent is one of my favourites, and it perfectly fits the peaceful and secluded Grottan.

Here are some videos of people speaking with a South Wales accent!

Newport (Casnewydd), Gwent, South Wales, Welsh Accent (Female) Accentbase File #144

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6x7uaw

School Of British Accents – WELSH ENGLISH

Elis James Bad B&B Experience | Alan Davies As Yet Untitled | Dave

https://www.thevoicecafe.net/learn-Welsh-accent-online.htm

And that’s all! I was really surprised by the amount of people that were interested in me making this post, so I hope I haven’t disappointed anyone! I’d love to know what you guys headcanon the gelfling clans to sound like, and whether you think my headcanons or accurate or not. Again, I’m sorry if I got anything wrong about the accents, or generalized too much. I’m linking a few more videos which go through all of these accents, with more examples of people speaking with them, all well as some linguistics background to the dialects. I’ve also linked the Survey of English Dialects, where you can find lots of clips of all these different accents I have mentioned. Thank you so much for reading all of this, I really appreciate it!!

Survey of English Dialects - Accents and dialects

20 British Accents in 1 Video

One Woman, 17 British Accents - Anglophenia Ep 5

[adamsvanrhijn]

The dialect quiz is actually pretty good! Got me to within 20 miles of home and I havent lived there for 20 years by now.... I was interested in your definition of northern England English, which many writers do often use indiscriminately for tv etc but I have less qualms about (posh southern) julian fellowes using it because it was 100 years ago so obviously people would talk differently

they did a really good job!!!! you guys have a lot more englishes over there because you've been talking in the same places for longer so it is easier to pinpoint where you started talking 😈

for a lay audience for simplicity's sake, when i say "northern england english" i'm mainly referring to the englishes spoken in the modern political boundary area from the southernmost borders of yorkshire and lancashire up to the scottish border, excluding the isle of man, especially by middle and working class speakers

but, as i think you are getting at, there is a TON of variation in this area and you can't really define it as One English beyond a surface level because, like i said and like you said, in the british isles in general you can ascribe unique linguistic features to a very specific area and sometimes they can be pretty wildly different, usually completely independent of modern political boundaries

but it IS more simple to draw the lines of where the Groups Of Englishes begin and end. not Simple just more simple, like in the area i mentioned there are enough common linguistic features, many around vowel sounds, that are unique from the south and moooost of the midlands, such that you can group those together coherently

in linguistic terminology, you define language areas using an isogloss, which is an imaginary line where, for example, most people on one side pronounce rhotic/r sounds after a vowel and most people on the other side don't.

there are a few of these people look at for northern england englishes, one good example is the trap/bath split isogloss. if you learned how to speak english north of this imaginary line you probably pronounce the vowel in those words differently than if you learned how to speak south of it. this line actually goes through the midlands, which is also true of the foot-strut vowel distinction isogloss

that said, that vowel distinction is less reliable these days bc, 1, language changes all the time, and 2, especially w/ stigmatized language varieties you tend to see change as standardization toward the prestige variety, so some of the distinguishing features of 100 years ago don't exist much anymore

the really fun thing about downton abbey and i think what must have been a good challenge for their dialect coach, is, you have many northern actors who speak w/ local accents, some of which are stronger than others, and you want to take advantage of that where you can so broadly you will encourage people to keep using them

but there are some changes that have happened in language over time that can be reflected too, and those have to be coached, but you also need to keep in mind that this has to be comprehensible across multiple english speaking markets worldwide so you can't go Too historically accurate or a lot of it would be very tough to understand even for modern speakers of e.g. yorkshire english(es), and SIMULTANEOUSLY there is historical context about working in service and the effort people put into changing their speech for their jobs, so... it's just a lot of layers! cool to implement. and like i said in my thomas post a lot of it seems to come down to direction and/or actor choice, jf didn't always include northernisms in the script where they appear in the show

I Just Think It's Neat

idk if this touches on what you were getting at sjjfjd but thank you for the ask either way!!!

[stellarstacey]

Okay so after watching that Global vid I got this idea. I know there is this head canon that Buck’s parents are the worst but what if they’re actually the kindest people you’ll meet and they visit the fire station all the way from England, after the tsunami and the lawsuit. Buck can’t help that his own accent slips through and Eddie is there and can’t help that his true feelings for his best friend rise even more to the surface. Idk you can figure out the rest.

@wearelosersyoudumbfuck

Buck stoled a piece of pepper from Bobby's cutting board. Bobby rolled his eyes playfully at him.

"Maddie?" Chim called out and Buck turned around and froze.

Eddie and Hen looked up from their card game.

Buck smiled brightly and jogged over to pick up and twirl the small older woman next to Maddie.

"My baby!" The woman cried out happily as Buck put her down only to be assaulted with two large wet kisses to his cheeks.

"What about me?" The older man teased and Buck laughed before pulling him into a hug.

"What are you doing here?" Buck asked confused but happy.

"We wanted to surprise you." The woman spoke in a posh British accent.

Eddie was so confused as he slowly got up.

"Let me introduce you to my team. Guys, these are my parents, James and Lily." Buck stated proudly and Eddie blinked in confusion.

Buck's parents were British?

Eddie zoned out a bit as Maddie and Buck introduced their parents to the team only nodding with a smile when they got to him. They spent a few minutes talking and Eddie was starting to understand where Buck's kindness came from. Eddie watched as he took a sip from his water bottle only to nearly choke on it when Buck's accent changed just the slightest. Eddie felt his face flush and his blood run south. That was hands down the hottest thing ever. The longer his parents stayed the more the accent peeked out. Eddie never wanted them to leave. Eddie blushed even more as Buck showed his parents pictures of Christopher on his phone.

"He's such a good kid." Buck smiled and Eddie gulped.

Eddie was so screwed.

"We don't want to keep you from work anymore than we already have, dear. We will see you tonight." Lily smiled as she kissed his cheek again and swiped an affectionate thumb over his birthmark.

"Keep up the good work, son. Proud of you." James clapped his shoulder and Buck flushed with pride.

As soon as they left, the team started to tease Buck about his accent. Mainly Chim and Hen, while Eddie couldn't form a coherent thought. Buck found him later in the bunk room.

"You alright, mate I mean man. Jesus...I keep slipping." Buck snorted amused and Eddie stared at him.

"How come you never told me you spent most of your childhood in London?" Eddie asked and Buck shrugged.

"You never asked." Buck replied and Eddie frowned.

"Your accent..." Eddie started and Buck cut him off.

"Oh come on, not you too. I know its horrible but..." Eddie sighed.

"It's hot." Eddie whispered and Buck blinked.

"I'm sorry what?" Buck asked startled and Eddie bit his lip.

"It's fucking hot." Eddie murmured and Buck took a step closer.

"Are you telling me that all I had to do to get you to admit you're attracted to me was to speak in my British accent?" Buck asked slipping into the accent.

Eddie nodded and Buck huffed.

"Bloody hell, Eddie." Buck growled before kissing him.

Eddie moaned in pleasure. Yeah, he could get use to this.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Occasionally, when I travel to England I have a hard time understanding a person's accent.  Granted, I speak Californian, but I was wondering do you ever have a difficult time understanding a person with an American accent ? Thanks

Actually I don’t for the simple reason of how deeply embedded American popular culture is through the film and television shows that one can’t avoid. But speaking for myself I am well traveled and I have been in quite a few parts of the United States for work or vacation reasons - genuinely admire the genius of the American Founders (they were educated as English gentlemen and some were even educated as Classicists) and the landscapes are breath taking.

I love the cosmopolitan flavours of New York and the down to earth humour of New Yorkers themselves; I am charmed by the preservation of civility and manners of the South; I respect the indivudual and community frontier spirit of those in the Mid West. But I have to confess California remains a mystery to me. I know not everyone speaks like a stoned Keanu Reeves but I find it far too laid back for my tastes. That is not to say I don’t understand the way they speak because I do by virtue of having friends from there. The only time I had difficulty understanding anyone was in Boston when I went to give an academic paper there at Harvard. I just found the Boston accent terribly hard to follow.

This is ironic when you really think about the issue of English and the origin of American English began in New England.

The first English people to colonise the land that would become the United States came over in 1607, and they brought the English language (and accent) with them to New England. So most of us can picture the idea of the original Pilgrims talking like Benedict Cumberbatch only to have their future descendants talk like Keanu Reeves.

Except it’s not true.

Afew years ago I had a friend who was a Shakespearian scholar at Cambridge where we both studied and he surprised me once over dinner. He told me that the modern American accent is a lot closer to how English used to be spoken than the British accent is.

The main difference between the British accent and the American one is rhoticity, or how a language pronounces its "Rs." What you might think of as standard American (or "newscaster voice") is a rhotic accent, which basically means "R" is enunciated, while the non-rhotic, stereotypical English accent drops the "R" pronunciation in words like "butter" and "corgi".

Of course, there are a few American accents that drop the "R," too — Bostonians "pahking the cah in Hahvahd Yahd," for example, or a waitress in the South who calls you "Suga.'" And some accents in Northern England, Ireland, and Scotland retain their "Rs" as well.

But Americans didn't find a treasure trove of Rs in their new country.

Instead, British speakers willingly lost theirs. This is where it gets interesting.

Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, many formerly lower-class British people began to find themselves with a great deal of money, but a voice that instantly marked them as a commoner. In order to distinguish themselves from their lowlier roots, this new class of English gentlemen developed their own posh way of speaking. And eventually, it caught on throughout the country.

It's called "received pronunciation," and it even influenced the speech patterns of many other English dialects — the Cockney accent, for example, is just as non-rhotic but a lot less hoity-toity.

Meanwhile, English-speakers in the United States, for the most part, did not change with the times and kept the Rs in their speech.

Although pronunciation has changed on both sides of the Atlantic, some Americans began claiming that their particular regional dialect is actually the original English pronunciation, preserved for all time in a remote pocket of the country. Unfortunately, most of these claims don't really pan out. Indeed sholars now believe many have tis idiosyncratic speech as a result of isolation instead. One popular candidate is the Appalachian accent, which is distinguished by some archaic words such as "afeared," but otherwise doesn't seem to have much connection to the language of Shakespeare.

But on the topic of English speakers making a conscious choice to drop their Rs, there was an interesting blip in linguistic history around the time that radio became popular.

Like received pronunciation, the ‘Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic Accent’ was deliberately invented to serve a purpose. You almost certainly don't know anybody who speaks it, but you've definitely heard it before. It's the voice of Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Pierce Brosnan (Bahnd, James Bahnd).

In the Transatlantic accent the Rs are dropped, the Ts are articulated, the vowels all softened to an erudite drawl. It's also an ambiguous combination of the British and American accents.

Taken together, all of the factors made it the perfect voice for broadcasting at the time. The unique pronunciation was easy to understand even on early audio equipment with poor bass frequencies and could appeal to listeners in multiple English-speaking countries. But it fell out of favor after World War II, and one of the first accents to be immortalised on audio recording was consigned to another piece of wartime nostalgia. Today it’s confined to British film stars who make their living in the US.

As an aside when I was a small child growing up in India my parents insisted we enunciated properly and spoke clearly that was the Queen’s English. And that is indeed how I speak to this day but I was helped by the surrounding Indian culture because they also spoke the Queen’s English. This was simply because they retained the English language textbooks from the days of the British Empire (even to this day). 

The rich irony wasn’t lost on me when I had a hard time going back to England because - outside of my boarding school environment and social circles - I just couldn’t always understand the many commoner regional accents in England that were now coming back in vogue. It’s everywhere now especially on the BBC. So in effect it is Indians (and Pakistanis) who are preserving what we have been burying for some decades now. I remember how shocked my well educated friends from India or Pakistan who came to study at Cambridge or Oxford to find the way they spoke naturally with the Queen’s English was now considered a quaint anachronism in this Age of championing regional diversity.

I think the erosion of the Queen’s English is a travesty as well as a tragedy. To speak ‘proper’ English is considered elitist and privileged. To me it’s just a sign of civilised discourse. Of course there is a place for regional accents and they should be preserved because it is part of the tapestry of our culture but I fear it has been at the expense of clarity of speech and the coherence of thought.

Thanks for your question.

[ariesrps]

in honor of a recent rise in roleplays set in the uk, coinciding with the recent global success of the new british netflix show sex education, i was inspired to create this guide to roleplaying british characters. as a british kid myself i love seeing these characters in rps, but have often had friends in the rpc tell me that they struggle to write them due to the differences in popular culture, dialect, slang, media etc.

of course, accuracy isn’t TOO important when it comes to this, since british people generally aren’t a marginalized or oppressed group. however i do think this is a guide a lot of people will find valuable. in a poll with 43 respondents, the highest percentage of roleplayers were from north america (72.1%) compared to only 9.3% coming from the united kingdom (all info correct at time of posting). with the assumption that people mostly write characters that are from the country they’re most familiar with, there aren’t a lot of british characters in tumblr rp. if this guide can provide non-UK-based rpers with the info they’re seeking to pen a british muse, then my job here is done!

DISCLAIMER: if you were looking for a guide written like an essay or report, this ain’t it! this is mostly a collection of external resources you may find useful when writing your characters, as opposed to written instructions.

PLEASE, LIKE OR REBLOG THIS IF YOU FOUND IT USEFUL IN ANY WAY!

GEOGRAPHY — where will your character be from?

as a british person who isn’t exactly the most well-traveled, there are definitely inaccuracies in my knowledge of other countries’ geography. i wouldn’t be surprised if some people struggle with the same issue, but regarding the united kingdom. if your character is from the UK, it’s important to know that their characterization should differ depending on which part they’re from.

map of the british isles

map of england

map of scotland

map of wales

map of northern island

the difference between the UK, great britain, and england: explained

why is the republic of ireland not a part of the united kingdom?

NOTE: this guide will not include info on how to write characters from the republic of ireland, as that identity is one of its own and is not classified as part of the uk!

SOCIAL CLASS — what kind of socio-economic background will your character have?

class is an important issue in the UK, in some ways more-so than the US. the first bullet point of this section is an interesting article which explains why this is, but to summarize: the american dream – though flawed, is a reality to an extent. there is no such concept in the UK, making the class situation and socio-economic divide a little different.

“in the uk, i’m working class, but said goodbye to that title in america” article

the seven social classes of 21st century britain — where do you fit in?

POLITICS — what kind of stance will your character take?

just like in any country, politics is extremely important in the UK. just like in america, the country is extremely divided between left and right. if political views is something your character views as important, or you think that their politics defines their characterization in any way, this section should be helpful!

parliamentary (UK) vs. presidential (US) democracy, explained

the uk’s many political parties, explained ( NOTE: this video is slightly outdated. the prime minister, and leader of the conservative party, is now theresa may, not david cameron. but you probably already knew that. )

uk political spectrum

2017 uk general election map

brexit, explained

to summarize the two main parties: labour = left-wing = good. conservative = right-wing = bad.

ETHNIC DIVERSITY — what kind of ethnic background will your character have?

similarly to the US, the UK (though dominated by caucasian people aka white british) encompasses many different cultures. according to the UK gov “87% of people in the uk are white, and 13% belong to a black, asian, mixed or [from] other ethnic group[s], according to the combined 2011 censuses.” while non-white ethnicities are a definite minority, it’s so important not to erase their existence.

a chart illustrating the uk’s race / ethnicity breakdown

britain’s most racially diverse areas

2011 census reveals most ethnically diverse city

IDENTITY — what kind of cultural identity will your character have?

ask a scotsman for a handful of reasons he’s different from an englishman, and he’ll talk for hours. within england alone, ask a londoner how they’re different from a mancunian and they’ll talk for even longer. different parts of the uk have different identities, and it’s important. something we want to avoid is the “posh”, well-spoken, crumpet-eating stereotype or, on the other end of the spectrum, the modern-day oliver twist. expand your horizons!

stereotypes americans have about british people that aren’t actually true

10 differences between brits and americans

what does it mean to be british?

ENGLAND

how is the south of england different to the north? (spoiler: very)

north-south divide wikipedia

culture of england wikipedia

SCOTLAND

our scottish culture: so much more than kilts and bagpipes

scottish culture and traditions guide

culture of scotland wikipedia

WALES

wales history, language and culture

welsh culture: facts and traditions

culture of wales wikipedia

NORTHERN IRELAND

northern ireland �� cultural life

northern ireland history and culture

culture of northern ireland wikipedia

LANGUAGE, DIALECT, ACCENT, SLANG — how will your character speak?

here’s where the fun parts start! there are so many different variations of accents, regional dialects, area-specific slang and colloquialisms throughout the uk. sometimes i see british characters being written with little to no use of any of these, nothing at all differentiating them from american characters and it’s such a waste in my opinion. even if you don’t like writing with a an accent (some people don’t!) the dialect and slang words along can make your character so much more authentic.

how are british english & american english different?

everyday american words we don’t use the same in the UK

america vs british english – 50 differences

NOTE: resources for the north of england are higher in quantity than the midlands and south of england due to wider variations of accents within the region.

ENGLAND (NORTH)

a tour of northern english accents

a - z of northern slang (GENERAL NORTHERN)

northern slang with blossoms (GENERAL NORTHERN)

a - z of mancunian slang (MANCHESTER)

mancunian: english like a native (MANCHESTER)

scouse: english like a native (LIVERPOOL)

scouse slang (LIVERPOOL)

geordie slang (NEWCASTLE)

mackem slang (SUNDERLAND)

yorkshire slang (YORKSHIRE)

the yorkshire accent (YORKSHIRE)

sheffield slang (SHEFFIELD)

arctic monkeys slang lessons (SHEFFIELD / YORKSHIRE / GEN. NORTHERN)

ENGLAND (MIDLANDS)

how to speak birmingham (BIRMINGHAM)

a brummie accent (BIRMINGHAM)

7 things said in nottingham (NOTTINGHAM)

black country dialect (BLACK COUNTRY)

ENGLAND (SOUTH)

10 common british/english slang expressions & phrases (NON-SPECIFIC)

cockney (LONDON)

cockney rhyming slang: english like a native (LONDON)

roadman slang vs cockney slang (LONDON)

london street slang, translated (LONDON)

west country: english like a native (WEST COUNTRY / SOUTH WEST)

essex slang (ESSEX)

mark watson on bristol slang (BRISTOL)

slang of the south - portsmouth (PORTSMOUTH)

WALES

welsh people on welsh slang (GENERAL WELSH)

taron egerton talks welsh slang (GENERAL WELSH)

common welsh sayings (GENERAL WELSH)

luke evans on welsh slang (GENERAL WELSH)

25 words and phrases you’ll always hear in cardiff (CARDIFF)

swansea slang (SWANSEA)

20 welsh colloquialisms (GENERAL WELSH)

29 words that have a totally different meaning in wales (GENERAL WELSH)

welsh language wikipedia

SCOTLAND

how to speak & understand glaswegian (GLASGOW)

gerard butler teachers you scottish slang (GENERAL SCOTTISH)

glasgow slang words (GLASGOW)

most used scottish slang words & phrases (GENERAL SCOTTISH)

doric from around aberdeen (ABERDEEN) note: definitions in description

edinburgh dialect words (EDINBURGH)

trainspotting slang explained (GLASGOW / GENERAL SCOTTISH)

scottish words glossary (GENERAL SCOTTISH)

glossary of scottish slang & jargon wikipedia (GENERAL SCOTTISH)

handy scottish words to know (EDINBURGH / GENERAL SCOTTISH)

28 great scottish sayings and slang phrases (GENERAL SCOTTISH)

use of gaelic in scotland wikipedia

NORTHERN IRELAND

jamie dornan teaches you northern irish slang – vanity fair (GENERAL N. IRISH)

jamie dornan does northern irish slang – bbc (GENERAL N. IRISH)

28 sayings from northern ireland (GENERAL N. IRISH)

northern irish words (GENERAL N. IRISH)

16 slang phrases you’ll need to know in northern ireland (GENERAL N. IRISH)

17 words and phrases you’ll always get in belfast (BELFAST)

a list of belfast sayings (BELFAST)

derry slang words 1 (DERRY)

derry slang words 2 (DERRY)

use of gaelic in northern ireland wikipedia

SURROUNDINGS — what’s it like where your character grew up, or where they live now?

whether your character comes from one of these places OR lives there now (or both!) it might be interesting to incorporate some of their surroundings into their characterization. this section isn’t classified by country/region, because if i were to start going into that much detail here, this guide would go on forever!

10 incredible historical towns in the uk

where are the largest cities in britain?

a guide to the english countryside

the 15 most stunning places in the uk outside of london

top 50 areas for quality of life in the uk

10 best party cities in the uk

10 best student cities in the uk

10 of the uk’s most creative towns & cities to live, work & play

cities with the youngest vs oldest age population

map of stereotypes in the uk

google autocomplete map of the uk “why is [city]...”

POP CULTURE / MEDIA — what does your character like? what are they consuming?

us brits are very proud of our own british-made media. our television, our music, our cinema, etc. if you’re somebody who is interested in including the things a character likes in their characterization, it would be unrealistic not to give a british character some favourites from the place they’re from.

uk map showing where tv shows are set and filmed

uk map showing the origins of famous bands/musicians

the uk’s most popular tv shows according to IMBD

10 best british rock bands of the 21st century

the ultimate reference guide to british pop culture

LASTLY, HERE ARE SOME RESOURCES ON WRITING BRITISH CHARACTERS:

making british characters realistic as an american writer

tips from a brit for writing british fictional characters

another ‘writing british characters’ guide by @thewritershelpers​

another ‘writing british characters’ guide by @writeworld​

another ‘writing british characters’ guide by @rphelper

how to write dialogue for british characters

writing black british characters by talkthepoc on wattpad

of course, this is overkill. there’s no way on earth you’ll ever need all of these resources, but they’re here and i hope you find some use out of this guide! please forgive any inaccuracies or mistakes, this is my first time writing a guide. you’re welcome to leave me feedback on this here. last but not least, HAPPY WRITING!

[lodelss]

Laurie Penny | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,360 words)

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” — Winston Churchill, unpublished memorandum

“Will Mockney for food.” — Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. III

This is a story about a border war. Specifically, a border war between two nations that happen, at least in theory, to be precisely the same place. One of them is Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

One is a real place. The other is a fascinatingly dishonest, selective statement of fact, rather like describing how beautiful the countryside was in the antebellum American South. A truth so incomplete it’s worse than a lie.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die. The U.K. is unique among modern states in that we not only buy our own hype, we also sell it overseas at a markup. “Britain always felt like the land where all the stories came from,” an American writer friend told me when I asked why she so often sets her novels in Britain. Over and over, writers and readers of every background — but particularly Americans — tell me that the U.K. has a unique hold on their imaginations.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.

That hold is highly profitable. Britain was kept out of recession last year by one industry: entertainment. Over the past four years, the motion picture, television, and music industries have grown by almost 50 percent — the service sector, only by 6.  So many shows are currently filmed in England that productions struggle to book studio space, and even the new soundstages announced by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2018 will be hard-pressed to keep up with demand. As historian Dan Snow pointed out, “[O]ur future prosperity is dependent on turning ourselves into a giant theme park of Queens, detectives, spies, castles, and young wizards.”

There is hope: the statues are coming down all over Britain, starting in Bristol on June 7, 2020. Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston, who is remembered for how he lavished his wealth on the port city and not for the murder of 19,000 men, women and children during the Middle Passage. Colston’s statue was thrown into Bristol Harbor, where it remains. In Oxford, students demanded the removal of monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the business magnate and “architect of apartheid” who stole vast tracts of Africa driven by his conviction in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons. In Parliament Square, fences have been erected to protect Winston Churchill himself, the colonial administrator and war leader whose devoted acolytes include both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Young Britons are  demanding a reckoning with a history of colonial conquest, slave-trading, industrial savagery, and utter refusal to examine its own legacy.

Meanwhile, the economic disaster of a no-deal Brexit is still looming and Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll in Europe, putting further pressure on an already-struggling National Health Service. Under Boris Johnson’s catastrophic leadership, or lack thereof, there are no signs of changing tactics on either. Fantasy Britain is having a boomtime. Real Britain is in deep, deep trouble.

* * *

I was homesick. That’s my excuse. I had been in Los Angeles for six months, writing for TV shows set in England. I woke up every day 5,000 miles from home, in a city of sweltering tarmac and traffic jams and palm trees, to try and explain how British people speak and think. I fell asleep every night to the radio from home, listening to the logic of xenophobia capture the political mainstream as my country circled the drain. I watched my British friends who are Black or brown or who were born overseas trying to stay brave and hopeful as racism became more and more normalized. I was homesick, and people do silly things when they’re homesick.

So yes, I went to see the Downton Abbey movie.

Specifically, I went to the Downton Abbey Experience, a special screening where you could spend a few hours in a mocked-up Edwardian drawing room, nibbling on tiny food and pretending to be posh. I was expecting it to be rubbish, forgetting that this was Los Angeles, where talented actors and set dressers can be had on every street corner. I couldn’t help but be a bit charmed by the commitment: the food was terrible, but two of the waiters had concocted an elaborate professional-rivalry backstory, and the accent-work was almost flawless. It really did feel as if you’d stepped, if not into Downton itself, then certainly onto the show’s set. And I finally understood. The way Americans feel about this is the way I feel about Star Trek and schlocky space opera. This is their escape from reality. This is their fandom. Not just Downton Abbey — “Britain.”

I do try to resist the temptation to make fun of other people who take uncomplicated joy in their thing. The British do this a lot, and it’s one of the least edifying parts of the national character. Fandom is fine. Escapism is allowed. No semi-sensitive soul can be expected to live in the real world at all times. But watching the whitewashed, revisionist history of your own country adopted as someone else’s fantasy of choice is actively uncomfortable. It’s like sitting by while a decrepit relative gibbers some antediluvian nonsense about the good old days and watching in horror as everyone applauds and says how charming.

I decided not to be charmed and sulked on an ornamental sofa, angrily eating a chocolate bonbon and resenting everyone else for having fun. This was where I met the only other British person in the room, a nice lady from Buckinghamshire in a fancy dress. What did my new friend think of the event?  “I don’t like to complain,” she said, “but I’m sitting here in a ballgown eating bloody bread and jam. Honestly, it’s not worth the money.”

Which was the second-most-British thing anyone said all evening. The most British thing of all had been uttered half an hour earlier, by me, when it dawned on my friend and me that we really should have worn costumes. “It’ll be alright,” I said, “I’ll just take my accent up a bit posher and everyone will be pleased to see us.” Living in a place where all you have to do is say something in your normal accent to be told you’re clever and wonderful is all very well, until you start believing it. This is as true in politics as anywhere else: just showing up and being relentlessly British at people does not constitute sociopolitical strategy. It doesn’t even constitute a personality. I know that there are a lot of British expats who will be cross with me for giving the game away, and chaps, I really am so terribly, terribly sorry. But you and I both know that someday we’ll have to go home, and people won’t automatically be pleased to see us just because we said some words.

This is as true in politics as anywhere else: just showing up and being relentlessly British at people does not constitute sociopolitical strategy.

I write for TV shows set in Britain, or a fantasy version of it, and American Anglophilia is endlessly fascinating to me, as it is to most British expats. It comes in a few different flavourways (ed.: Normally we’d edit this to the u-less American spelling, but in this particular case it seemed appropriate to let it go). There’s the saccharine faux-nostalgia of Downton fans, the ones who love The Crown and afternoon tea and the actual monarchy. They tend to be more socially conservative, more likely to vaporize into angry drifts of snowflakery at the mere suggestion that there might have been brown people in the trenches of the First World War. But there is also a rich seam of Anglophilia among people who are generally suspicious of nationalism, and television is to blame for most of it. The idea of Britain that many Americans grew up with was Monty Python, Doctor Who, and Blackadder; today it’s Downton, Sherlock, Good Omens, and The Great British Worried-People-Making-Cakes-in-a-Tent Show. And of course, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, which technically take place in Middle-earth and Westeros but, in practice, are set in the version of medieval Britain where all epic fantasy tends to settle — in days of olde when knights were bold and brown people didn’t get speaking roles but dragons were fine.

(No British expat can honestly criticize a franchise like Downton for taking advantage of the North American fascination with Englishness, not unless we can say we’ve never taken advantage of it ourselves. Occasionally we catch one another at it, and it’s deeply embarrassing. Not long ago, waiting for coffee in the morning, I listened aghast as an extremely pretty American lady with her arm around an averagely-attractive Englishman explained that their dog was called something not unlike Sir Humphrey Woofington-Growler. “Because he’s British — my boyfriend, I mean.” Said British boyfriend’s eyes were pinned on the middle distance in the full excruciating knowledge that if he’d given a dog a name like that at home, he’d have got a smack, which would have upset the dog.)

Lavish Britscapist vehicles like Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Belgravia are more popular with Americans than they are at home. Trudging through Finsbury Park in London on a cold morning last Christmas, a poster advertising The Crown had been gleefully tagged “royalist propaganda” by some local hero with a spray can. My American friends were confused when I explained this to them. “Don’t you like your royal family?” They asked. No, I explained. We like Hamilton. The stories we export lay bare the failing heart of Britain’s sense of itself in the world — the assumption that all we have to do, individually or collectively, is show up with a charming accent and say something quaint and doors will open for us, as will wallets, legs, and negotiations for favorable trade deals.

This is a scam that works really well right up until it doesn’t.

* * *

It was irritatingly difficult to remain uncharmed by the Downton Abbey movie. I found myself unable to work up a sweat over whether there would be enough lawn chairs for the royal parade, but I rather enjoyed the bit where the Downton house staff, snubbed by the royal servants, decided to respond with kidnapping, poisoning, and fraud. There was also a snide rivalry between butlers, a countess with a secret love child, a disputed inheritance, an attempted royal assassination, a perilous tryst between closeted valets, a princess in an unhappy marriage, and Maggie Smith. It was disgustingly pleasant right up until its shameless closing sequence, where fussy butler Mr. Carson and his sensible housekeeper wife had a conversation about whether the Abbey would last into the next century. Yes, said Mr. Carson, sending us off into the night with the promise that “a hundred years from now, Downton will still be standing.”

And there it is. It’s not a good or noble or even an original lie, but it’s at least told with flair. As the British Empire went ungently into its good night offscreen last century, many great English houses were repurposed, sold, or demolished in part so that families did not have to pay inheritance tax on the properties. Highclere Castle — the estate where Downton Abbey was filmed — is an exception and remains under the stewardship of  the Earls of Carnavron, who live on the estate. They can afford to do this because a lucrative show about a lost and largely fictional age of aristocratic gentility happened to be filmed on the grounds. Let me repeat that: the only way the actual Downton Abbey can continue to exist is by renting itself out as a setting for fantasies of a softer world. Which is, in microcosm, the current excuse for a government’s entire plan for a post-Brexit economy. With nowhere left to colonize, we gleefully strip our own history for the shiniest trinkets to sell. The past is a different country, so we’re allowed to invade it, take its stuff and lie relentlessly about the people who actually live there.

It’s not a good or noble or even an original lie, but it’s at least told with flair.

The uncomfortable truth is that America doesn’t love Britain the way we want to be loved. That white-innocence fantasy of rolling lawns and ripped bodices is only palatable (and profitable) because Britain doesn’t have much actual power anymore. Our eccentricities would be far less adorable if we still owned you. If we were still a military-industrial juggernaut on the scale of Russia or China, if we were still really an imperial power rather than just cosplaying as one for cash, would the rest of the world be importing our high-fructose cultural capital in such sugary sackloads?

I don’t think so — and nor does Britain’s current government, the most nationalist and least patriotic in living memory, which has no compunction about turning the country into a laundry for international capital and flogging our major assets to foreign powers. American businesses already have their eyes on the National Health Service, which will inevitably be on the table in those trade deals a post-Brexit British economy desperately needs. In one of its first acts in power, the Johnson administration shoved through a controversial arms deal selling a major defense company to a private American firm, which is somehow not seen as unpatriotic.

This summer, Black Lives Matter protests are boiling around a nation that has never reexamined its imperial legacy because it is convinced it is the protagonist of world history. Conversation around what “British” means remains vaguely distasteful. “Culturally our stories are of plucky underdogs,” historian Snow told me. “But actually our national story was of massive expenditure on the world’s most complex weapon systems and smashing the shit out of less fiscally and technological societies.”

“Nations themselves are narrations,” wrote Edward Said, pioneer of postcolonial studies. Britain’s literary self-mythologizing spans several centuries. During the Raj, teaching English literature to the Indian middle and ruling classes was central to the strategy for enforcing the idea of Britain as morally superior. The image of Britain that persists in the collective global unconsciousness was founded deliberately to make sense of the empire and romanticize it for ordinary British citizens, most of whom had neither a complete understanding of the atrocities nor the voting rights that would make their opinion relevant. Britain wrote and rewrote itself as the protagonist of its own legends, making its barbarism bearable and its cultural dominance natural.

Bad things happen to people who have never heard a story they weren’t the hero of. I try not to be the sort of person who flashes the word “hegemony” around too much, but that’s what this is and always has been: a way of imposing cultural norms long after we, as my history books delicately put it, “lost” the British Empire. The stories are all we have left to make us feel important.

The plain truth is that Britain had, until quite recently, the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever known. We don’t have it anymore, and we miss it. Of course we miss it. It made us rich, it made us important, and all the ugly violent parts happened terribly far away and could be ignored with a little rewriting of our history. It continues to this day with tactful omissions from the school syllabus — in 2010, Education Secretary Michael Gove, later one of the chief architects of Brexit, pushed to teach British children a version of the “exciting and appealing” Imperial history that cast their country as heroic. According to one 2016 study, 43 percent of the British public think the Empire “was a good thing.” For most British people, the Empire came to us in pieces, in jingoistic legends and boys’ adventure stories with as many exclamation points as could be crammed on one book cover. The impression I was given as a schoolgirl was that we were jolly decent to let the Empire go, and that we did so because it was all of a sudden pointed out that owning other countries wholesale was a beastly thing to do — of course old boy, you must have your human rights! Really, we were only holding on to them for you.

The last time Britain truly got to think of itself as heroic on the world stage was during the Second World War. The narrative with the most tenacity is the “Blitz Spirit” — of a plucky little island standing firm against impossible odds, pulling together while hell rained down from above, growing victory gardens and sheltering in the stations of the London Underground. Those black-and-white photographs of brave-faced families wrapped in blankets on the train platforms are instantly recognizable: this is who we are as a country. Most Britons don’t know that soldiers from the colonies fought and died on the frontlines in France. Even fewer are aware of the famine that struck India at around the same time, leaving a million dead, or of Britain’s refusal to offer aid, continuing instead to divert supplies to feed the British army as the people of India starved.

What all of this is about, ultimately, is white innocence. That’s the grand narrative that so many of our greatest writers were recruited to burnish, willingly or not. White innocence makes a delicious story, and none of its beneficiaries wants to hear about how that particular sausage gets made.

* * *

Many of the biggest narrative brands of Britain’s fretful post-colonial age are stories of a nation coming to terms with the new and eroding nature of its own power, from James Bond (a story about a slick misogynist hired by the state to kill people) to Doctor Who (which I will defend to the death, but which is very much about the intergalactic importance of cultural capital). We are a nation in decline on the international stage; that’s what happens when a small island ceases to own a third of the earth. Rather than accepting this with any semblance of grace, we have thrown a tantrum that has made us the laughing stock of world politics, the sort of tantrum that only spoiled children and ham-faced, election-stealing oligarchs are allowed to get away with.

In this climate, the more pragmatic among us are seeing that what we actually have to offer the rest of the world boils down to escapism. Fantasy Britain offers an escape for everyone after a hard day under the wheel of late-stage capitalism.

There’s no actual escape, of course. Good luck if you’re a refugee. Since 2012, the conservative government has actively cultivated a  “hostile environment” scheme to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants, highlights of which include fast-tracking deportations and vans driving a massive billboard reading “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST” around the most diverse boroughs in London. Seriously. If you want to escape to actual Britain you need at least two million pounds, which is how much it costs for an Investor Visa. Non-millionaires with the wrong documents can and will be put on a plane in handcuffs, even if they’ve lived and worked in Britain for 50 years — like the senior citizens of the Windrush generation who came to Britain from the West Indies as children with their families to help rebuild the nation after the Second World War. In the past five years, hundreds of elderly men and women, many of them unaware they were not legal citizens, have been forcibly deported from Britain to the Caribbean. The subsequent public outcry did almost zero damage to the government’s brand. In 2019, Johnson’s Conservatives won a landslide victory.

“Take your country back.” That was the slogan that Brexit campaigners chose in 2016. Take it back from whom? To where? It was clear that the fictional past that many Brexit nostalgists wanted to reclaim was something not unlike the syrupy storylines of Downton Abbey — quiet, orderly, and mostly white. But to make that story work, British conservatives needed to cast themselves as the plucky underdogs, which is how you get a Brexit Party representative to the European Parliament comparing Brexit to the resistance of “slaves against their owners” and “colonies … against their empires,” or Boris Johnson bloviating in 2018 about Britain’s “colony status” in the EU (although he also believes that it would be good if Britain was still “in charge” of Africa). 

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What really won the day, though, was the lie that leaving the EU would leave us with 350 million pounds per week “to spend on the NHS.” Boris Johnson rode up and down the nation on a big red bus emblazoned with that empty promise. The British people may not trust our politicians, but we trust our National Health Service — almost all of us, from across the sociopolitical spectrum, apart from some fringe internet libertarians and diehard neoliberal wingnuts, most of whom, unfortunately, are in power (though they couldn’t get there without promising to protect the NHS).

After the COVID-19 lockdowns end, Brexit is still happening. The actual changes don’t come into effect until 2021, and Boris Johnson, whose empty personal brand is forever yoked to this epic national self-harm project, is clearly hoping to sneak in a bad Brexit deal while the country is still reeling from a global pandemic. Leaving the EU will not make Britain rich again. It will not make us an imperial power again. In fact, the other nations of Europe are now taking the opportunity to reclaim some of the things we borrowed along the way. Greece wants the Parthenon Marbles back, more than two centuries after a British tourist visited Athens and liked them so much he decided to pry them off and ship them home. Spain has made noise that it wants Gibraltar back, and we’ll probably have to give it to them. So far, the only way in which Britain is returning to its days of High Victorian glory is in the sudden re-emergence, in communities ravaged by austerity, of 19th-century diseases of poverty, and now of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in Europe, after Johnson’s government pursued a disastrous “herd immunity” strategy that transparently invited the elderly and infirm to sacrifice themselves for the stock market. British kids are not growing up with a sense of national heroism; they are growing up with rickets and scurvy. As a great poet from the colonies once wrote, it’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is for the sneering Eton thugs you inexplicably elected to stop stabbing you in the back.

As it happens, I want my country back, too. I have spent enough time baking under the pitiless California sunshine. I have been to Hot Topic. I’m stuck in the States until the lockdowns end, but want to go back to the soggy, self-deprecating country I grew up in, the country of tolerance and diversity and kind people quietly getting on with things, the land of radio sketch comedy, jacket potatoes, decent bands, and basic decency.

I know that that country, too, is imaginary; just as imaginary as any of the “Rule Britannia” flag-waggery. I don’t believe that Britain is Great in anything but name, but I do believe it can be better. I do not care to be told that I am any less of a patriot because I choose to know my country, or because I can imagine a future where we do more than freeze in the haunted house of our past glories, stuffed with stolen treasures and trapdoors we never open. It’s where I’m from, where my family and friends live, and where I hope to grow old and die. It worries me that we have not even begun to develop the tools to cope with our material reality, one in which we are a rather small rainy island half of whose population currently hates the other.

* * *

Since we’re all talking about myths and revisionist history and the Blitz Spirit, here’s something else that never makes it into the official story.

Those working-class Londoners sheltering in tube stations during World War II? They weren’t supposed to be there. In fact, the British government of the late 1930s built far too few municipal shelters, preferring to leave that to private companies, local government councils, and individuals and when the first bombs first fell, the hardest hit areas were poor, immigrant, and working-class communities in the East End with nowhere to go. Elite clubs and hotels dug out their own bomb shelters, but the London Underground was barricaded. On the second night of the Blitz, with the flimsy, unhygienic East End shelters overflowing, hundreds of people entered the Liverpool Street Station and refused to leave. By the time the government officially changed its position and “allowed” working-class Londoners to take shelter down among the trains, thousands were already doing so — 177,000 people at its most packed.

Eventually it was adopted into the propaganda effort and became part of the official mythos of the Blitz, but the official story leaves out the struggle. It leaves out the part about desperate people, abandoned by their government, in fear of their lives, doing what they had to — and what should have been done from the start — to take care of each other.

This failure is the closest thing to the staggering lack of leadership that Britain, like America, has displayed during the weeks and months of the coronavirus crisis. As I write, more than 42,000 British citizens have died, many in our struggling NHS hospitals and countless more in care homes. On the same January day that the Brexit treaty was signed, Boris Johnson missed the first emergency meeting of COBRA, the government’s effort to determine a response to rumors of a new and horrifying pandemic. Johnson went on to miss four subsequent meetings, choosing instead to go on holiday with his fiancée to celebrate Brexit as a personal win. As vital weeks were squandered and the infection reached British shores, it emerged that the country was singularly underprepared. Stocks of protective equipment had been massively depleted because, with everyone’s attention on Brexit, nobody had bothered to consider that we might have to deal with a crisis not of our own making. Worse still, the National Health Service was chronically underfunded and hemorrhaging staff, as migrant doctors, nurses, and medical professionals from EU countries fled a failing institution in a hostile culture. In the years following the Brexit referendum, over 10,000 European medical staff have reportedly left the NHS.

Over 10 years of wildly unnecessary cuts to public services, successive Tory governments deliberately invoked the Blitz Spirit, promoting their economic reforms with the unfortunate slogan “we’re all in this together” — as if austerity were an external enemy rather than a deliberate and disastrous choice imposed on the working poor by politicians who have never known the price of a pint of milk or the value of public education. Today, it is perhaps a signal of the intellectual drought in British politics that the slogan “We’re all in this together” has been recycled to flog the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Their other slogan — plastered resentfully on podiums after a decade of decimating the health service — is “Protect the NHS.” The National Health Service is perhaps the last thing that truly unites every fractured shard of the British political psyche, and the Tories hate that, but 10 years of gutting hospitals, scrapping social care schemes, and blaming it all on the very immigrants who come from overseas to care for us when we are sick has not made the British love socialized medicine any less. Every Thursday night across Britain, since the lockdowns began, the whole country comes out to applaud the healthcare workers who are risking their lives every day to fight on the front lines of the pandemic. The mumbling rent-a-toffs the Tories shove up on stage to explain the latest hopelessly ineffectual lockdown strategy have no choice but to clap along. Because, as the murals mushrooming up around the country attest, the best stories Britain tells about itself have never been about Queen and Country and Glory — they’ve always been the ones where the broke, brave, messed-up millions of ordinary people who live here pull together, help each other, and behave with basic human decency.

* * *

I’m not arguing for us all to stop telling stories about Britain. For one thing, people aren’t going to stop, and for another, stories by and about British people are currently keeping my friends employed, my rent paid, and my home country from sliding into recession. And there are plenty that are still worth telling: if you want to shove your nose against the shop window of everything actually good about British culture, watch The Great British Bake-off. If you like your escapism with a slice of sex and cursing and corsets, and why wouldn’t you, curl up with the criminally underrated Harlots, which does an excellent job of portraying an actually diverse London and also has Liv Tyler as a trembly lesbian heiress in a silly wig. And if you want to watch a twee, transporting period drama with decent politics, I cannot more heartily recommend Call the Midwife, which also features biscuit-eating nuns and an appropriate amount of propaganda about how the National Health Service is the best thing about Britain.

I was supposed to be home by now. Instead, I’m in quarantine in California, watching my home country implode into proto-oligarchic incoherence in the middle of a global pandemic and worrying about my friends and loved ones in London. Meanwhile, my American friends are detoxing from the rolling panic-attack of the news by rewatching Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Belgravia. The British film industry is already gearing up to reopen, and the country will need to lean on its cultural capital more than ever.

But there is a narrative chasm between the twee and borderless dreamscape of fantasy Britain and actual, material Britain, where rents are rising and racists are running brave. The chasm is wide, and a lot of people are falling into it. The omnishambles of British politics is what happens when you get scared and mean and retreat into the fairytales you tell about yourself. When you can no longer live within your own contradictions. When you want to hold on to the belief that Britain is the land of Jane Austen and John Lennon and Sir Winston Churchill, the war hero who has been repeatedly voted the greatest Englishman of all time. When you want to forget that Britain is also the land of Cecil Rhodes and Oswald Moseley and Sir Winston Churchill, the brutal colonial administrator who sanctioned the building of the first concentration camps and condemned millions of Indians to death by starvation. These are not contradictions, even though the drive to separate them is cracking the country apart. If you love your country and don’t own its difficulties and its violence, you don’t actually love your country. You’re just catcalling it as it goes by.

There is a country of the imagination called Britain where there will never be borders, where down the dark lane, behind a door in the wall, David Bowie drinks gin with Elizabeth Tudor and Doctor Who trades quips with Oscar Wilde and there are always hot crumpets for tea. This idea of Englishness is lovely, and soothing, and it makes sense, and we have to be done with it now.  If Britain is going to remain the world’s collective imaginative sandbox, we can do better than this calcified refusal to cope with the contradictions of the past. We can liberate the territory of the imagination. We can remember what is actually good about Britain  — which has always been different from what was “great.”

* * *

Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. 

Editor: Michelle Weber Fact checker: Matt Giles Copyeditor: Ben Huberman

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Give your British mini-break some real style and book a stay in one of these 14 grand houses

Whether, like Plumber Manor in Dorset, they’ve been owned by the same family for hundreds of years or are a cherished new project such as Caer Beris in Wales, manor hotels have a family at their hearts. 

Packed with history, these hotels pride themselves on delightfully old-fashioned hospitality with generous meals, antique furniture, gardens to wander in and countryside to admire. 

There are famous ones, including Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, and Gravetye and Cowley Manors, but there are plenty of others to discover, and some of them have superb deals this year.

Lympstone Manor, Devon 

Lympstone Manor in Devon has a Michelin-starred restaurant and 21 bedrooms in the main house, with high levels of indulgence that include a resident artist and a vista of the River Exe

Stunning: Pictured is one of the bathrooms, which features two freestanding gold baths and a marble double sink 

When chef Michael Caines bought this Regency mansion near Exmouth in 2017, part of the appeal was the surrounding farmland which he thought would make an ideal terroir for English sparkling wine. More than 17,000 vines were planted, and the first vintage is due in 2021.

In the meantime, there’s a Michelin-starred restaurant and 21 bedrooms in the main house, with high levels of indulgence that include a resident artist and a vista of the River Exe. New this year are equally luxurious shepherd’s huts that sleep up to five guests. Doubles from £560, including breakfast and lunch (lympstonemanor.co.uk).  

Ockenden Manor, West Sussex

Sussex treat: Ockenden Manor, near Cuckfield, serves afternoon cream tea with scones and finger sandwiches 

Tucked into the countryside near the South Downs, next to the boutique-filled village of Cuckfield, parts of this mansion date from the 16th Century. If you want to delve into the oldest part of the hotel, ask for the Master Timothy suite, which has wooden panelling, reading nooks and an adjacent room for children. Downstairs is given over to a bar, drawing rooms and a restaurant which overlooks a semi-wild garden; its wine list reflects the burgeoning Sussex vineyard scene.

The former walled garden now houses a spa with an indoor and outdoor swimming pool; there are also a handful of suites, allowing guests to drift between their rooms and treatments.

One-night Spa Break Getaway costs from £143pp for dinner, B&B with £25 voucher towards a spa treatment from Monday to Friday (prideofbritainhotels.com).

Buckland Manor, Worcestershire

Chef Will Guthrie raids the nearby Vale of Evesham for produce both in the restaurant and for hampers to take on picnics around Buckland Manor and beyond 

There are 15 rooms, some of them with four-poster beds and views of church spires. Distinctly more family-friendly than many Cotswolds hotels, there are interconnecting rooms as well as special menus for children

 Domesday mention:  The manor house has ‘Domesday Book history and plenty of modern-day appeal’

A manor house with Domesday Book history and plenty of modern-day appeal. The 15th Century timbered hall provides the backdrop for afternoon tea in winter, although in summer it spreads out into the gardens.

The beautiful village of Broadway is a gentle hike away, so are the gardens at Snowshill. There are 15 rooms, some of them with four-poster beds and views of church spires. Distinctly more family-friendly than many Cotswolds hotels, there are interconnecting rooms as well as special menus for children.

Chef Will Guthrie raids the nearby Vale of Evesham for produce both in the restaurant and for hampers to take on picnics around the hotel and beyond.

Two-night stays from £315pp, including B&B plus one dinner and a National Trust card worth £127 (bucklandmanor.co.uk).

Plumber Manor, Dorset

Generations of the Prideaux-Brune family have lived at Plumber Manor in Dorset since they built it in the 1600s – and it shows

A textbook West Country manor house, from the long driveway surrounded by fields to the mullion windows framed by roses.

Generations of the Prideaux-Brune family have lived at Plumber since they built it in the 1600s and it shows, with resident black labradors, proper family portraits and a collection of classic cars.

There are six bedrooms in the main house, ten others in a restored stone barn. Spread over three dining rooms, the menu is classic country house, strong on cheese souffle and peppered beef, followed by home-made puddings.

B&B from £155. For a three-night minimum stay, dinner, B&B is from £137.50pp per night (plumbermanor.co.uk).

Manor House, Wiltshire

The 14th Century ivy-clad manor house in Wiltshire is filled with stained-glass windows, beams and a Michelin-starred restaurant

There are 21 rooms in the main house and 29 cottages around the grounds, some of which are dog-friendly

With its charming honey-stoned houses, Castle Combe is often described as England’s most beautiful village, and it has caught the eye of many a Hollywood director. It has a 14th Century ivy-clad manor house – in the same honey-coloured stone to match – filled with stained-glass windows, beams and a Michelin-starred restaurant. There are 21 rooms, including the delightful Lordsmeer suite in the main house and 29 cottages around the grounds, some of which are dog-friendly. There’s an 18-hole golf course and a glorious Italianate garden, and the Bybrook river meanders through the grounds. B&B doubles from £250 (exclusive.co.uk/the-manor-house).

Titchwell Manor, Norfolk

A hotel that catches the posh but gently boho North Norfolk vibe beautifully; this Victorian building is too close to the beach to have any airs and graces, but there’s a lot of breezy charm. Meals are served in an expansive conservatory and there are 26 rooms, some with hot tubs.

Owned by the Snaith family, it is managed by their son Eric, who also runs Norfolk’s smartest fish and chip shop in nearby Thornham. Family-friendly, it’s also a stylish bolthole for birdwatchers; there’s an RSPB reserve next door.

B&B from £140. A two-night walking break including dinner, B&B plus a packed lunch on one day costs from £265pp (titchwellmanor.com).

Longueville Manor, Jersey 

Longueville Manor, Jersey, puts food and wine at the centre of its appeal

This Relais & Châteaux hotel may put food and wine at the centre of its appeal, but there’s much more on offer. 

The 30 rooms and suites are cream and serene, generously sized and with French-accented luxury. 

For extra privacy, there’s a two-bedroom cottage in the grounds, alongside tennis courts and a spa. The hotel also has its own yacht.

Longueville became a hotel in 1949 and is now in the third generation of family ownership. 

There’s a fine cellar, with more than 5,000 bottles, a forager on staff to supplement the extensive kitchen garden and honey from hives dotted around the grounds. 

Doubles from £225, room-only (longuevillemanor.com).

Aynsome Manor Hotel, Cumbria

Aynsome Manor Hotel, Cumbria, has 13 bedrooms, some in the beamed eaves of the building, all with the sort of views that will have you pulling on your walking boots

For those who like the wilder side of Cumbria, here is a handsome, good-value manor near Cartmel, now run by the second generation of the Varley family.

There are just 13 bedrooms, some in the beamed eaves of the building, all with the sort of views that will have you pulling on your walking boots. Guests eat in the dining room rather than a restaurant and the food aims to make the flavours sing with minimal fuss. The menus are set-price and a bargain at three courses for £30. B&B from £90 per night (aynsomemanorhotel.co.uk).

Caer Beris Manor, Powys

The Southwick family bought Caer Beris Manor in Powys last year and spent lockdown continuing their renovation programme 

Lord Swansea built this mock-Tudor mansion, surrounded on three sides by the River Irfon, in 1896 on the foundations of a 13th Century castle. It was bought by the Southwick family last year.

There are 22 rooms spread across the estate, ranging from suites to single rooms. The family spent lockdown continuing their renovation programme and have created picnic areas throughout the grounds, which also hold orchards and an otter hide, while there’s trout, salmon and grayling to fish for. The 1898 restaurant sources its ingredients locally. Mains start at £16. B&B from £90 (caerberis.com).

Manor House, Argyll and Bute

Manor House, Argyll and Bute, is ‘delightfully gentle’ with just 11 rooms and spectacular West Coast views

The Scots don’t do manors in quite the same way as the English – fortified castles were more their thing. This hotel is one of the exceptions, and it’s delightfully gentle with just 11 rooms and spectacular West Coast views. It was built for the Duke of Argyll in 1780, next to Oban’s harbour. Staying here is a superb introduction to the Inner Hebrides, from the freshly caught seafood in the restaurant to sunset views from McCaig’s Tower behind the hotel – although watching from the Nelson bar at the hotel with a fine whisky in hand is nearly as good. Sailors can use the hotel’s own mooring. Double B&B from £224 (manorhouseoban.com).

The Manor at Sway, Hampshire

Pictured is one of the bedrooms at The Manor at Sway, Hampshire, where ‘William Morris mixes with a touch of modern design’

All the space and grace that the Edwardians could muster comes into play at this hotel on the southern edge of the New Forest, where William Morris mixes with a touch of modern design. It’s a great car-free option as it’s near the railway station and there are wonderful walks into the forest and heath to explore from the hotel. There are just 11 bedrooms and a restaurant serving local produce. Dishes include local pork with black pudding, crisp ham and charred baby gem lettuce, while puddings include lemon curd tart with basil. Doubles from £189, including dinner, breakfast and afternoon tea (themanoratsway.com). 

Moonfleet Manor, Dorset

Room with a view: Moonfleet Manor, a Georgian mansion in Dorset, overlooks the magnificent Chesil Beach

Not just for adults: One of the lounges at the hotel, which is child-focused, with play areas and picnics

If you want to get your child manored up, head here. Overlooking Chesil Beach and part of the Luxury Family Hotel group, it’s thoroughly child-focused. There are interconnecting rooms, indoor and outdoor play areas, including a pool, and in a Covid-made-fun way, picnics are available for every meal including breakfast. The South West Coastal Path runs alongside the back garden.

In the Georgian mansion, there’s a playfulness that adults will appreciate too, with high teas and grown-up meals and, above all, Snoopy, the venerable hotel spaniel.

Two nights from £329, including breakfast and dinner for two. Children stay free but are charged for meals; two hours of childcare a day is included from September 7 when the creche reopens (moonfleetmanorhotel.co.uk).

Long Crendon Manor, Buckinghamshire

Long Crendon Manor in Buckinghamshire has bedrooms with original features, a bakery, farm shop and florist 

Not a hotel as such, but you can stay in this manor, which is stacked with beamed charm. Parts of the main house date from the 12th Century. It’s still a working estate, with ducks and geese in the orchard that creates the cider, and Gloucester Old Spot pigs that provide the morning bacon.

Head into the courtyard and there’s a bakery, farm shop and florist. The farm shop cafe serves lunch and it’s walking distance from two pubs in the village. B&B doubles from £145 (longcrendonmanor.co.uk). 

Rothay Manor, Cumbria

This small foodie hotel in the heart of the Lake District is owned by Jamie and Jenna Shail, who have bought significant flair and rolltop baths to the low-slung white house near Ambleside. Eight of the rooms on the ground floor are dog-friendly; first-floor rooms have balconies. Its main restaurant has three AA rosettes and five courses start from £70 a head, but there’s also a more casual restaurant. B&B from £221 (rothaymanor.co.uk).

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Brexit Stirs the British Class War

(Bloomberg) -- Nothing runs through the veins of British society more than the colors of an old school tie.With the country deep in conflict with itself over leaving the European Union, the opposition Labour Party may be about to stir up another quintessentially British argument: the class war over private schools.The party faithful convenes for their conference in Brighton on England’s south coast this weekend and a group of members is pushing for their “Abolish Eton” campaign to be part of the debate. Named after the U.K.’s most iconic school and alma mater of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it aims to shut down establishments for fee-paying elites or at least tax them out of existence.The scrapping of private schools has several hurdles to overcome before becoming Labour policy, let alone U.K. law. But the fact that it’s being discussed alongside Brexit and workers’ rights at such a febrile time shows how the party under socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn is eager to make political capital by attacking the rich. It also helps explain why many in Britain are as wary of a Labour government as they are of Brexit.The vote to leave the EU cleaved the electorate between “leave” and “remain,” yet it was as much about income and opportunity disparities in a country with the wealthiest capital in Europe and yet where a United Nations report last year concluded that a fifth of the population lives in poverty.“You can talk about it being a zeitgeist issue,” said Robert Verkaik, author of the 2018 book “Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain.” “You can see there are people who are angry about their predicament or their place in society. The referendum has awoken some of these feelings about being left behind in parts of communities where there is a two-tier system not just of education, but also of life chances.” Read More: Will Brexit Trigger England’s Next Civil War?British society is still very much defined by its class system, with a person’s background often betrayed by accent and education as much as money. Private schools cut to the heart of that. They command their own fees and operate alongside the taxpayer-funded state system whose access is usually just determined by where a child lives. The privately funded schools benefit from being registered as charities and some other tax breaks. Prices can vary by region. In Birmingham, the girls-only King Edward VI High School charges 13,300 pounds ($16,600) per year. Eton, where annual fees can top 43,000 pounds a year and uniforms are a tail coat and pinstripe pants, is at the higher end of the market, although it takes some boys for free and provides grants to others. It has educated royal princes and 20 of Britain’s prime ministers.To its detractors, Eton is a symbol of the division between the nation’s haves and have-nots. A report for Britain’s children’s commissioner this week found there was a “shameful” rise in the number of young people in England leaving school without enough qualifications.Thelma Walker is one of the Labour members of Parliament backing the “Abolish Eton” campaign. A state-school teacher for 34 years before becoming a lawmaker, she sees how sports fields at a private school near Parliament in London are kept behind iron railings from the rest of the community, she said.“Games lessons are held there, but for most of the day and out of term time it is empty with local people living close by, many living in poor quality housing, unable to access the one green space,” said Walker. “For me this is symbolic of the massive inequality in our society.”Fee-paying schools educate only 7% of under-16s in England. Yet a report by education charity The Sutton Trust revealed that 65% of senior judges, 52% of junior ministers, 44% of media columnists and 16% of university vice-chancellors were educated in private schools.About two thirds of Johnson’s cabinet was privately educated. And it’s getting more exclusive, campaigners say. Last year, fees rose an average 3.7% and pupil numbers dropped to a five-year-low.Supporters of the system point to inequalities in society based on where people live, who their parents are and pressure on high-performing state schools to demonstrate the demand for quality education. House prices are pushed up around good schools, while other parents opt to attend a place of worship to boost the chances of their kids getting into a religious school.If Labour sought to abolish private education, children would just transfer to top-performing state schools, according to Patrick Derham, headmaster of London’s fee-paying Westminster School.Private schools have also offered scholarships to children from less affluent backgrounds and shared facilities with nearby state schools.“I completely accept that the correlation between socio-economic group and educational attainment is too close in the U.K.” said Derham. “It worries me, but it goes way, way beyond any influence private schools can have. We should stop focusing on the outcome of a few thousand pupils.”While Corbyn is painting Johnson and the Conservative Party as the elite, Labour isn’t just about state schools.Former leader Tony Blair, who won three consecutive elections, attended the elite Fettes College in Edinburgh. Among the current crop, Winchester College, founded in 1382 where fees are 41,709 pounds a year, educated two of Corbyn’s key advisers. Corbyn himself attended a fee-paying junior school, known as a preparatory, or “prep” school.Campaigners are considering a range of options before phasing out private schools altogether.A report published on Thursday by the pressure group Private School Policy Reform claims adding standard 20% sales tax on to school fees would raise about 1.75 billion pounds even after taking into account a 5% reduction in pupil numbers as some families get priced out. A second proposal suggests axing the status as charities for tax purposes.Labour has already pledged to impose sales tax on fees and spend the revenue on free school meals for all in the state sector. But how much revenue the reforms would actually deliver is disputed by research commissioned by the Independent Schools Council, which represents private schools. It could end up costing at least 416 million pounds because schools would reclaim the sales tax like other businesses, it said.“There is a clear contradiction in a policy that aims to raise revenue from independent schools and reduce demand for them at the same time,” said Julie Robinson, who heads the council.For now, it’s not clear if anything will get off the ground. The private school debate has to be selected in Brighton, then passed by delegates before being fully costed and adopted into the party’s manifesto, even though it was endorsed by the party’s finance spokesman and key strategist John McDonnell.A total abolition of private schools would require a sizable Labour majority in Parliament, something that looks unlikely given the division over Brexit. The Conservatives lead the polls by as much as 10 percentage points even after more than three years of upheaval and political sclerosis over leaving the EU, in part a reflection of concern over a socialist government under Corbyn.If it did come down to it, though, moderate Labour politicians could back abolition, said former party lawmaker John Woodcock.“No Labour MP is going to go down fighting for class privilege if it came to a vote,” Woodcock said. “If it’s a matter of throwing a bit of red meat to the left of the party, then I expect they’d let it go through Parliament.”To contact the author of this story: Kitty Donaldson in London at kdonaldson1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Rodney JeffersonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

(Bloomberg) -- Nothing runs through the veins of British society more than the colors of an old school tie.With the country deep in conflict with itself over leaving the European Union, the opposition Labour Party may be about to stir up another quintessentially British argument: the class war over private schools.The party faithful convenes for their conference in Brighton on England’s south coast this weekend and a group of members is pushing for their “Abolish Eton” campaign to be part of the debate. Named after the U.K.’s most iconic school and alma mater of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it aims to shut down establishments for fee-paying elites or at least tax them out of existence.The scrapping of private schools has several hurdles to overcome before becoming Labour policy, let alone U.K. law. But the fact that it’s being discussed alongside Brexit and workers’ rights at such a febrile time shows how the party under socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn is eager to make political capital by attacking the rich. It also helps explain why many in Britain are as wary of a Labour government as they are of Brexit.The vote to leave the EU cleaved the electorate between “leave” and “remain,” yet it was as much about income and opportunity disparities in a country with the wealthiest capital in Europe and yet where a United Nations report last year concluded that a fifth of the population lives in poverty.“You can talk about it being a zeitgeist issue,” said Robert Verkaik, author of the 2018 book “Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain.” “You can see there are people who are angry about their predicament or their place in society. The referendum has awoken some of these feelings about being left behind in parts of communities where there is a two-tier system not just of education, but also of life chances.” Read More: Will Brexit Trigger England’s Next Civil War?British society is still very much defined by its class system, with a person’s background often betrayed by accent and education as much as money. Private schools cut to the heart of that. They command their own fees and operate alongside the taxpayer-funded state system whose access is usually just determined by where a child lives. The privately funded schools benefit from being registered as charities and some other tax breaks. Prices can vary by region. In Birmingham, the girls-only King Edward VI High School charges 13,300 pounds ($16,600) per year. Eton, where annual fees can top 43,000 pounds a year and uniforms are a tail coat and pinstripe pants, is at the higher end of the market, although it takes some boys for free and provides grants to others. It has educated royal princes and 20 of Britain’s prime ministers.To its detractors, Eton is a symbol of the division between the nation’s haves and have-nots. A report for Britain’s children’s commissioner this week found there was a “shameful” rise in the number of young people in England leaving school without enough qualifications.Thelma Walker is one of the Labour members of Parliament backing the “Abolish Eton” campaign. A state-school teacher for 34 years before becoming a lawmaker, she sees how sports fields at a private school near Parliament in London are kept behind iron railings from the rest of the community, she said.“Games lessons are held there, but for most of the day and out of term time it is empty with local people living close by, many living in poor quality housing, unable to access the one green space,” said Walker. “For me this is symbolic of the massive inequality in our society.”Fee-paying schools educate only 7% of under-16s in England. Yet a report by education charity The Sutton Trust revealed that 65% of senior judges, 52% of junior ministers, 44% of media columnists and 16% of university vice-chancellors were educated in private schools.About two thirds of Johnson’s cabinet was privately educated. And it’s getting more exclusive, campaigners say. Last year, fees rose an average 3.7% and pupil numbers dropped to a five-year-low.Supporters of the system point to inequalities in society based on where people live, who their parents are and pressure on high-performing state schools to demonstrate the demand for quality education. House prices are pushed up around good schools, while other parents opt to attend a place of worship to boost the chances of their kids getting into a religious school.If Labour sought to abolish private education, children would just transfer to top-performing state schools, according to Patrick Derham, headmaster of London’s fee-paying Westminster School.Private schools have also offered scholarships to children from less affluent backgrounds and shared facilities with nearby state schools.“I completely accept that the correlation between socio-economic group and educational attainment is too close in the U.K.” said Derham. “It worries me, but it goes way, way beyond any influence private schools can have. We should stop focusing on the outcome of a few thousand pupils.”While Corbyn is painting Johnson and the Conservative Party as the elite, Labour isn’t just about state schools.Former leader Tony Blair, who won three consecutive elections, attended the elite Fettes College in Edinburgh. Among the current crop, Winchester College, founded in 1382 where fees are 41,709 pounds a year, educated two of Corbyn’s key advisers. Corbyn himself attended a fee-paying junior school, known as a preparatory, or “prep” school.Campaigners are considering a range of options before phasing out private schools altogether.A report published on Thursday by the pressure group Private School Policy Reform claims adding standard 20% sales tax on to school fees would raise about 1.75 billion pounds even after taking into account a 5% reduction in pupil numbers as some families get priced out. A second proposal suggests axing the status as charities for tax purposes.Labour has already pledged to impose sales tax on fees and spend the revenue on free school meals for all in the state sector. But how much revenue the reforms would actually deliver is disputed by research commissioned by the Independent Schools Council, which represents private schools. It could end up costing at least 416 million pounds because schools would reclaim the sales tax like other businesses, it said.“There is a clear contradiction in a policy that aims to raise revenue from independent schools and reduce demand for them at the same time,” said Julie Robinson, who heads the council.For now, it’s not clear if anything will get off the ground. The private school debate has to be selected in Brighton, then passed by delegates before being fully costed and adopted into the party’s manifesto, even though it was endorsed by the party’s finance spokesman and key strategist John McDonnell.A total abolition of private schools would require a sizable Labour majority in Parliament, something that looks unlikely given the division over Brexit. The Conservatives lead the polls by as much as 10 percentage points even after more than three years of upheaval and political sclerosis over leaving the EU, in part a reflection of concern over a socialist government under Corbyn.If it did come down to it, though, moderate Labour politicians could back abolition, said former party lawmaker John Woodcock.“No Labour MP is going to go down fighting for class privilege if it came to a vote,” Woodcock said. “If it’s a matter of throwing a bit of red meat to the left of the party, then I expect they’d let it go through Parliament.”To contact the author of this story: Kitty Donaldson in London at kdonaldson1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Rodney JeffersonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

September 20, 2019 at 03:30PM via IFTTT

[zoedart-blog]

Gran’s Story

Grans Story

 I was born in Kensington, Melbourne on 5-1-1923. My family lived near the Flemington Racecourse. My mother Agnes Grey McKissock and father- Joseph Purcell Brown had a lolly shop next door to the theatre. My mother came to south Australia by sailing ship- My grandfather George McKissock was 6ft1in, He came from Paisley, Scotland and had lovely snowy white hair and beard and a beautiful accent, he was a sailor on sailing ships. Stephen has a couple of signing off certificates in his possession. They came to live in Port Melbourne where his wife Kate Lavina Grey rented a double fronted house and the front rooms were turned into a midwifery hospital. Kate took on women who wanted nursing whilst having babies. My grandfather eventually got a job on the wharves. My father’s mother and father apparently had over time a few country inns around St. Leonards and Sussex Way. He was a sailor in the British Navy, I think he left the navy in Sydney and joined the A.I.F his number was 206. I remember living behind a lolly shop next door to a theatre in Racecourse Road, Flemington. I can remember at the age of 3 kneeling on a chair in front of an ice cream can digging ice-cream out with a spoon at theatre intervals. My sister Betty Ellan was born there and not long after we shifted to Ascot Vale to a delicatessen shop where my mother did ALL the cooking- (pies which we had for lunch every school day) fish, cold meats etc etc.

 The Depression was on and sadly people owed them a lot of money, the shop was situated in an area where there were a lot of horse trainers, jockeys where they used to tick up everything, so once again we shifted. To Brunswick where I went to school, I was about 6 years old. We had to wait till our house was ready in Merlynston, North Coburg. We had enough money for a deposit on a three-bedroom weatherboard house at 39 Orvieto Street Merlynston, eight hundred pounds and my mother paid 1 pound a week till they paid it off.

My brother Donald George Harry was born here, and we were all so happy. My father at that time was employed on two ships going back and forth to Tasmania, hit his war wounds were a big problem and he eventually received the TPI pension. We bought a car, at least my dad did and each weekend in the spring and summer we ALL mum, dad and 3 kids, uncle and aunts etc would go to Seaford. The car had a big front seat and two dicky seats on the back of it and a big back seat. So, held quite a few bodies. We also went to Hanging Rock for New Years Day and picnics in the autumn a wonderful time for us kids.

It was such a sad time for my mother and father, our long-awaited brother wasn’t doing to well and it was found he had double cataracts in both eyes and some double mastoids in both ears. My mother had measles whilst carrying him for so many years he had to have many operations, the result was vision- 16 inches and partly spastic. My poor mum had to do so much for Don and my Father, taking Don to a private school 3 days a week. My dad was also in and out of hospital.

At the age of 58 years my mum collapsed and died.

The doctors said, “there was nothing they could do for her, she was worn out”. My dad went on to be manager of the Masonic Club dining room in Flinders Street, all voluntary and he died at 72. During all that time mu aunt Kate looked after Don and Dad. She died at 64 in 1963 and then Allen and I took over the care of Don, looking after him. He was living in a cottage environment for many years he had spent 5 years with us. He was 18 when he came to live with us.

So much for my family.

My sister and I went to church 4 times a week each Sunday, 10am Christian Endeavour, Church, Sunday School and church again at night. My dear grandfather would give us threepence every Sunday if we had been good, many a time I would only get a penny. Bet seemed to manage a threepence. We sang in the choir in the Methodist church in our street and each summer and winter we’d get a new dress only to be worn on a Sunday or for something special. I was also a Sunday school teacher until I got ticked off for wearing lipstick at 16 years old.

 My life at home- I always had to clean the brass. Perhaps that was how I got to love it so much. I can remember 4 brass candlesticks they had been given to my mother as a wedding present, I had them dated 17th century. I have them here and Tina’s put her name on them, Brass taps, plates etc. We would as kids have to set the table, always a white cloth and a vase of flowers in the centre, a big oval table and then we had to wash up after tea. In those days no dishwasher, only children. As we did that, we would sing our heads off until dad told us to shut up. I also had to mow the lawns, with a hand mower of course and that took hours. For pocket money on Saturdays we’d get sixpence to go to the local pictures and threepence to spend. If we bought our lunch on Friday whilst attending Merlynston Primary school another threepence- one penny for a pie. 1 penny for a luscious family ice block and a lolly. Bliss. I made many long-life friends at that school, 23 of us met in Melbourne 1st Monday in December. The girls who live in Melbourne met monthly, but there is always the phone, not short cats, they’re lovely long ones. Of the 23 girls present last December only three were under 80 (only just). We met at school, friends through teens, dances, shows, weddings and babies. We all knew each other’s families, husbands, some children until we all went off to different places but now, we are mainly widowed, sad really. Some of the girl’s names- Val Creighton, Lil Westwood, Peg Woods, Clarice Roberts and Norma Joyce the only one of us to marry a yank and head odd to the USA but came back here eventually Olive Stubbs, Peggy Cash, Lorna Watts. We played cherry bobs, basketball, have school reports, concerts exams. My dad gave me my first watch when I passed my merit certificate at 13 1/2 , I could leave school then. My first job was at Allen’s music shop, at the information desk, a bit boring, seven shillings and sixpence a week.

Then I got a position at the posh end of Collins street to learn Millinery at Thommy Harrisons. It was the most exclusive salon in Melbourne where I learnt to make hats and sell them. Only people with lots of money could afford to shop there.

My girlfriends told me that first night after I said after I had a few dances with him “hands off he’s mine” and he was. We had a wonderful time together dancing, dinners at lovely places, theatres etc until he went overseas. We got engaged before he went to Manus Island with the 79th Spitfire Squadron on active service. Allen’s brother Jim was in the Navy, he served in some dangerous countries for 37 years, his brother George was in the 6th Division Middle East, Greece and was captured in Crete and was a POW in Germany and came home safely after the war. Arthur was also in 6th Division and was sent to Malaysia, was captured and died on the Burma Railway. Four sons in the forces, his poor mother she has such a lot to bear. Allen came back to Australia to pick up more spitfires and was given leave to come home from Oakey, Queensland. Two days to get home, three days here and two days back there a week and they let him come home again. We married on the 31st of January 1945 at St Linus Church of England in Merlynston at 5pm, I arranged the wedding in 3 days and we had 4 days honeymoon- I don’t know why my granddaughters had to take 12 months or more. We had the reception at the Federal Hotel in Collins Street, and I wore a lace dress with a train and a veil borrowed from a Catholic Convent. The nuns made them and lent them out to all who would like them. They asked what time we were to be married so they could pray for our future happiness. I thought it was a lovely thought perhaps that is why Allen and I had such a long (58 years) wonderfully happy life together. Everyone has their ups and downs and to succeed one must give and take and look after one another in sickness and health. Then whatever setbacks one can always get above them if there is plenty of love about. We had part of our honeymoon at the Hotel, room 21 with a bathroom, very posh and then had two days at the Georgian Inn. So, we had seven days of married life then Allen went off again to Moratie and several other islands. The war ended in August 1945 and Allen was discharged in Bairnsdale 1945.

I went up there to live and keep house for two months. I couldn’t cook much, but I soon learnt, not like you girls- we weren’t allowed in the kitchen, perhaps because of food rationing. I don’t quite know why as my mother was a lovely cook. We had three honeymoons altogether and between postings it was at Bairnsdale I learnt I was pregnant, thrilled to bits we were. When Allen left the air force, he went to Tech school at night to brush up on his carpentering. We lived with mum and dad in Merlynston. Ian was born 19th of August 1946 and by then we had bought a block of land for 55 pounds at 14 Edward St, Fawkner and were planning our home. Materials were very hard to get, and one had to go on a list to buy things. We gad enough money to build the back of our house, one bedroom, nursery, big kitchen, sunroom, laundry and bathroom combined. Allen worked very hard to get it ready for when Stephen arrived on the 17th of October 1948. We shifted in when Stephen was three weeks old, we furnished our house very comfortable with bits and pieces relations gave us and were quite happy to do that. Later on, we built on a bedroom, hallway, bathroom, and lovely big loungeroom. In 1950 Allen decided to join the police force, he did very well in all his studies often coming 1st or 2nd. He was the only married bloke in No.5 squad and lived out. The single fellows lived in barracks, he even learnt to swim. Allen’s first police station was in Brunswick and by then we decided we’d like a little girl. Ian was at Lynch Road School and Stephen had just started, Stephen and Ian shifted into the middle room, us in the front one (even had a walk-in robe!) The nursery was empty, Robbie John arrived on the 11th of May 1955, and so we gave up the idea of trying for a girl. Allen’s mum had 9 boys and two girls; the girls arrived last. Allen finished off our house and we even had a road made by then, he was doing very well in the police force. Allen was promoted to uniform to plain-clothes detective and went to Airlie College and came out 4th of 36. It was very hard demanding work, all shifts life was a struggle in those days, but we managed to buy a car, a Morris for 100 pounds then in 1952 an A model ford for 50pounds, Allen’s pride and joy. What fun we had picnics, rabbiting, mushrooming, wood gathering. A picnic consisted of a cooked leg of lamb, jar of beetroot, pickles, loaf of bread, butter, tomatoes, white onions and fruitcake- wonderful. Pop and Gran Mumford lived 5 minutes away across the paddocks, we all used to go to Sunday school night tea. Geoff, Dorrie, Jean were home enough to have a footy or a cricket team, great times.

Then, Allen was talked into trying for a country station, Wedderburn the first, what excitement, had to rent out my lovely family house everything just right. Garden was lovely- we shifted just after Christmas 1958. Allen had the Ford all done up as he had to use it for the Police work and away we went with the trailer on the back, on board more incidentals plus bikes, dog, dog kennel, 4 bantams on eggs, 1 possum and I imagine a lot of pot plants. I was his unpaid offsider, After Wedderburn we went to Violet Town the Yarra Junction, each town provided for all us new experiences. Wedderburn was a small town, 3000 people all very friendly, a lovely big old house and an office looking out onto a village green where cricket was played in the summer. Stephen went down to the local milk bar, he was breathless when he got back, the man said we could have a loan of a cow and he had two and not enough feed as we had a Lucerne paddock we accepted. Me on the condition I did not have to milk her. Flossie, A jersey cow. I did learn how to milk later as Allen would sometimes be caught up with work and the boys would be playing sports etc. I also had a piglet given to me for Mother’s Day, when sold 5 months later $79 came my way. I mothered in the first 6 months, 5 baby lambs, a clucky hen who sat on 10 duck eggs, rosella parrots and galas on my combustion stove hearth who all had to be hand fed. We had a possum who ate roses, fruit and chocolate. I even made my own butter, separated the milk and supplied everyone who called in with jars of cream and homemade jams. My town friends could hardly believe but it’s all true.

Our inspector came once a month for lunch and this day Allen had Fred, a simple lad in the lock up. He was caught flashing himself off to school girls. I had to give him lunch also, so inspector said “what are you going to give Fred for lunch?”, same as you I said, but I put a bit more bacon on yours” and the inspector said “are you going to put it on a plate with a fork and knife?”. “yes” I replied. “well” said the inspector “He could break the plate, cut his throat, stab himself with knife and four times with the fork” so, Fred’s lunch was on an enamel plate with an enamel cup and a spoon, one soon learns. Another time, a runaway boy who I had already made him a great heap of sandwiches, Allen came in and said “he was still hungry”, we had, had a flower show and cooking competition, I won the lamington prize and I bought the prize fruit cake, I don’t know if Allen told him what he was about to eat but he never left any.

Next stop Violet Town- Allen’s mother and father were born at Boho and Warrenbain in time we found we were related to half the town. We’d have weekends when Allen’s parents would come up and have open house and all wonderful stories these relations would tell. The Hume Highway was very bad for accidents, dreadful ones- trucks-many times I’d have injured people to look after and feed till their relatives would come and pick them up. Once, Allen and the shire engineer (he said he would help) a truck with milk powder and a truck with 250 sheep collided, what a mess. Both trucks caught fire and by the time Allen got there the sheep were running up and down the highway with their wool on fire. All the sheep had to be destroyed, nothing much left of the two truckies but the shire engineer never offered to go with Allen again.

Next Stop- over the mountains to Yarra Junction. What a difference. Mountains. Huge gumtrees. Ferns and a house on the side of a mountain and facing Bencairn near Donna Buang. Within 3 days it was all on fire. I didn’t see Allen for four days and then I saw him on the TV. Allen and a ranger tried to get two boys and their grandparents to leave their house as it was in a valley surrounded by trees, but they said “they would stay” so Allen couldn’t do much about it. After the fire they went back to find them. They had all perished on the way out in a ute. The house was still standing, so very sad. The fires were over by Wednesday and Dianna Trask’s wedding was on the Saturday. Allen in one car containing a policeman, his wife, myself, 3 boys and two girls in the back of our station wagon, we were the crowd control.

People came from everywhere to Warburton it really was a circus, church windows full of faces, the brides father had his wallet pinched out of his pocket, after all that Allen had to make way for the bride and grooms car to the reception with a green Holden station wagon with all of us in it and one of the kids yells out “look they’re kidding!” what fun we all had. After the fires the ferns grass and trees were all starting to shoot after 10 days. Plenty of snow in the winter to play in.

After two years Allen and our family had to shift back to Melbourne to Seaford to take up a promotion what a shock to our systems, the people were so rude, always in a hurry and didn’t care about one another. After a while I was a bit lost after having been so busy for several years. I was lucky to meet with Winifred Moss a well-known dressmaker for the wealthy, also did beautiful society weddings, entered the gown of the year 7 times and won 3. Winifred wanted someone to do beading and bridal headgear. I started at 3 ½ days a week and ended up doing full time. I was offered a position at Haileybury College looking after 700 boys and masters in sickbay. I loved it, I also had to show overseas visitors over the school and do flowers and decorate the reception rooms when needed.

Allen was not at all well and became very ill and was discharged on medical grounds, as a family his boys and I were very proud of our policeman and the wonderful life he had provided. I retired from Haileybury and we bought an old house on a big treed block near the beach in Rye. We spent many happy years renovating and creating a lovely garden. My garden was featured in Home Beautiful as the best CWA garden on the peninsula.

We decided six months after finishing the house to move to warmer climes, to Maroochydore where we had, looking back 5 ½ years of holidays. But we returned to Victoria as our granddaughters were growing up without us around.

Ian, Heather and four granddaughters in Tinamba

Stephen and June and two granddaughters in Canberra

Rob and Sue in Lakes Entrance

We settled in eagle point and the mozzies made us move to rosebud, where the traffic made us move to Maffra, just the right type of place we were looking for. Lovely little town, very caring people, loving friends and I hope I have many more years among you all.

Sadly, Allen passed away in April 2003, a brave man.

We now have 6 granddaughters and seven great granddaughters, and hopefully someday maybe a great grandson.

[newstfionline]

The Latest Populist Craze in Britain: An Unabashed Elitist

By Ellen Barry, NY Times, Sept. 29, 2017

LONDON--On a recent afternoon, when the very tall, very thin British lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg rose from the bench where he had been reclining, his fellow members of Parliament perked up, confident that what followed would be amusing.

What upper-crust kookiness would it be this time? Would he call someone a “degenerate libertine”? Reference Darius the Mede? Invoke his floridly named sixth child, Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg? Slip in a 29-letter word as if no one would notice?

For years, Mr. Rees-Mogg, 48, has been one of British politics’ favorite eccentrics, affecting a languid, antiquarian poshness that verges on performance art. He was an obscure backbencher, though, never once included in an annual ranking of the country’s top 100 right-wing thinkers.

Among the most unlikely developments of this political season in Britain has been that Mr. Rees-Mogg--whose conservative views include a hard line on departure from the European Union and on abortion and gay marriage--is being talked up as a possible Conservative Party leader.

This unfurled in phases all summer. Youth activists coined the term “Moggmentum,” touting him as the only Tory, as Conservatives are also known, with the charisma to match the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. A 24-year-old man from South Yorkshire had the phrase tattooed on his chest, sending the newspapers into transports of delight. Memes followed. There were online quizzes (“Name Your Child the Jacob Rees-Mogg Way”) and T-shirts (“This fellow is a Rees-Moggian teen”). Someone recorded electronic dance tracks called Moggwave.

By fall, it was no longer a joke. Prime Minister Theresa May had become dismally unpopular, and when a conservative website asked party members who should be the Conservatives’ next leader, Mr. Rees-Mogg got more votes than anyone else.

An interview on a morning TV show highlighting Mr. Rees-Mogg’s positions was expected to put an end to the chatter. But it appeared, for many, to have the opposite effect.

Voters understood that his positions were to the right of his party, but they had found a quality in him that mattered more than positions. He was, they said, “authentic.”

A decade ago, many Conservative Party leaders wanted nothing to do with Mr. Rees-Mogg. He first attracted national attention in the late 1990s, when he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in a working-class Labour stronghold in Scotland and went out to shake voters’ hands in the company of his nanny. (It was reported that they had campaigned in a Bentley, but he later denied this charge; it was a Mercedes.)

At that time, Tory leaders were intent on demonstrating a “common touch,” even if it meant obfuscating their own elite backgrounds. David Cameron, who attended Eton and Oxford, made a point of wearing jeans and riding a bicycle to work.

Mr. Rees-Mogg had less interest in restyling himself as a common man. At 12, around the time he was busted for running a roulette game during recess, he grandly told a radio interviewer about his stock-trading and his collection of antique silver.

At Oxford, his classmates seized on him as a figure of fun, and he played along, recommending that every student wear a morning suit and a mortarboard and remarking, “I do so like to cycle around Oxford with it on.” Then, as now, it was difficult to know whether he was serious.

“I have tended just to plod along, really, and do what I’ve done,” he said, in an interview, adding that journalists typically write about him when they have nothing else to report.

But this air of being a cartoonish aristocrat is in large part schtick. Mr. Rees-Mogg’s father was not a man of leisure, but the influential editor of The Times of London, and his grandmother was an American actress, from Mamaroneck, N.Y. Though Mr. Rees-Mogg is very wealthy, most of his wealth was not inherited but earned during a 25-year career as an investment banker and fund manager, he said in an interview.

He made his home in Hong Kong in his 20s, taking careful and tactical steps toward entering politics, until a promising seat came open in his home region, North East Somerset, in 2010. He then stopped managing funds, though he remains a partner in Somerset Capital Management, which has $8.5 billion under management.

“He had the right connections but trod the path and the slippery pole like everyone else,” said Richard Harris, another British fund manager who met Mr. Rees-Mogg through a Hong Kong conservatives’ group. “He had no easy ride to politics.”

Margaret Brewer, a local Conservative Party official in North East Somerset, recalled that party leaders made repeated calls warning her and the other local representatives not to select him. “It was made quite clear that was not what they wanted in a candidate,” she said. Ms. Brewer was not deterred, though, and neither was Mr. Rees-Mogg. “Jacob doesn’t care what people think,” she said. “He must do,” she added. “But he doesn’t seem to.”

Mr. Rees-Mogg’s gentle, erudite manner made him a favorite among his fellow lawmakers, even those repelled by his ideas. But only with “Brexit” did the populist mood swing fully in his direction. Attributes that once made Mr. Rees-Mogg an unviable candidate--like his opposition, as a conservative Roman Catholic, to abortion under any circumstances--now make him look brave and honest, wrote Freddy Gray, deputy editor of The Spectator.

In the age of social media, Mr. Gray added, a comic persona also comes in handy. “It’s all part of the LOL, nothing matters, Twitter thing,” he said in an interview. “It’s dangerous, in a way, that if you don’t make yourself an obviously comical figure, or seem like you’re on the fringes, people will regard you with suspicion.”

As the Conservative Party conference approached--it begins on Sunday, and Mr. Rees-Mogg is expected to give as many as nine speeches in two days--moderate Conservatives sent up flares of warning. One of his colleagues in Parliament said she would quit the party if he became leader (though she added that she found him “incredibly charming”).

Those hesitations had not reached Radstock, where Mr. Rees-Mogg traveled on a recent morning to meet with his constituents. Radstock was a mining town until the last pits closed down, in the 1970s. Among those waiting to see him was Scott Williams, a knife-maker with brawny forearms and the accent of a Hollywood pirate. Mr. Williams said he had always considered himself staunchly Labour, but was increasingly concerned about attacks on his personal liberties. He had fiercely supported Brexit.

“I belong in Texas,” he said. “That’s the type of person I am. I don’t fit in in England.”

Mr. Williams said he had paid little attention to Mr. Rees-Mogg’s voting record on taxes or welfare--“I don’t really keep count on politics”--but had been drawn to him in recent months, and was impressed when he stood by his hard-line view on abortion.

“Something I do like about Jacob, he’s a straight talker,” he said. “He is who he is. He may be blue blood, but at least you get a straight answer.”

Mr. Rees-Mogg was expected at a party gathering in Kent, so he climbed back into his Jaguar sport utility vehicle, a history of the Hapsburg dynasty queued up on the stereo. As he steered through narrow country lanes, past haystacks and swelling hillsides dotted with sheep, he denied any ambition to become leader of the Tory Party, or for that matter, prime minister.

But he admitted to enjoying the speculation.

“It was just a jolly summer,” he said. “It was all very amusing.”

[learnspanishfans]

How to Speak English Like the English

Two of my favourite articles on Fluent in 3 Months are Benny's classics How to Speak English Like the Irish and its sequel Advanced Hiberno English. So, being from England, I'd like to share some thoughts on how to speak English like the English. Let's start with a story you might hear from a mate down the pub in any town in the south of England:

Bloody hell mate! A fortnight ago I was down the local having a chin-wag with this fit bird, feeling pretty chuffed with myself, when some dodgy-looking bloke came up and started getting lairy with me. I don't know what he was on about; I thought he was taking the piss, but he wouldn't stop giving me aggro. I reckon he must have been off his tits. Next thing I knew the Old Bill had shown up and nicked this geezer before he could scarper. What a load of bollocks!

If an English learner saw the above paragraph on a language test, they might decide to give up and learn Esperanto instead. If an English person saw it, however, they'd effortlessly understand that the narrator had been talking to a pretty female in a pub two weeks ago when they'd been accosted by an aggressive and possibly drunk man who was then arrested by the police. If you're a native English speaker staring at the above and wondering if I'm just making it up, I assure you, you ain't seen nothing yet. In this article, I’m going to share how to speak English with an English accent. Before I do that, I’d like to clear up a few common myths about England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom.

Myth 1: The British Accent

I need to clear one thing up. There’s no such thing as a “British accent”. We Brits rarely use that term ourselves, and we tend to roll our eyes when we hear it used in American TV shows. It’s far more common in the UK to be specific and talk about English, Welsh, Scottish, or Northern Irish accents, the four of which are very distinct from each other. These four accents still only represent broad categories that can be subdivided further.

Myth 2: The United Kingdom and England are the Same Thing

To those who don't understand the difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England - or where other places like Scotland fit into all of this… look it up. Seriously, it’s not that hard to understand. (This video does a neat job of explaining.)

Myth 3: English Citizens Speak the Original Version of English

Do English folk really speak the the “original” version of English? It’s actually a dubious claim. Linguists agree that over the last few hundred years, the accents and dialects of Britain have changed more than the American dialects they gave birth to. In other words, modern American speech is closer to the way British people spoke in 1776 than modern British speech is. [caption id="attachment_20244" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] This is how I imagine it sounded.[/caption] Suffice to say that I'm from England (specifically, I grew up in Oxfordshire), and I can tell you a little bit about the way they talk in the other three Home Nations (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), but this is an article about English English, one of the oldest dialects of the world’s biggest language, and the one that gave it its name.

English vs. American English - What’s the Difference?

1. The Rhotic Accent

How exactly then have our accents diverged since the Boston Tea Party? Many books have been written about the precise phonetic details of different English dialects, but for now I’ll stick with just one: rhoticity. If you have a “rhotic accent”, that means you pronounce the letter “r” every time it’s written, and most American dialects (along with Irish and Scottish ones) remain fully rhotic. In England, on the other hand, most of us at some point in the last few hundred years stopped pronouncing the letter "r" when it comes before a consonant (or is at the end of a word). For example in my own name, George, which I pronounce like the word "jaw" with an extra "j" sound on the end, no "r" to be found. In most parts of England (the main exception being the West Country), people pronounce "father" identically to "farther", "pawn" identically to "porn", and "panda" identically to "pander", while to most Americans and Canadians those word pairs are all distinct. Non-rhotic accents can be found outside England too, particularly in places that we colonised more recently than North America like Australia and New Zealand. They can be even found in a small number of places in the U.S., most famously in Noo Yawk. But rhoticity remains one of the clearest, most prominent dividing lines between different varieties of English.

2. Vowel Sounds

Vowel sounds have shifted a fair bit over the years. In many cases sounds which used to be pronounced differently are now pronounced the same, or vice versa, but the merger or split only happened on one side of the Atlantic. I pronounce “cot” very differently from “caught”, but to many Americans they’re homophones. Similarly with “merry”, “marry”, and the name “Mary”, which are three distinct words in British speech, but sound the same in most American accents. In the other direction, I’d pronounce “flaw” identically to “floor” (there’s that lack of rhoticity again), but in American English those words are usually separated not just by an “r” but by two noticeably different vowel sounds.

3. Vocabulary

Where things start to get really confusing is with vocabulary, and I’m not just talking about slang. In Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, while in the U.S.A. the Postal Service delivers the mail. Confusing, huh? Many of our vocabulary differences are totally arbitrary: if I did something on Saturday or Sunday, I'd say that I'd done it at the weekend, whilst an American would talk about having done it on the weekend. Other differences allow for extra shades of meaning: Americans only talk about being "in the hospital", whilst British English retains a distinction between being "in the/a hospital", which just means you're literally inside the hospital building, and "in hospital", which heavily implies that you're in the hospital as a patient. It's like the difference between being "in school" and "in a school"... except Americans use the word "school" slightly differently too. In the U.S., "school" refers to any educational establishment including college, whilst in the U.K. it's only used to refer to primary and secondary education: the school that you do before going to “uni”, a British abbreviation for “university” that Americans don’t use. To add to the confusion, "public school" means something completely different here; for historical reasons a "public school" in the U.K. is a type of very expensive and exclusive private school, whilst a free, government-funded school (what Americans call a public school) is a "state school." Do you follow? If you’re from America, you may have raised an eyebrow at my frequent use of the word "whilst" in this article. This word sounds very archaic and old-timey to American ears, but it lives on in the U.K. as a synonym of "while". The verb "to reckon" is also alive and well in the British Isles, while in the U.S. it’s not really used anymore, except stereotypically by rural moonshine-drinking folks from the South: ”I reckon this here town ain’t big enough for the both of us!” Then again, I find it weird when Americans say “I wish I would have”. This construction sounds just plain wrong to me. In England we say “I wish I had”. Where do you go to buy alcohol? In the U.S. it's probably a liquor store, but in Blighty (that means Britain) it's more likely to be at the off-licence, so named because it's licensed to sell alcohol for consumption off the premises, as opposed to a bar where you can both buy alcohol and drink it in the same building. After a visit to the off-licence (or "offy", where I'm from), a Brit might get pissed, which means "angry" to an American but "drunk" to us. Another American synonym for "angry" is "mad", but in the U.K. that word exclusively means "crazy" - which caused confusion recently when Bill Clinton described British politician Jeremy Corbyn as "the maddest person in the room". In context it was clear that Clinton had meant “angry”, but many British commentators misinterpreted the statement as a comment on Corbyn's mental health.

What About the Different Accents You’ll Find Inside England?

So far we’ve just been looking at the differences between American English and English English. I’ve barely touched on the enormous regional variations that you'll find within England: from the town I live in I could drive two hours in any direction and be somewhere where the people sound completely different. The stereotypical “posh” (upper class) accent (often called “received pronunciation” or RP) is generally only found in the south, but it’s only the most formal form of southern speech; many shades of variation exist. Up north people sound very different not only from southerners but from each other. For some reason - probably the fact that the north historically has had a lower population density and so the towns have been more isolated - there’s much more regional accent variation in the north, and you can generally pinpoint where a northern person is from from their accent with a higher degree of accuracy than you can a southerner. Liverpool and Manchester are 90 minutes’ drive from each other, and yet the people in each city sound completely different.

We're Only at the Tip of the Iceberg, and it's Time to Go Swimming

Remember our discussion a few moments ago about how a Brit who'd been to the offy might end up pissed? If he got too plastered (drunk) last night he might be hanging (hungover) the next morning and have a lie-in (he stayed in bed later than normal). When his friends ask him what he did last night, he'd tell them that he'd gone out on the piss (gone out drinking), or maybe even on the pull, which means that he wasn't just drinking last night but looking for a fit (attractive) girl to take home. Now it's the morning, but maybe today he'll skive school (skip class), or, if he has a job, pull a sickie (call up his boss and pretend to be ill so he can get the day off). If his boss realises that he's talking rubbish (lying, bullshitting), he might give him the sack (fire him). Our British friend isn't really ill (sick), he just can't be bothered to go to work. I've never been able to precisely explain "can't be bothered" to Americans, but it's an extremely common expression in the U.K. used when you don't want to do something because it's too much effort and/or you're lazy. If you want to be more vulgar, you can upgrade to "can't be fucked", a phrase which shouldn’t be taken too literally. A happy halfway point is "can't be arsed": a fine example of the British spelling and pronunciation of the American "ass". (“Bum”, by the way, is another word for "arse" here, unlike in the U.S. where a "bum" is a homeless person, known in the U.K. as a "tramp".) Then you have “sod”. This ubiquitous British insult refers to an unpleasant or disliked person (see also "wanker") and is considered mildly rude on roughly the same level as “crap” or “damn”. It can also be used as an exclamation (“sod it!”) or an intensifier (“that sodding wanker”). To my astonishment, while researching this article I learned that the word "sod" originated as an abbreviation for "sodomite". I've been using this word my entire life, and I apparently never even knew what it meant. Sodding hell! I’ve only scratched the surface here - I could write far more about the many peculiarities of English English, and the above is just a taster. If I’m being honest (another British turn of phrase - Americans more naturally say “to be honest”), I didn’t really think about most of these things until I started travelling, meeting people from all over the world and finding that many of the expressions I thought were international are in fact uniquely English, or vice versa.

What are Your Favourite Local Words?

Do you have any other fine examples of incomprehensible Englishisms? Or do you have any favourite words or turns of phrase that are common where you're from, but that no-one else understands? Let me know in the comments.

The post How to Speak English Like the English appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.

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[lodelss]

Tea, Biscuits, and Empire: The Long Con of Britishness

Laurie Penny | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,360 words)

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” — Winston Churchill, unpublished memorandum

“Will Mockney for food.” — Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. III

This is a story about a border war. Specifically, a border war between two nations that happen, at least in theory, to be precisely the same place. One of them is Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

One is a real place. The other is a fascinatingly dishonest, selective statement of fact, rather like describing how beautiful the countryside was in the antebellum American South. A truth so incomplete it’s worse than a lie.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die. The U.K. is unique among modern states in that we not only buy our own hype, we also sell it overseas at a markup. “Britain always felt like the land where all the stories came from,” an American writer friend told me when I asked why she so often sets her novels in Britain. Over and over, writers and readers of every background — but particularly Americans — tell me that the U.K. has a unique hold on their imaginations.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.

That hold is highly profitable. Britain was kept out of recession last year by one industry: entertainment. Over the past four years, the motion picture, television, and music industries have grown by almost 50 percent — the service sector, only by 6.  So many shows are currently filmed in England that productions struggle to book studio space, and even the new soundstages announced by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2018 will be hard-pressed to keep up with demand. As historian Dan Snow pointed out, “[O]ur future prosperity is dependent on turning ourselves into a giant theme park of Queens, detectives, spies, castles, and young wizards.”

There is hope: the statues are coming down all over Britain, starting in Bristol on June 7, 2020. Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston, who is remembered for how he lavished his wealth on the port city and not for the murder of 19,000 men, women and children during the Middle Passage. Colston’s statue was thrown into Bristol Harbor, where it remains. In Oxford, students demanded the removal of monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the business magnate and “architect of apartheid” who stole vast tracts of Africa driven by his conviction in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons. In Parliament Square, fences have been erected to protect Winston Churchill himself, the colonial administrator and war leader whose devoted acolytes include both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Young Britons are  demanding a reckoning with a history of colonial conquest, slave-trading, industrial savagery, and utter refusal to examine its own legacy.

Meanwhile, the economic disaster of a no-deal Brexit is still looming and Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll in Europe, putting further pressure on an already-struggling National Health Service. Under Boris Johnson’s catastrophic leadership, or lack thereof, there are no signs of changing tactics on either. Fantasy Britain is having a boomtime. Real Britain is in deep, deep trouble.

* * *

I was homesick. That’s my excuse. I had been in Los Angeles for six months, writing for TV shows set in England. I woke up every day 5,000 miles from home, in a city of sweltering tarmac and traffic jams and palm trees, to try and explain how British people speak and think. I fell asleep every night to the radio from home, listening to the logic of xenophobia capture the political mainstream as my country circled the drain. I watched my British friends who are Black or brown or who were born overseas trying to stay brave and hopeful as racism became more and more normalized. I was homesick, and people do silly things when they’re homesick.

So yes, I went to see the Downton Abbey movie.

Specifically, I went to the Downton Abbey Experience, a special screening where you could spend a few hours in a mocked-up Edwardian drawing room, nibbling on tiny food and pretending to be posh. I was expecting it to be rubbish, forgetting that this was Los Angeles, where talented actors and set dressers can be had on every street corner. I couldn’t help but be a bit charmed by the commitment: the food was terrible, but two of the waiters had concocted an elaborate professional-rivalry backstory, and the accent-work was almost flawless. It really did feel as if you’d stepped, if not into Downton itself, then certainly onto the show’s set. And I finally understood. The way Americans feel about this is the way I feel about Star Trek and schlocky space opera. This is their escape from reality. This is their fandom. Not just Downton Abbey — “Britain.”

I do try to resist the temptation to make fun of other people who take uncomplicated joy in their thing. The British do this a lot, and it’s one of the least edifying parts of the national character. Fandom is fine. Escapism is allowed. No semi-sensitive soul can be expected to live in the real world at all times. But watching the whitewashed, revisionist history of your own country adopted as someone else’s fantasy of choice is actively uncomfortable. It’s like sitting by while a decrepit relative gibbers some antediluvian nonsense about the good old days and watching in horror as everyone applauds and says how charming.

I decided not to be charmed and sulked on an ornamental sofa, angrily eating a chocolate bonbon and resenting everyone else for having fun. This was where I met the only other British person in the room, a nice lady from Buckinghamshire in a fancy dress. What did my new friend think of the event?  “I don’t like to complain,” she said, “but I’m sitting here in a ballgown eating bloody bread and jam. Honestly, it’s not worth the money.”

Which was the second-most-British thing anyone said all evening. The most British thing of all had been uttered half an hour earlier, by me, when it dawned on my friend and me that we really should have worn costumes. “It’ll be alright,” I said, “I’ll just take my accent up a bit posher and everyone will be pleased to see us.” Living in a place where all you have to do is say something in your normal accent to be told you’re clever and wonderful is all very well, until you start believing it. This is as true in politics as anywhere else: just showing up and being relentlessly British at people does not constitute sociopolitical strategy. It doesn’t even constitute a personality. I know that there are a lot of British expats who will be cross with me for giving the game away, and chaps, I really am so terribly, terribly sorry. But you and I both know that someday we’ll have to go home, and people won’t automatically be pleased to see us just because we said some words.

This is as true in politics as anywhere else: just showing up and being relentlessly British at people does not constitute sociopolitical strategy.

I write for TV shows set in Britain, or a fantasy version of it, and American Anglophilia is endlessly fascinating to me, as it is to most British expats. It comes in a few different flavourways (ed.: Normally we’d edit this to the u-less American spelling, but in this particular case it seemed appropriate to let it go). There’s the saccharine faux-nostalgia of Downton fans, the ones who love The Crown and afternoon tea and the actual monarchy. They tend to be more socially conservative, more likely to vaporize into angry drifts of snowflakery at the mere suggestion that there might have been brown people in the trenches of the First World War. But there is also a rich seam of Anglophilia among people who are generally suspicious of nationalism, and television is to blame for most of it. The idea of Britain that many Americans grew up with was Monty Python, Doctor Who, and Blackadder; today it’s Downton, Sherlock, Good Omens, and The Great British Worried-People-Making-Cakes-in-a-Tent Show. And of course, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, which technically take place in Middle-earth and Westeros but, in practice, are set in the version of medieval Britain where all epic fantasy tends to settle — in days of olde when knights were bold and brown people didn’t get speaking roles but dragons were fine.

(No British expat can honestly criticize a franchise like Downton for taking advantage of the North American fascination with Englishness, not unless we can say we’ve never taken advantage of it ourselves. Occasionally we catch one another at it, and it’s deeply embarrassing. Not long ago, waiting for coffee in the morning, I listened aghast as an extremely pretty American lady with her arm around an averagely-attractive Englishman explained that their dog was called something not unlike Sir Humphrey Woofington-Growler. “Because he’s British — my boyfriend, I mean.” Said British boyfriend’s eyes were pinned on the middle distance in the full excruciating knowledge that if he’d given a dog a name like that at home, he’d have got a smack, which would have upset the dog.)

Lavish Britscapist vehicles like Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Belgravia are more popular with Americans than they are at home. Trudging through Finsbury Park in London on a cold morning last Christmas, a poster advertising The Crown had been gleefully tagged “royalist propaganda” by some local hero with a spray can. My American friends were confused when I explained this to them. “Don’t you like your royal family?” They asked. No, I explained. We like Hamilton. The stories we export lay bare the failing heart of Britain’s sense of itself in the world — the assumption that all we have to do, individually or collectively, is show up with a charming accent and say something quaint and doors will open for us, as will wallets, legs, and negotiations for favorable trade deals.

This is a scam that works really well right up until it doesn’t.

* * *

It was irritatingly difficult to remain uncharmed by the Downton Abbey movie. I found myself unable to work up a sweat over whether there would be enough lawn chairs for the royal parade, but I rather enjoyed the bit where the Downton house staff, snubbed by the royal servants, decided to respond with kidnapping, poisoning, and fraud. There was also a snide rivalry between butlers, a countess with a secret love child, a disputed inheritance, an attempted royal assassination, a perilous tryst between closeted valets, a princess in an unhappy marriage, and Maggie Smith. It was disgustingly pleasant right up until its shameless closing sequence, where fussy butler Mr. Carson and his sensible housekeeper wife had a conversation about whether the Abbey would last into the next century. Yes, said Mr. Carson, sending us off into the night with the promise that “a hundred years from now, Downton will still be standing.”

And there it is. It’s not a good or noble or even an original lie, but it’s at least told with flair. As the British Empire went ungently into its good night offscreen last century, many great English houses were repurposed, sold, or demolished in part so that families did not have to pay inheritance tax on the properties. Highclere Castle — the estate where Downton Abbey was filmed — is an exception and remains under the stewardship of  the Earls of Carnavron, who live on the estate. They can afford to do this because a lucrative show about a lost and largely fictional age of aristocratic gentility happened to be filmed on the grounds. Let me repeat that: the only way the actual Downton Abbey can continue to exist is by renting itself out as a setting for fantasies of a softer world. Which is, in microcosm, the current excuse for a government’s entire plan for a post-Brexit economy. With nowhere left to colonize, we gleefully strip our own history for the shiniest trinkets to sell. The past is a different country, so we’re allowed to invade it, take its stuff and lie relentlessly about the people who actually live there.

It’s not a good or noble or even an original lie, but it’s at least told with flair.

The uncomfortable truth is that America doesn’t love Britain the way we want to be loved. That white-innocence fantasy of rolling lawns and ripped bodices is only palatable (and profitable) because Britain doesn’t have much actual power anymore. Our eccentricities would be far less adorable if we still owned you. If we were still a military-industrial juggernaut on the scale of Russia or China, if we were still really an imperial power rather than just cosplaying as one for cash, would the rest of the world be importing our high-fructose cultural capital in such sugary sackloads?

I don’t think so — and nor does Britain’s current government, the most nationalist and least patriotic in living memory, which has no compunction about turning the country into a laundry for international capital and flogging our major assets to foreign powers. American businesses already have their eyes on the National Health Service, which will inevitably be on the table in those trade deals a post-Brexit British economy desperately needs. In one of its first acts in power, the Johnson administration shoved through a controversial arms deal selling a major defense company to a private American firm, which is somehow not seen as unpatriotic.

This summer, Black Lives Matter protests are boiling around a nation that has never reexamined its imperial legacy because it is convinced it is the protagonist of world history. Conversation around what “British” means remains vaguely distasteful. “Culturally our stories are of plucky underdogs,” historian Snow told me. “But actually our national story was of massive expenditure on the world’s most complex weapon systems and smashing the shit out of less fiscally and technological societies.”

“Nations themselves are narrations,” wrote Edward Said, pioneer of postcolonial studies. Britain’s literary self-mythologizing spans several centuries. During the Raj, teaching English literature to the Indian middle and ruling classes was central to the strategy for enforcing the idea of Britain as morally superior. The image of Britain that persists in the collective global unconsciousness was founded deliberately to make sense of the empire and romanticize it for ordinary British citizens, most of whom had neither a complete understanding of the atrocities nor the voting rights that would make their opinion relevant. Britain wrote and rewrote itself as the protagonist of its own legends, making its barbarism bearable and its cultural dominance natural.

Bad things happen to people who have never heard a story they weren’t the hero of. I try not to be the sort of person who flashes the word “hegemony” around too much, but that’s what this is and always has been: a way of imposing cultural norms long after we, as my history books delicately put it, “lost” the British Empire. The stories are all we have left to make us feel important.

The plain truth is that Britain had, until quite recently, the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever known. We don’t have it anymore, and we miss it. Of course we miss it. It made us rich, it made us important, and all the ugly violent parts happened terribly far away and could be ignored with a little rewriting of our history. It continues to this day with tactful omissions from the school syllabus — in 2010, Education Secretary Michael Gove, later one of the chief architects of Brexit, pushed to teach British children a version of the “exciting and appealing” Imperial history that cast their country as heroic. According to one 2016 study, 43 percent of the British public think the Empire “was a good thing.” For most British people, the Empire came to us in pieces, in jingoistic legends and boys’ adventure stories with as many exclamation points as could be crammed on one book cover. The impression I was given as a schoolgirl was that we were jolly decent to let the Empire go, and that we did so because it was all of a sudden pointed out that owning other countries wholesale was a beastly thing to do — of course old boy, you must have your human rights! Really, we were only holding on to them for you.

The last time Britain truly got to think of itself as heroic on the world stage was during the Second World War. The narrative with the most tenacity is the “Blitz Spirit” — of a plucky little island standing firm against impossible odds, pulling together while hell rained down from above, growing victory gardens and sheltering in the stations of the London Underground. Those black-and-white photographs of brave-faced families wrapped in blankets on the train platforms are instantly recognizable: this is who we are as a country. Most Britons don’t know that soldiers from the colonies fought and died on the frontlines in France. Even fewer are aware of the famine that struck India at around the same time, leaving a million dead, or of Britain’s refusal to offer aid, continuing instead to divert supplies to feed the British army as the people of India starved.

What all of this is about, ultimately, is white innocence. That’s the grand narrative that so many of our greatest writers were recruited to burnish, willingly or not. White innocence makes a delicious story, and none of its beneficiaries wants to hear about how that particular sausage gets made.

* * *

Many of the biggest narrative brands of Britain’s fretful post-colonial age are stories of a nation coming to terms with the new and eroding nature of its own power, from James Bond (a story about a slick misogynist hired by the state to kill people) to Doctor Who (which I will defend to the death, but which is very much about the intergalactic importance of cultural capital). We are a nation in decline on the international stage; that’s what happens when a small island ceases to own a third of the earth. Rather than accepting this with any semblance of grace, we have thrown a tantrum that has made us the laughing stock of world politics, the sort of tantrum that only spoiled children and ham-faced, election-stealing oligarchs are allowed to get away with.

In this climate, the more pragmatic among us are seeing that what we actually have to offer the rest of the world boils down to escapism. Fantasy Britain offers an escape for everyone after a hard day under the wheel of late-stage capitalism.

There’s no actual escape, of course. Good luck if you’re a refugee. Since 2012, the conservative government has actively cultivated a  “hostile environment” scheme to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants, highlights of which include fast-tracking deportations and vans driving a massive billboard reading “GO HOME OR FACE ARREST” around the most diverse boroughs in London. Seriously. If you want to escape to actual Britain you need at least two million pounds, which is how much it costs for an Investor Visa. Non-millionaires with the wrong documents can and will be put on a plane in handcuffs, even if they’ve lived and worked in Britain for 50 years — like the senior citizens of the Windrush generation who came to Britain from the West Indies as children with their families to help rebuild the nation after the Second World War. In the past five years, hundreds of elderly men and women, many of them unaware they were not legal citizens, have been forcibly deported from Britain to the Caribbean. The subsequent public outcry did almost zero damage to the government’s brand. In 2019, Johnson’s Conservatives won a landslide victory.

“Take your country back.” That was the slogan that Brexit campaigners chose in 2016. Take it back from whom? To where? It was clear that the fictional past that many Brexit nostalgists wanted to reclaim was something not unlike the syrupy storylines of Downton Abbey — quiet, orderly, and mostly white. But to make that story work, British conservatives needed to cast themselves as the plucky underdogs, which is how you get a Brexit Party representative to the European Parliament comparing Brexit to the resistance of “slaves against their owners” and “colonies … against their empires,” or Boris Johnson bloviating in 2018 about Britain’s “colony status” in the EU (although he also believes that it would be good if Britain was still “in charge” of Africa). 

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What really won the day, though, was the lie that leaving the EU would leave us with 350 million pounds per week “to spend on the NHS.” Boris Johnson rode up and down the nation on a big red bus emblazoned with that empty promise. The British people may not trust our politicians, but we trust our National Health Service — almost all of us, from across the sociopolitical spectrum, apart from some fringe internet libertarians and diehard neoliberal wingnuts, most of whom, unfortunately, are in power (though they couldn’t get there without promising to protect the NHS).

After the COVID-19 lockdowns end, Brexit is still happening. The actual changes don’t come into effect until 2021, and Boris Johnson, whose empty personal brand is forever yoked to this epic national self-harm project, is clearly hoping to sneak in a bad Brexit deal while the country is still reeling from a global pandemic. Leaving the EU will not make Britain rich again. It will not make us an imperial power again. In fact, the other nations of Europe are now taking the opportunity to reclaim some of the things we borrowed along the way. Greece wants the Parthenon Marbles back, more than two centuries after a British tourist visited Athens and liked them so much he decided to pry them off and ship them home. Spain has made noise that it wants Gibraltar back, and we’ll probably have to give it to them. So far, the only way in which Britain is returning to its days of High Victorian glory is in the sudden re-emergence, in communities ravaged by austerity, of 19th-century diseases of poverty, and now of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in Europe, after Johnson’s government pursued a disastrous “herd immunity” strategy that transparently invited the elderly and infirm to sacrifice themselves for the stock market. British kids are not growing up with a sense of national heroism; they are growing up with rickets and scurvy. As a great poet from the colonies once wrote, it’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is for the sneering Eton thugs you inexplicably elected to stop stabbing you in the back.

As it happens, I want my country back, too. I have spent enough time baking under the pitiless California sunshine. I have been to Hot Topic. I’m stuck in the States until the lockdowns end, but want to go back to the soggy, self-deprecating country I grew up in, the country of tolerance and diversity and kind people quietly getting on with things, the land of radio sketch comedy, jacket potatoes, decent bands, and basic decency.

I know that that country, too, is imaginary; just as imaginary as any of the “Rule Britannia” flag-waggery. I don’t believe that Britain is Great in anything but name, but I do believe it can be better. I do not care to be told that I am any less of a patriot because I choose to know my country, or because I can imagine a future where we do more than freeze in the haunted house of our past glories, stuffed with stolen treasures and trapdoors we never open. It’s where I’m from, where my family and friends live, and where I hope to grow old and die. It worries me that we have not even begun to develop the tools to cope with our material reality, one in which we are a rather small rainy island half of whose population currently hates the other.

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Since we’re all talking about myths and revisionist history and the Blitz Spirit, here’s something else that never makes it into the official story.

Those working-class Londoners sheltering in tube stations during World War II? They weren’t supposed to be there. In fact, the British government of the late 1930s built far too few municipal shelters, preferring to leave that to private companies, local government councils, and individuals and when the first bombs first fell, the hardest hit areas were poor, immigrant, and working-class communities in the East End with nowhere to go. Elite clubs and hotels dug out their own bomb shelters, but the London Underground was barricaded. On the second night of the Blitz, with the flimsy, unhygienic East End shelters overflowing, hundreds of people entered the Liverpool Street Station and refused to leave. By the time the government officially changed its position and “allowed” working-class Londoners to take shelter down among the trains, thousands were already doing so — 177,000 people at its most packed.

Eventually it was adopted into the propaganda effort and became part of the official mythos of the Blitz, but the official story leaves out the struggle. It leaves out the part about desperate people, abandoned by their government, in fear of their lives, doing what they had to — and what should have been done from the start — to take care of each other.

This failure is the closest thing to the staggering lack of leadership that Britain, like America, has displayed during the weeks and months of the coronavirus crisis. As I write, more than 42,000 British citizens have died, many in our struggling NHS hospitals and countless more in care homes. On the same January day that the Brexit treaty was signed, Boris Johnson missed the first emergency meeting of COBRA, the government’s effort to determine a response to rumors of a new and horrifying pandemic. Johnson went on to miss four subsequent meetings, choosing instead to go on holiday with his fiancée to celebrate Brexit as a personal win. As vital weeks were squandered and the infection reached British shores, it emerged that the country was singularly underprepared. Stocks of protective equipment had been massively depleted because, with everyone’s attention on Brexit, nobody had bothered to consider that we might have to deal with a crisis not of our own making. Worse still, the National Health Service was chronically underfunded and hemorrhaging staff, as migrant doctors, nurses, and medical professionals from EU countries fled a failing institution in a hostile culture. In the years following the Brexit referendum, over 10,000 European medical staff have reportedly left the NHS.

Over 10 years of wildly unnecessary cuts to public services, successive Tory governments deliberately invoked the Blitz Spirit, promoting their economic reforms with the unfortunate slogan “we’re all in this together” — as if austerity were an external enemy rather than a deliberate and disastrous choice imposed on the working poor by politicians who have never known the price of a pint of milk or the value of public education. Today, it is perhaps a signal of the intellectual drought in British politics that the slogan “We’re all in this together” has been recycled to flog the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Their other slogan — plastered resentfully on podiums after a decade of decimating the health service — is “Protect the NHS.” The National Health Service is perhaps the last thing that truly unites every fractured shard of the British political psyche, and the Tories hate that, but 10 years of gutting hospitals, scrapping social care schemes, and blaming it all on the very immigrants who come from overseas to care for us when we are sick has not made the British love socialized medicine any less. Every Thursday night across Britain, since the lockdowns began, the whole country comes out to applaud the healthcare workers who are risking their lives every day to fight on the front lines of the pandemic. The mumbling rent-a-toffs the Tories shove up on stage to explain the latest hopelessly ineffectual lockdown strategy have no choice but to clap along. Because, as the murals mushrooming up around the country attest, the best stories Britain tells about itself have never been about Queen and Country and Glory — they’ve always been the ones where the broke, brave, messed-up millions of ordinary people who live here pull together, help each other, and behave with basic human decency.

* * *

I’m not arguing for us all to stop telling stories about Britain. For one thing, people aren’t going to stop, and for another, stories by and about British people are currently keeping my friends employed, my rent paid, and my home country from sliding into recession. And there are plenty that are still worth telling: if you want to shove your nose against the shop window of everything actually good about British culture, watch The Great British Bake-off. If you like your escapism with a slice of sex and cursing and corsets, and why wouldn’t you, curl up with the criminally underrated Harlots, which does an excellent job of portraying an actually diverse London and also has Liv Tyler as a trembly lesbian heiress in a silly wig. And if you want to watch a twee, transporting period drama with decent politics, I cannot more heartily recommend Call the Midwife, which also features biscuit-eating nuns and an appropriate amount of propaganda about how the National Health Service is the best thing about Britain.

I was supposed to be home by now. Instead, I’m in quarantine in California, watching my home country implode into proto-oligarchic incoherence in the middle of a global pandemic and worrying about my friends and loved ones in London. Meanwhile, my American friends are detoxing from the rolling panic-attack of the news by rewatching Downton Abbey, The Crown, and Belgravia. The British film industry is already gearing up to reopen, and the country will need to lean on its cultural capital more than ever.

But there is a narrative chasm between the twee and borderless dreamscape of fantasy Britain and actual, material Britain, where rents are rising and racists are running brave. The chasm is wide, and a lot of people are falling into it. The omnishambles of British politics is what happens when you get scared and mean and retreat into the fairytales you tell about yourself. When you can no longer live within your own contradictions. When you want to hold on to the belief that Britain is the land of Jane Austen and John Lennon and Sir Winston Churchill, the war hero who has been repeatedly voted the greatest Englishman of all time. When you want to forget that Britain is also the land of Cecil Rhodes and Oswald Moseley and Sir Winston Churchill, the brutal colonial administrator who sanctioned the building of the first concentration camps and condemned millions of Indians to death by starvation. These are not contradictions, even though the drive to separate them is cracking the country apart. If you love your country and don’t own its difficulties and its violence, you don’t actually love your country. You’re just catcalling it as it goes by.

There is a country of the imagination called Britain where there will never be borders, where down the dark lane, behind a door in the wall, David Bowie drinks gin with Elizabeth Tudor and Doctor Who trades quips with Oscar Wilde and there are always hot crumpets for tea. This idea of Englishness is lovely, and soothing, and it makes sense, and we have to be done with it now.  If Britain is going to remain the world’s collective imaginative sandbox, we can do better than this calcified refusal to cope with the contradictions of the past. We can liberate the territory of the imagination. We can remember what is actually good about Britain  — which has always been different from what was “great.”

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Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. 

Editor: Michelle Weber Fact checker: Matt Giles Copyeditor: Ben Huberman

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