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26 Jun 16
00:29
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14 Jun 05
This has got to be the most patethic, whining, self hating newspaper article i have ever read..........a british acedemic (tom whyman) writes about his hometown in essex............it appeared in the New York Times
Hell Is Other Britons
By TOM WHYMANJUNE 25, 2016
ALRESFORD, England — IN summer, the land around Alresford, the rural market town in the south of England where I grew up, blooms in a way that seems almost terrible.
My parents’ house stands in the middle of a 1980s housing development of suburban ugliness, all detached red-brick blocks and generously proportioned driveways. There is not supposed to be nature in the suburbs, but in Alresford (pronounced AWLS-fud) nature is still powerful — every year the grass at the top of the road will suddenly grow tall, and fill with wildflowers, hedgehogs, little birds of delirious and unusual colors. Every morning the birds wake you up at 4 with a chorus of hoots and trills.
But no sooner has nature started to assert itself than the grass gets cut back and the mornings return to being silent and still. Alresford becomes human again. Human in a normal, provincial English way, in a place where people own homes, save for pensions and vote to leave the European Union — as 55 percent of the population of Hampshire county did on Thursday.
Sometimes, in the summer, I walk up the hill and I look out over it, the housing development on one side and the Georgian town center at the bottom of the other, and I have this fantasy image of how it once was, before Alresford was founded in the Middle Ages, when all of this was untouched: just the wild, untamed nature that it keeps wanting to turn itself back into. And sometimes, I think: I wish that would happen. Because all that humans have ever done here is ruin things.
Alresford is my personal hell.
We are not used to thinking that a place like this — a pleasant town with a pretty center — might actually be hell. There is almost no poverty and only the occasional act of violence. There are good schools, a range of shops, a heritage railway. In fact, it’s somewhere that a lot of people, apparently, actively want to live: Houses in the center easily sell for upward of a million pounds. (What they will cost once the vote to leave the European Union makes the economy crater remains to be seen.)
But dig below the surface, and you will find the demons crawling. You can see them in the looks that residents give you when they pass; sneering snobs glaring down their noses with entitlement; small-minded townies, bullying you with eyes that you recognize from the primary school lunchroom; the old people, 80 and above, wearing blank stares. You can hear it in their bothered tutting at the bus stop (especially if they ever hear a visitor mispronouncing the name of the town), the shots that constantly ring out from across the countryside as they set about murdering as many of the local pheasants as they can.
As with any hell, the thing that really makes it so is that you can never leave. For one thing, poor public transportation makes leaving impossible in a practical, everyday sense — at least if you can’t drive. For another, the town thwarts any ambitions that stretch beyond its borders. From what I can tell, a young person from Alresford, forced to move back in with his parents after college, will typically find himself unable to get work that is not based in Alresford. As a result, it is full of people around my age, 27, stuck in dead-end jobs.
Continue reading the main story
And it is impossible to leave Alresford, because Alresford is not just a place: It is an ideology that infects your very soul. Let’s call it “Alresfordism.” It is an ideology of smallness, of contraction, of wanting to curl up in our own personal, financially secure hole and will everything amusing or interesting or exciting in the world away.
Since my late teens, every effort I have ever exerted has been with the intention of escaping Alresford. And yet, I am an early-career academic and so I am forced to move back, every summer, to live with my parents because I cannot afford to pay rent elsewhere after my temporary teaching contract ends. Then, sometimes, I think: What if I’m actually secretly comfortable here? What if I have chosen the security of death in Alresford over the risks of life elsewhere? What if I am in fact fully in the clutches of Alresfordism?
It was for psychological reasons, as much as anything else, that I didn’t register to vote in Alresford. Registering to vote here would have felt like actually moving here. I registered in Essex, where I live during the academic year, for the recent local elections, so I just thought I’d retain that registration for the Brexit referendum. I also don’t like filling in forms, which is why I didn’t register to vote by mail or look into how I’d amend my registration.
I admit that I was very complacent about all this. I didn’t think one vote would make a difference. And besides, I wasn’t particularly motivated to use my vote anyway. Brexit, supported by some very bad people, would definitely have some bad consequences, but on the other hand, who knows what positive effects it might have? I wasn’t willing to endorse it, but, hey, I certainly bought the argument that it might be a worthwhile shake-up to the system.
My complacency lasted until June 16, when Jo Cox, a Labour member of Parliament and a vocal defender of immigration, was killed; the man charged in her death, Thomas Mair, had ties to far-right groups and introduced himself in court by the name “death to traitors.” That shocked me into a realization that this referendum wasn’t really a referendum about whether or not we should remain in the European Union. It was a referendum on immigration and on race — on whether to have our borders open or closed.
In short: Do we open ourselves up to new things, even if they might be unfamiliar, risky, unexpected, sometimes even undesirable? Or do we close ourselves down: a small island, trapped in its own smallness? So I knew which way I had to vote. This was a referendum on Alresfordism.
I SET out from Alresford on Thursday to register my protest against Alresfordism. Three hours on the train, through London, from Winchester to Wivenhoe, then back again, I thought. I was wrong.
An electrical storm the night before had caused signal failures across southeast England. I managed to get to London, but when I tried to change for the train to Essex, I found that everything so far that day had been canceled. A convoluted series of changes on the Tube and on buses left me stranded in Romford, in outer London, where the train I had been told I could catch to Colchester had just been canceled. I tried my best, I thought, and I failed miserably. I went home.
Even if I’d managed to cast my vote, it would have been pointless. The Remain campaign didn’t just lose by my vote, we lost by more than a million. Britons wanted to make our world smaller. They wanted to make it more like Alresford. As far as I can tell, they are going to get exactly what they wanted.
As a result of this vote, Britain will withdraw rapidly. We will have fewer people coming here, enriching our culture and our lives. Ther will be fewer opportunities. We will have less of a chance to explore the world for ourselves..
Brexit is the result of a deep nihilism among the British public. This nihilism has not just emerged recently; I’ve lived alongside it my whole life. This is the nihilism of Alresfordism, a security-driven retraction toward death.
A recession would not, in truth, matter much to the people of Alresford. It is a pretty affluent place, and if you are a true Alresfordian, you will always be happy in your small town. How much more will the effects of the Leave vote be felt by people who do not share their nihilism, people like my friends and colleagues who’ve come here to live and work from the European Union.
All I can do is look out at the nature from the window of my room in Alresford. I’m from here, so I can’t be sure whether or not this is just another type of nihilism, but I think: Well, if all this nature is bigger than us, then I want it be get even bigger. I want it to become so big that it will consume all of our smallnesses, invalidate them, smother them out. Not just Alresford. I want a demented, throbbing, fecund nature to overrun this whole country, to overturn the wretched consequences of the laws that we have, in our stupidity, set for ourselves.
Tom Whyman is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex.
Hell Is Other Britons
By TOM WHYMANJUNE 25, 2016
ALRESFORD, England — IN summer, the land around Alresford, the rural market town in the south of England where I grew up, blooms in a way that seems almost terrible.
My parents’ house stands in the middle of a 1980s housing development of suburban ugliness, all detached red-brick blocks and generously proportioned driveways. There is not supposed to be nature in the suburbs, but in Alresford (pronounced AWLS-fud) nature is still powerful — every year the grass at the top of the road will suddenly grow tall, and fill with wildflowers, hedgehogs, little birds of delirious and unusual colors. Every morning the birds wake you up at 4 with a chorus of hoots and trills.
But no sooner has nature started to assert itself than the grass gets cut back and the mornings return to being silent and still. Alresford becomes human again. Human in a normal, provincial English way, in a place where people own homes, save for pensions and vote to leave the European Union — as 55 percent of the population of Hampshire county did on Thursday.
Sometimes, in the summer, I walk up the hill and I look out over it, the housing development on one side and the Georgian town center at the bottom of the other, and I have this fantasy image of how it once was, before Alresford was founded in the Middle Ages, when all of this was untouched: just the wild, untamed nature that it keeps wanting to turn itself back into. And sometimes, I think: I wish that would happen. Because all that humans have ever done here is ruin things.
Alresford is my personal hell.
We are not used to thinking that a place like this — a pleasant town with a pretty center — might actually be hell. There is almost no poverty and only the occasional act of violence. There are good schools, a range of shops, a heritage railway. In fact, it’s somewhere that a lot of people, apparently, actively want to live: Houses in the center easily sell for upward of a million pounds. (What they will cost once the vote to leave the European Union makes the economy crater remains to be seen.)
But dig below the surface, and you will find the demons crawling. You can see them in the looks that residents give you when they pass; sneering snobs glaring down their noses with entitlement; small-minded townies, bullying you with eyes that you recognize from the primary school lunchroom; the old people, 80 and above, wearing blank stares. You can hear it in their bothered tutting at the bus stop (especially if they ever hear a visitor mispronouncing the name of the town), the shots that constantly ring out from across the countryside as they set about murdering as many of the local pheasants as they can.
As with any hell, the thing that really makes it so is that you can never leave. For one thing, poor public transportation makes leaving impossible in a practical, everyday sense — at least if you can’t drive. For another, the town thwarts any ambitions that stretch beyond its borders. From what I can tell, a young person from Alresford, forced to move back in with his parents after college, will typically find himself unable to get work that is not based in Alresford. As a result, it is full of people around my age, 27, stuck in dead-end jobs.
Continue reading the main story
And it is impossible to leave Alresford, because Alresford is not just a place: It is an ideology that infects your very soul. Let’s call it “Alresfordism.” It is an ideology of smallness, of contraction, of wanting to curl up in our own personal, financially secure hole and will everything amusing or interesting or exciting in the world away.
Since my late teens, every effort I have ever exerted has been with the intention of escaping Alresford. And yet, I am an early-career academic and so I am forced to move back, every summer, to live with my parents because I cannot afford to pay rent elsewhere after my temporary teaching contract ends. Then, sometimes, I think: What if I’m actually secretly comfortable here? What if I have chosen the security of death in Alresford over the risks of life elsewhere? What if I am in fact fully in the clutches of Alresfordism?
It was for psychological reasons, as much as anything else, that I didn’t register to vote in Alresford. Registering to vote here would have felt like actually moving here. I registered in Essex, where I live during the academic year, for the recent local elections, so I just thought I’d retain that registration for the Brexit referendum. I also don’t like filling in forms, which is why I didn’t register to vote by mail or look into how I’d amend my registration.
I admit that I was very complacent about all this. I didn’t think one vote would make a difference. And besides, I wasn’t particularly motivated to use my vote anyway. Brexit, supported by some very bad people, would definitely have some bad consequences, but on the other hand, who knows what positive effects it might have? I wasn’t willing to endorse it, but, hey, I certainly bought the argument that it might be a worthwhile shake-up to the system.
My complacency lasted until June 16, when Jo Cox, a Labour member of Parliament and a vocal defender of immigration, was killed; the man charged in her death, Thomas Mair, had ties to far-right groups and introduced himself in court by the name “death to traitors.” That shocked me into a realization that this referendum wasn’t really a referendum about whether or not we should remain in the European Union. It was a referendum on immigration and on race — on whether to have our borders open or closed.
In short: Do we open ourselves up to new things, even if they might be unfamiliar, risky, unexpected, sometimes even undesirable? Or do we close ourselves down: a small island, trapped in its own smallness? So I knew which way I had to vote. This was a referendum on Alresfordism.
I SET out from Alresford on Thursday to register my protest against Alresfordism. Three hours on the train, through London, from Winchester to Wivenhoe, then back again, I thought. I was wrong.
An electrical storm the night before had caused signal failures across southeast England. I managed to get to London, but when I tried to change for the train to Essex, I found that everything so far that day had been canceled. A convoluted series of changes on the Tube and on buses left me stranded in Romford, in outer London, where the train I had been told I could catch to Colchester had just been canceled. I tried my best, I thought, and I failed miserably. I went home.
Even if I’d managed to cast my vote, it would have been pointless. The Remain campaign didn’t just lose by my vote, we lost by more than a million. Britons wanted to make our world smaller. They wanted to make it more like Alresford. As far as I can tell, they are going to get exactly what they wanted.
As a result of this vote, Britain will withdraw rapidly. We will have fewer people coming here, enriching our culture and our lives. Ther will be fewer opportunities. We will have less of a chance to explore the world for ourselves..
Brexit is the result of a deep nihilism among the British public. This nihilism has not just emerged recently; I’ve lived alongside it my whole life. This is the nihilism of Alresfordism, a security-driven retraction toward death.
A recession would not, in truth, matter much to the people of Alresford. It is a pretty affluent place, and if you are a true Alresfordian, you will always be happy in your small town. How much more will the effects of the Leave vote be felt by people who do not share their nihilism, people like my friends and colleagues who’ve come here to live and work from the European Union.
All I can do is look out at the nature from the window of my room in Alresford. I’m from here, so I can’t be sure whether or not this is just another type of nihilism, but I think: Well, if all this nature is bigger than us, then I want it be get even bigger. I want it to become so big that it will consume all of our smallnesses, invalidate them, smother them out. Not just Alresford. I want a demented, throbbing, fecund nature to overrun this whole country, to overturn the wretched consequences of the laws that we have, in our stupidity, set for ourselves.
Tom Whyman is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex.
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Replies: 58
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maybe he would prefer the slums of manila, crime ridden central america or the killing fields of syria.............good god, this man has disgraced himself.
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He's hoping to get into the knickers of some of the more impressionable students at UE.
Respect. |
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Pretty decent article - beyond the intellectual capacity of the vast majority on here. To be critical you have to first understand, move on chaps this isn't for you.
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I understand the sense of superiority and refusal to accept his way is the only way.
All in all a most pathetic piece of bilge. But a fine seethe nonetheless. |
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Oh bankit. Eventually you'll get to the same place some of us are at, and have a good laugh at your younger self. Nihilism? Throbbing? Fecund? Wild? Untamed? Crawling demons? It's obvious the man was bullied and at 27 it still burns. Don't worry, sir, you've got years of people making fun of you ahead.
Hopefully he's got a Swedish student or two to massage his ... ego. |
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lol bodil.
He makes some valid points which I guess is the reason you are belittling him. In his words " You can see them in the looks that residents give you when they pass; sneering snobs glaring down their noses with entitlement; small-minded townies, bullying you with eyes that you recognize from the primary school lunchroom" |
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that was lol to the impressionable student joke fwiw
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Like I said, he was bullied and will never, ever forget or forgive. You just have to get over it. Though I guess so much of what we are was forged in school playgrounds. It probably wasn't good for most of us but it was better than being eaten by wolves.
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I left home at 20, and at 24 I bought my first home. A job wasn't difficult to get and house prices were affordable. I had an independent life. This fella would have worked harder than me and be better qualified and he's stuck at home with his parents at 27. I can see why he's frustrated with his parents generation and his parents, parents generation.
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A lecturer in philosophy at UE better qualified and harder working than you?
Sarcasm aside, truly we have screwed the young. Though I'm curious as to how allowing unlimited numbers of immigrants into the UK is going to improve the situation of indigenous youth. |
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There are psychic Vampires on this Earth, who can only exist sucking on other peoples misery, even if that misery is imagined, or even contrived for self indulgent attention, Fck me gently but!!. Bleeding hearts move over The Clydebank Riveter is in town. narcissism is an unedifying affliction.
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You've been drinking, btf.
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 no bodil, heart meds keeping me awake, just a bit of fun, no malice intended. |
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It is late night Chitty Chatty after all,
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Perhaps I'm the needy one, trying to get someone to throw a few fcks at me to see if I'm still alive. Clyde and me had a bit of banter on another thread.
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Heart meds, eh? Sounds fun. Mind you, the US is being ravaged by prescription opiates - kill more than heroin, crack, speed etc added together. Whole areas laid waste. Think there was a prog about Orange County on PBS tonight (repeated infinitely).
I wasn't accusatory. Glasshouses etc. I think I've made a new enemy tonight. And me so lovely and cuddly and sweet-smelling. |
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This article is a much more meaningful one in the aftermath to digest. Succinct, heartfelt and without the pretentious twaddle only a philosophy lecturer could peddle.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/eu-referendum/sore-losers-in-remain-were-blind-to-uks-ingrained-euroscepticism-34831290.html |
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"I think I've made a new enemy tonight. And me so lovely and cuddly and sweet-smelling."..... I nearly croaked a few times in the last 3 years, about time I hear people/relatives cry!! remember where there's a will there's an expectant family. This stuff is for pure entertainment, and for me at least it works, but I'm easily pleased.
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Well, look on the bright side, when you disappear, we'll know why.
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Very good article charwell. Pensioner envy is the 'NEW Black'( mixing my political and fashion cliches) and as a pensioner I find it amazing that the world has thrown out experience for technology so easily. "When an Old man dies a library burns to the ground" in the 'New age' that will still resonate to those that have any grey matter between their ears. Steven Paul Jobs, is among the first examples.
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Evening boxing - Hope your doing well
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Going to be up all night again, but hey ho the b@stard pills work, I'm now a minute millionare, thast bollix for I'm a pensioner with all the time in the world and I don't need to worry about alarm clocks.
Hi Ron I'm great, pills keeping me awake but more importantly alive!! ...cue groans fron Facts et-al. Hope you are well and winning mate. |
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thast ....ffs Thats
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What would you have done before satellite TV and the internet? Died of boredom. Thank god for 600 channels and the infinite horror of the internet. You're never alone. Never, ever.
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Ron I'm off soon to sleep, probably won't work and I'll be watching some cooont selling me A steam Shark cleaning mop, or worse still some plastic implanted east European asking me to phone her,
I put up a thread earlier and some coont had my opening post removed, probably facts. I've PMd you if you want to read it. GN and GL |
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bodil, Ive given that **** (in my best mates Glasgow Accent) up and I'm now just on freeview. GN bodil.
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Sleep well btf.
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Cheers, I'll be back in a couple of hours playing Youtube videos Isn't this interwebby thing marvelous...............I'm gone.
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Very good to hear boxing
re the pills post |
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Ha - boxing i see the message! but hardly ever look on the new site so
don't see things like that. Just like the old forum view always |
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A very illuminating article.
A fairly typical Remainer,hates his home town,hates his own estate yet doesn't realise he would have to build thousands of similar estates to house all these new immigrants. The article is poorly written by a man who couldn't manage to vote,it was all the fault of others though. This writer is fairly typical of those that work teaching your young people. |
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ARLESFORD in this report is the town in Hampshire .
The ARLESFORD in Essex is a one horse village . Had me confused as i lived near the Essex village . Hants Arlesford looks nice  |
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it's weird because where he teaches term time is 2 miles away from the Essex Arlesford.
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I've been to the Hampshire one it is very nice.
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"The ARLESFORD in Essex is a one horse village" Sadly it's not even that now, the poor nag had to be put down, they are desperately trying to get another one but their chances are Slim and none, Slim moseyed out of town years ago.
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As a result of this vote, Britain will withdraw rapidly. We will have fewer people coming here, enriching our culture and our lives. Ther will be fewer opportunities. We will have less of a chance to explore the world for ourselves..
I refer Mr Whyman to our Newham correspondent. I also suggest to Mr Whyman that foreign travel may still be possible in the future... |
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Tom Whyman is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex.
I see. The first thing that strikes me is that this is someone who has never left school and has had a pretty cushy ride through life so far. The second thing is that he's got plenty of time on his hands if he's got enough room in his life to turn out a lengthy piece like that. On the evidence here he sounds like a spoiled brat. |
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he maybe not comfortable in his own skin - many like that .
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