…the fifth of November.

Bonfire Night is one of those times I wish I still lived in England (though I know that, like so many things, it’s not what it was), so if you’re having some fireworks fun tonight light a sparkler for me – or maybe stick a banger in someone’s letterbox. Not that I ever did anything like that.

Download: Fireworks – Siouxsie & The Banshees (mp3)

But be careful out there!

Tina Moore, wife of the great Bobby, seen here making Victoria Beckham look a bit Third Division.

Do you think she wore that England shirt when they…you know..?

Download: The English Dream – Generation X (mp3)

Alec: We know we really love each other. That’s true. That’s all that really matters.
Laura: It isn’t all that really matters. Other things matter too. Self-respect matters, and decency.

No one has ever asked me about the picture in the banner at the top of this page so I assume everyone knows it comes from the 1945 film Brief Encounter — and those that didn’t know couldn’t care less what it was. I grew up knowing that film by heart, it was one of those old British movies full of plummy voices, stiff upper lips and dreary tea rooms which the BBC used to show all the time on Sunday afternoons (along with Genevieve, The Way To The Stars, and The Dam Busters) and it’s atmosphere of monochrome miserablism was perfectly suited to that post-lunch rainy Sunday dead zone where there was nothing better to do than sit in front of the fire and watch a great old movie.

The picture of England these films painted was of a genteel and polite country which probably only exists today in the minds of ageing Daily Mail readers. It was a place of deference and impeccable manners where the last thing anyone wants to do is cause a scene or, God forbid, get all emotional about something. It’s a cliché about us English that we’re all a bit reserved and repressed and in Brief Encounter Alec and Laura are like the poster children for stiff English formality, living in a buttoned-up world of afternoon tea and polite chat about trains and library books. When they fall in love it threatens to tear that tidy world apart and they’re thrown into a panic by it, Laura in particular is completely discombobulated by her sudden feelings — “I’ve fallen in love. I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” — and it’s heartbreaking to see them try to be sensible and frightfully British about something as irrational and powerful as love.

Before she meets Alec, Laura’s life has all the flavour and excitement of a stale British Rail ham sandwich, with a house in the suburbs and a dull husband who looks like he probably goes to bed in the pinstriped suit he wears while doing The Times’ crossword puzzle in front of the fire every night. It’s the sort of dreary suburban trap that would later be made out to be a soul-destroying hellhole to be escaped at all costs, but Laura is a sensible middle-class housewife and people like her just don’t run off with a handsome doctor. Passion and romance might be alright for the French, but she’s British! So she does the “decent” thing and gives up Alec even though it tears her apart. At the end of the film it looks like she’ll never be happy again, but you know that she’ll pull herself together, keep it all bottled up and soldier on making the best of things, hiding her misery behind a polite English exterior. Order must be preserved, emotions must be kept in check, or England and the Empire will crumble.

It’s easy to mock (and parody) their frightfully proper manners and old-fashioned English reserve in general, especially in this post-1960s era when we’re told it’s bad to bottle your feelings up and to let it all hang out, man. But really, don’t you wish more people these days would resist the urge to share the almost pornographic details of their inner selves in public and keep the lid on a bit more? And just because the “stuffy” Brit isn’t inclined to swing naked from the emotional chandelier doesn’t mean they have no feelings, we just find it a little vulgar and juvenile to advertise them to the world in great big neon letters* which is why we get embarrassed in the presence of loud Americans who will insist on talking about their bloody feelings and hugging you all the time. That’s when we start looking at our shoes and talking about the weather.

Download: Love Hurts – The Everly Brothers (mp3)
Download: I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You – Tom Waits (mp3)
Download: Show Some Emotion – Joan Armatrading (mp3)

*Or we used to, I’m sure I’m not the only one who found the national crying jag that took place after the death of Princess Diana a little unseemly at times, especially when people started demanding that the Queen open her heart and let us all cry on her shoulder too as if she was bloody Oprah Winfrey.

I know I’m a little late to this, but what’s with the whole of England coming to a standstill because of a little snow? Eight inches? Pah! We’ve had eight feet of it here in Boston since Christmas — and it’s snowing again right now while I’m writing this! — and we all managed to get to work. It’s such a cataclysmic event The Guardian are even live blogging about it. You know, like they probably did on 9/11. Get a grip people, Hitler must be laughing in his grave.

Download: Baby It’s Cold Outside – Joyce Blair & Oliver Reed (mp3)

One of the inspirations for this blog was the book “Lost Worlds” by Michael Bywater, an eccentric and beautifully written compendium of lost things, feelings, places, attitudes and people. So I’m going to be lazy and let him do all the heavy lifting for this post. Besides, he’s a much better writer than me.

“Anyone born before 1960 will have known Aunt Joan, or a variant of her. Neat, effective, cheerful. Aunt Joan’s response to the slenderest of pleasures was: ‘How lovely!’ She lived alone in a little house on a fixed income and did wonders for charity. All her Christmas presents for the nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews were bought carefully, with thought and love, throughout the year. Aunt Joan never had to make the panic dash on Christmas Eve, nor did she ever forget a birthday. She was tiny, courteous, well groomed, well loved and lived an orderly life, never causing pain or even upset; and at the heart of this little life was an incalculable loneliness.
Aunt Joan had a secret. It was always the same secret, for all the Aunt Joans: a young man, an understanding, plans, hopes — and a war from which the young man never returned. The end. You kept going, you did your best, you looked on the bright side and remembered that there were lots and lots of people much worse off than you were. How much of what Aunt Joan was, was because of what she had lost — or had taken from her.”
Michael Bywater,
Lost Worlds (2004)

I was born in 1962 so the “Aunt Joan” in this sounds more like my Grandmother who was also tiny and cheerful (though my sailor Grandfather did come back from the war.) My aunts were more the type to just give us a 50p record token at Christmas, but it was Gran who actually took the trouble to ask us what records we wanted, which for a few years meant the poor old dear was going into her local Woolworth’s and buying Clash and Stranglers albums.

Download: If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked A Cake – Gracie Fields (mp3)

This chap is a British Army spokesman who was on the BBC talking about the troops spending Christmas in Iraq and I took his picture because his name was Lt. Col. Dickie Winchester. I didn’t think British officers had such marvelous names as that anymore, at least not ones so young who didn’t also have massive, Jimmy Edwards-style whiskers. With a name like that he should be leading men over the top at the Somme, not dull PR duties in Basra.

The other thing I noticed about Dickie was that, despite his old-school-tie name, he didn’t sound in the slightest bit “posh” and instead spoke with a rather generic middle-class English accent that could be from anywhere south of Birmingham. There was a time when someone with his name and rank would have been all “Bally good show chaps!” and plummy, aristocratic vowels but, apart from the odd appearance by the Royal Family, these days you don’t hear frightfully proper “BBC English” much anymore — especially not on the BBC itself. Apparently talking “proper” and sounding upper-class is out of fashion these days, something to be embarrassed about even among the upper classes themselves whose children are dropping their ‘aitches and adopting the more common sound of so-called Estuary English in an effort to fit in with the new English egalitarian meritocracy — a country run by celebrities and footballers instead of the old Eton-Oxbridge network. Which of course it isn’t, you know those buggers are still in charge.

The only time I heard an old-fashioned upper class accent in London was when I was having lunch at one of the traditional stomping grounds of British nobs, the Peter Jones department store in Sloane Square. Among the crowds of modern young couples pushing their progeny around in Bugaboo pushchairs I’d catch the occasional sound of some haughty, crisp old-money voice and it was such a surprise to the ears I’d stare at the person as if I was looking at some rare bird on the endangered species list.

I’m not turning into Evelyn Waugh in my old age and mourning the decline of the ruling class (plus, I talk common as muck meself), but what is a shame is the continuing loss of colour and character to the national palette and, I must admit, hearing someone crisply crossing their Ts and talking in those clear, cut-glass tones does sound rather pleasing to the ear (especially coming from the mouth of a Jenny Agutter or Joanna Lumley), and what a dull place England would be if we all ended up talking like David Beckham. Knowarrimean?

Download: The Ruling Class – Monochrome Set (mp3)

“Do you know the road I live in—Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley? Even if you don’t, you know fifty others exactly like it. You know how these streets fester all over the inner-outer suburbs. Always the same. Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses—the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to 212 and ours is 191—as much alike as council houses and generally uglier. The stucco front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door. The Laurels, the Myrtles, the Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue. At perhaps one house in fifty some anti-social type who’ll probably end in the workhouse has painted his front door blue instead of green.”
George Orwell
Coming Up For Air (1939)

Most of my family originally come from London but I have aunties and uncles who long ago moved out to the leafy suburban outskirts of the city to places like Purley and Crawley where they had children, played golf, drank sherry and led nice middle-class lives. When I visited them as a kid I think I felt a little jealous of my cousins living in these large semi-detached houses with big back gardens only a short bike ride away from actual countryside (this was in the 1970s, I imagine the “countryside” is a lot further away now). Compared to our poky little council flat it seemed that they led an idyllic life like something out of a Ladybird book, where it was always sunny, there was a new car in the driveway and two parents at home, a cheery mum who baked pies and a solid, cardigan-wearing dad who did something in accounting. But this feeling probably had more to do with my personal family circumstances than any actual reality, after all I was the one who lived in London and inevitably my sense of city superiority took hold so by my late teens I regarded my suburban cousins as rather boring and backward people whose lives I wouldn’t swap with for all the tea in Croydon.

Now being a city boy who has an existential crisis if he lives too far from tall concrete buildings I obviously have my prejudices but that’s nothing compared to the good kicking the suburbs have always gotten in popular culture over the years; the list of novels, movies, plays and television shows damning them as awful, soul-crushing dead zones is as long as Orwell’s Ellesmere Road. This is true in every country that has suburbs but it’s in pop music that the English have really staked a claim to the subject. I’ve not done an in-depth survey or anything but there could be more English pop songs about suburbs and suburbanites than there are about almost any other subject (apart from L.O.V.E of course), and with few exceptions these songs portray the suburbs as the dull home to either angry, uptight reactionaries or sad, downtrodden cogs in the capitalist machine — usually with both hiding all sorts of sordid and kinky goings-on behind their net curtains of their mock-Tudor homes.

So why the fixation with these places? It’s not the garden gnomes and shag carpets they’re objecting to, the suburbs stand for bourgeois conformity and all the conservative values of tradition and respectability that rebellious, modern, pink-haired pop music is supposed to be against. And it’s often in the suburbs that these values, for lack of anything better to do, curdle and turn sour into reactionary xenophobia, empty materialism and dull philistinism which makes them a nice easy target for any aspiring pop poet who thinks he has something to say about England and the English. Plus, the essential fact about the suburbs is that they’re boring and what says more about England than the bleak nothingness of a rainy Sunday afternoon in a town where the major cultural attraction is the local concrete shopping precinct? That’s half of Morrissey’s songbook right there.

Download: 7:10 From Suburbia – Jackie Trent (mp3)
Download: The Sound of The Suburbs – The Members (mp3)
Download: Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James – Manfred Mann (mp3)
Download: Smithers-Jones (orchestra version) – The Jam (mp3)
Download: 10:15 Saturday Night – The Cure (mp3)
Download: Respectable Street – XTC (mp3)

Of all these songs only “7:10 From Suburbia” has what I would call a sunny disposition, the rest tell rather miserable stories, and while “10:15 Saturday Night” isn’t directly about the suburbs the song just reeks of whiny suburban ennui. Where else would Saturday night be thought of as boring but the suburbs? Robert Smith, of course, comes from Crawley — the same place as my Auntie Molly — so he would know.

I’m currently reading “Nobody’s Perfect”, a collection of reviews by The New Yorker film critic (and Englishman) Anthony Lane and I came across this great bit about Hugh Grant being interviewed on the Larry King show during that hooker scandal he was involved in a while ago:

Prodded by King toward self-examination, he scorned the need for psychotherapy—a source of vast bemusement to his host, who failed to realize that Englishmen have devised a cheap alternative to shrinks. The technical term for this is “a cup of tea.”

I told you so, didn’t I?

Download: Afternoon Tea – The Kinks (mp3)