this is england

as some kind of hot one year anniversary present i thought i'd put up a few snaps of my time in england: a retrospective, the english rose returns to the heartland.

i left before double digits and returned with just the kind of knowledge you'd expect a nine-year old to have. that is. i knew about iced gems and monster munch. i understood references to blue peter and art attack. the landscape was vaguely reassuring.

and that's where it ends.

i didn't know what it meant to be part of a big city. i didn't know how an economy falls.

i didn't know how england struggles to maintain it's archaic infrastructure: the physical and the institutional. i didn't know of the deep divide in political views that marks the front pages of broadsheets. i didn't know the underlying class dynamics of my parents' marriage.

i didn't know about mushy peas, wide-spread corduroy or emmerdale.

i didn't know about the relentless humiliation of being an australian living in london. i didn't know how much australians would insist on talking to me about the differences of two different countries, at length, repeatedly and at length repeatedly. i didn't know how to come to terms with living out a cultural cliche.

i didn't know that i would squlech my way into a sense of belonging to recline on the couch of cultural conversion. i didn't know that i would actually like it. not just a bit. but a lot.

now i know. knowing is nice. there's a lot more to know. but i mean, who doesn't prefer art attack?

as curated by neil buchanan: some audio and visual which are indicative, but by no means representative, of my time here.

suggested listening: magnetic fields/ get lost/ all the umbrellas in london

my favourite place in london (arbitrary big call): stoke newington car boot sale.

stoke newington/ london/ 2010

ukip. wow. this poster. says it all. statistics quoted and then transformed into column graph format may or may not be accurate.

wistable/ kent/ 2011

early last year it was pre-pre-election and gordon brown's failure to prevent the unpreventable had people worried that the tories would make a clean sweep.

on boxing day my auntie took me to a "hunt". the traditional english hunt has been curtailed but, even after seeing it, i still don't understand what happens now to make it any more humane.

apparently: bird of prey. man with shotgun. presence of dirt bike.

before the hunt started a sir with a red jacket and a megaphone took the opportunity to treat the crowd with some tory rhetoric. and in the end it made all the difference.

kersey/ suffolk/ 2010

the number 25 bus is not a nice place. it's a bendy bus and pretty easy to ride for free. transport in london is expensive so when something's free. something's free.

the seats are worn thread bare. it seems to have an unofficial policy of men only. there's always at least one shouter who lost touch with reality a couple of years ago.

the number 25 is not a nice place.

but check out this flower on the 25.

whitechapel/ london/ 2010

the common just behind my childhood home. this is my dad forging his way through forgotten paths, trying to find a vantage point to spy on said home, to gage the amount of diy done on said home, since said childhood.

thanks to his ambitious gait and my slow shutter speed/ general lack of skill you can actually see the time travel.

pyrford/ surrey/ 2010