sadmanbarty

Well-known member
The pre-Britpop context is interesting. Late-92 to late-93 was the key period (which also coincides with the darkcore era in the alternative Dissensus canon): there was the Morrisey Finsbury Park incident in August 92 and the BNP council by-election victory in the Isle of Dogs in September 1993 which sparked an Anti-Nazi League revival. This all culminated in a big anti-racism concert in Brockwell Park in May 1994.

This is the same time that Blur were creating their British Image. The best contemporary review of Modern Life is Rubbish was in Lime Lizard and it was an extended essay, basically, on this phenomenon, which opened with the very serious and outraged and anxious question of Blur: “Why ‘Britishness’? Why now?” This was never properly answered, no one even really engaged with it, until suddenly Parklife was the greatest British album since the Beatles or the Jam depending on your perspective, and then it was too late to go back to it.

Everything happened so fast in those days, one thing reacting to the previous thing, that it’s difficult to go back and unpick what happened between then and Parklife but some significant (and negative) shift occurred and British culture ended.

Unless you were listening to jungle.

craner's next essay's going to be on the revival of britishness as an aesthetic and political force.

he'll explore the the framework of what britishness is as portrayed in 60's and 70's film and television. hancock's half hour and all that.

then it's demise in the 80's followed by this early-90's ground zero he's just honed in on and taking us right up to farage/mogg/ boris/ brexit.

it's going to be fucking amazing.

peek craner.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's a great idea but it's so, so hard trying to get him to do anything. He resists everything that sounds like it might be acting in his own best interests.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
he done his list, his fascism essay, he's engaging with dissensus more than just drunken choon of the day drive bys.

he's in a good place. superhuman abilities restoring.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Good shit craner, I love that line from Thomas to durrell about needing to be in the dark to write about the sun. I don't think it's true myself, I find the sun inspiring, but I enjoy the sentiment and the poetry of it nonetheless. Did Thomas basically fester after going large? Watkins also sounds interesting, sort of like Larkin maybe.

Good points you raise about the damage that Welsh nationalism may have done, most likely unintentionally. I think the same way about so much of representational politics and culture: in trying to defend, preserve or champion a minority or marginal group, you basically reaffirm difference and make shackles stronger. But I suppose there are counter arguments also. I presume you don't speak Welsh?

Never been to Swansea, just driven past it and I suppose through it, on our way in and out of the gower, which was truly amazing and lived up to all we had heard of it. The closest I've come in the UK to feeling like I was on a tropical island or something. I guess that says a lot really, that I never even noticed Swansea.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Thank you, I appreciate it!

No I don't speak Welsh and no one I grew up with or around did either. The first Welsh speakers I knew lived in Cardiff and had come from North Wales, and even that is a different kind of Welsh to the Welsh that is spoken in, say, rural Carmarthenshire.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
That’s an outstanding write up. I know the region well. Swansea suffered from abominable post war redevelopment, but I’d disagree with your point that Abertawe didn’t have Welsh enclaves - the industrial revolution drew masses of rural Welsh into southern ports, where they were slowly assimilated into English speaking Victorian Britain. Surnames are a prime indicator. In my experience you see more of these in Swansea than you do in the Cardiff area, which attracted masses of English workers during the height of the colonial era. The phone directory says it all. Equally, the accent differences between the two cities are monumentally different. Caerdiff’s “raond tha raond ehbaowt“ (Stella) & Swansea’s more sing-song sentences (with mandatory “mush”). The Norse influence has long been diluted beyond Svensay. The Landsker line probably exerted more influence, long term, in differentiating what influences added to Swansea’s unique mix, but Twin Town nailed the contemporary inflections if nothing else.

Pontcanna has the most Welsh speakers east of Carmarthen today - upper middle class, high property prices, very pc, lots of gogs too who carry quite a degree of influence in the city (see Clwb Ifor Bach). Studying in the city took some getting used to. The Cardiff v Swansea rivalry is huge and not just sport related. Same with Newport, but really it’s better understood as post-industrial ports now divided from the valleys by the M4 corridor. Pontypridd is as distinct and similar as, say, Bridgend. The range of accents tell you everything though in terms of identity and parochialism, but deprivation is still a grotesque post industrial thorn, ie Caerphilly, Merthyr, Mountain Ash, take your pick. If you head west a bit, Port Talbot’s air pollution levels regularly tops the worst in Britain - it’s a weird Gotham-esque gateway into Swansea itself, an eye-sore hard to shake off as you drop down into the dunes.

I love both. They’re more like northern English cities than most southern English locations in terms of resilience & attitude and not just in terms of post-industrialisation. The nationalist agenda is complex. As a Cymru Cymraeg ex at uni put it, what if “our culture and environment was compared to an endangered species, like a rare, indigenous butterfly? Would it matter more or less in preservation and policy terms?“. She had a point.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Thank you, I appreciate the response. I think I do say in the second section that after the Act of Union rural migration into Swansea was a factor and Welsh-speaking was common in all the towns. My point is that Swansea assimilated those Welsh speakers to a great extent. Cardiff has kept unassimilated Welsh enclaves, latterly for example in the political and media classes. Sorry, this is a quick response as I am on the move, but again thank you so much for reading and responding.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I work in the heart of social deprivation, in Caerphilly and Blaenau Gwent. But I grew up on the beaches of the Gower.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
The nationalist agenda is very complex, I agree completely. What I will say about my piece is that I am anti-nationalist, and the Anglo-Welsh section is a deliberate and mildly provocative attempt to put the other side of the argument, by highlighting a tradition that is now practically ideologically erased and also some of the forgotten aspects of Plaid Cymru's roots and the origins of their agenda.
 
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WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
My Dad was Glaswegian (of Irish descent) and my Mum is fully Cymru Cymraeg from Gwynedd. They met in London, but moved north to settle down etc. Visiting relatives, holidays split between the two, the respective languages and a growing fascination with how distinct parts of the British Isles could be so different and yet so similar.

Started with my Dad’s love of maps and walking us to death as kids, few years in the army while caning DiY and Weatherall guested parties on leave, segue to Celtic Studies at Cardiff. Landscapes, myths, languages, genetics, cultural change and continuation with place names and family names etc. MA on Celtic identities in England - Hwntas and gog expats in Slough, north Nottingham’s coal-fields, Liverpool and London, followed by an aborted PhD on the same at Swansea with John Davies rip. Stayed on, worked and married a local girl, got divorced, but consider the region a second home. Oldest kid lives in Sketty so we go to Ospreys games when time allows.


The Gower is unique. Rhossilli beach, Llangennech, Parc le Breos, I could ramble on. Just wish it was advertised less. Caerphilly and BG are heavy, cat malogen Covid red zones, so elbow bumps and stay safe out there.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Fascinating mix and that is some deep study! I’m even more delighted, then,
that my piece basically got a pass.

I lived in Sketty from the age of 4 until we moved to Mumbles when I was 8.

Gwent was a Corona hot spot for a while but it has subsided a bit now; I’ve been working from home in Barry for 10 weeks anyway.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Hey Craner, that's a really great essay. It sort of pains me that you're not a professional journalist - which is silly, I mean why should it bother me what you do for a living? - but you know what I mean, right? You've got the chops for it, for sure.

Then again, maybe it's better to stay an amateur, in the strict sense of doing something for the love it, without having to worry about how you've then got to sell it to someone.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Thanks, Tea.

Part of me feels that way: I don’t have to pitch an angle to dickhead commissioning editors; I don’t have to rely on it to buy food and wine and pay the mortgage. It kills the ambitious, vain part of me, but that gets buried with age, unless it does actually kill you, and I’m burying it rather than let it bury me.
 
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