Cycling UK Forum

I love England. I love the scenery, the traditional architecture, the village churches and greens. The ordinary people.

I feel increasingly unwelcome here though. Every day I feel more of an alien. The self entitled are ever more distant yet trying to totally manage our lives. Government is corrupt like I have never known in my entire life.

As Bob Dylan wrote - "Times are a changin" and not for the better,
I've said it once and I'll say it again I'm 69 and glad I'm on the way out.

Funny really, I like the change.
I might not always agree with it but it's interesting.

What I really dislike is the way my peers seem to become more entrenched in their views as they get older.
I find I have more in common with the youngsters these days - just a shame I look like their grandad.

It's a strange perception these days.

Once upon a time we always used to say "if I had my time over again".

Lately, considering my grandkid's future lives, I've been thinking "I wouldn't want to be starting again now".

Progress? Not in my book.

If you find yourself with a few empty moments, plod your way through the two documentary films by Adam Curtis, both of which can be found on iPlayer, at the mo'. One is called Bitter Lake, the other HyperNormalisation. You will find that you are not alone. AC not for everyone, but at worst, you can enjoy great images, a novel approach to documentary making and an excellent choice of music for their respective soundtracks - available on Spotify if interested.

It's a polarisation thing, I think.

Would it be over-simplistic and naive to imagine that there are about 16.1 million people in this country whom I do empathise with, as against about 17.4 million whom I do not?

Yes it probably would be. Sorry to bring up the B-word, however obliquely - anyway numbers like that are meaningless today.

There are plenty of decent folk around, nevertheless. I don't say I feel unwelcome amongst those - though there are others around my patch who have made me unwelcome (like the bridge club I was kicked out of some years ago.... ). And even on one or two cycling forums in the past, I've been the outsider, the pariah. You can never be sure.

I am someone who likes to be progressive. I don’t live in the past although I do try to live a simple and modest lifestyle (but isn’t that actually forward thinking rather than mere nostalgia?) Indeed, one of the disturbing things today is the attempt to turn back the clock. Oh for the days of Churchill and Empire and Britannia ruling the waves. Oh for a white little England where everyone knew their place: the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate.

So it isn’t about “when I were a lad”.

Oldjohnw wrote:I love England. I love the scenery, the traditional architecture, the village churches and greens. The ordinary people.

I feel increasingly unwelcome here though. Every day I feel more of an alien. The self entitled are ever more distant yet trying to totally manage our lives. Government is corrupt like I have never known in my entire life.

My sympathies to you for feeling that way.

I let it all wash over me TBH.
My democratic votes have never been used .......... other than the B word. I voted that way because I never wanted us in in the first place, but if we stayed, so what? I don't honestly mind.

I'm not militant, I'm not extreme in my political views - perhaps I don't have any other than I don't like (and I've never liked or wanted) a Tory government.

I'm enjoying the soap opera that Alex and Nichola are starring in.

Is it really worse? Look at all the cover-ups, scandal and lies that were beyond our ken in the 60’s and 70’s. Could it just be that you are drowning in the incessant, ever-present media output that dominates this world? We are bombarded from every angle by air-time filling, attention-grabbing, shock inducing junk that, if it not for our obvious emotional reactions, would have no bearing on our lives whatsoever.
Ditch the TV, newspapers and online ‘news’ feeds. Listen to the local news once a day to keep informed. Then the stuff that matters rises out of the tat and looks less like the last nail in the coffin of a miserable, oppressed life.

There is plenty of evidence that our government today is the most corrupt of modern times.

I read some online news once a day and never watch TV news or listen to the radio news. But thanks for the advice. I am a board member of a couple of organisations dealing with poverty and exclusion. I see the consequences of policy. Newspaper spin is irrelevant in my making an assessment.

Oldjohnw wrote:There is plenty of evidence that our government today is the most corrupt of modern times.

I read some online news once a day and never watch TV news or listen to the radio news. But thanks for the advice.

That's one thing I miss.

If I read an news article in a paper from the early part of the last century it's just presented as facts.
No spin, no colouring.
"He said X, they said Y. Z was observed" etc etc.

That's the one thing I really hate about "modern times" is the spin.
Perhaps it was just hidden better back then.

Mick F wrote:
I'm enjoying the soap opera that Alex and Nichola are starring in.

Can't wait for the sequel, Pride and Prejudice the Holy Rude version.

.

kwackers wrote:If I read an news article in a paper from the early part of the last century it's just presented as facts.
No spin, no colouring.
"He said X, they said Y. Z was observed" etc etc.

That's the one thing I really hate about "modern times" is the spin.
Perhaps it was just hidden better back then.

'The North Briton' was a radical newspaper of the mid 18th C which seriously annoyed George III (the owner/editor fled to France) its outlook was largely political.

There were a gamut of newspapers from the 1860s onwards, because a paper tax was abolished and people's literacy improved. Known liberal papers included; Birmingham Daily Post, Daily Chronicle, Daily News, Daily Telegraph, Echo, Leeds Mercury, Manchester Evening News, Manchester Guardian, Morning Advertiser, Northern Daily Express, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, Northampton Post, Northern Echo and Pall Mall Gazette. Known conservative papers included Globe, Morning Post, The Standard, The Times and Yorkshire Post. Between 1896 and 1903 the Daily Mail, Daily Express and the Daily Mirror were all launched. The Mirror was deliberately repositioned from being a middle-class conservative paper to a left-wing working class one in the 1930s.

These papers all had opinions and biases on issues such as the American Civil War, Irish Home Rule, imperial expansion, the Boer Wars, World War One (where the media was pretty uniformly vicious in its portrayal of Germans in a way that was not seen in WW2 though oddly Nazism was far more grotesque), votes for women and appeasement.

I think some rose-tinted glasses have been ordered during lockdown....

Ben@Forest wrote:These papers all had opinions and biases on issues such as the American Civil War, Irish Home Rule, imperial expansion, the Boer Wars, World War One (where the media was pretty uniformly vicious in its portrayal of Germans in a way that was not seen in WW2 though oddly Nazism was far more grotesque), votes for women and appeasement.

I think some rose-tinted glasses have been ordered during lockdown....

It's just the way they read.
They come across as being factual as opposed to modern opinion pieces.

Obviously you can colour stuff by altering what you report, what you omit etc but somehow for the most part the reporting seemed to represent facts.
At the extreme end of the spectrum these days is the DM that is frequently spanked for telling porkies or exaggerating stuff to levels of unbelievable levels of silliness.