Hell in a handcart....

[perrykneeham]

"We Hear You Now is a spoken word audio journey embedded in the landscape and online. It presents new stories, poetry and myths by Sussex-based writers of global majority heritage.

The series explores the history, biodiversity and topography of the area, through the lens of climate change, personal migration, legacies of empire and the writer’s own personal sense of belonging and connection to the land."

I don't want to hear the childish whitterings of talentless quadroons. Everyone's entitled to enjoy the Downs, just as that.

[perrykneeham]

This is just one of several, which you could be forgiven for thinking were part of an absurdist parody.

youtu.be/5TcrXaoCr1w?si=fbiyZWBimBsvuJZ_

[mids]

"Global heritage"? What the hell is that?

[perrykneeham]

Efnix, innit.

[mids]

Can't you just go for a walk and think, "hmmm, this is nice"?

[mids]

To be honest I'd want to avoid weirdos like that in the countryside, babbling some made up spiritual shite about going for a walk.

[perrykneeham]

No, you MUST be kept mindful, as someone who never enslaved, by those that never were.

[perrykneeham]

Also, who's signed off on this shite?

[mids]

I work with a half-Nigerian chick who's well into hillwalking. I think she's in some sort of group which I think might be a women's group but not one that's globally heritagalised. I'll gently probe her and see if she's aware of this.

[mids]

Sept 26, 2024 18:26:01 GMT perrykneeham said:

Also, who's signed off on this shite?

Starmer.

[flatandy]

Sept 26, 2024 18:20:05 GMT mids said:

"Global heritage"? What the hell is that?

"global majority heritage". Surely that makes more sense, now?

[flatandy]

The problem here, obviously, is not "efnix" or "global majority heritage" or any of that stuff.

It is, clearly, poetry. If anyone thinks "access to the countryside" for anyone can be helped by "poetry" they need coating in concrete and throwing in Arun.

If there's one thing that guarantees turning the majority of people away from anything it's poetry and the wankery around poetry and the self-importance of poets and poetry. Even f**k**g Wordsworth's Daffodils was enough to deter me from wanting to go to the Lake District as a kid.

What a load of pretentious toss.

That video that Baloo posted is evidence. If reading poetry makes you less scared to go for a walk in the Downs there's something very wrong in your head.

[flatandy]

That said, there are definitely accessibility issues for rural areas for urban types, and particularly for urban types who've not grown up thinking that going for a stroll on a muddy footpath in the drizzle and spending 400 quid on a decent waterproof and 200 quid on decent waterproof boots was a reasonable thing to do. There's definitely a barrier that seems to mean a lower percentage of non-white people are out on the moors. There's probably something useful to be done about it.

Poetry and some daft woman wittering about hearing the voices of her ancestors on the wind is not the thing that's going to get your average kid of Bengali or Nigerian descent to go scrambling across Sharp Edge on Blencathra.

[perrykneeham]

Adventure training. The hills are often.alive with groups of kids on DofE or somesuch. It's great to see. Many ofbthe kids are of global majority heritage. They're always polite and genuinely seem pleased to find that people are friendly and take an interest in their challenge.

[mids]

I would like to wail at length about my lack of access to Mount Everest and Hollywood parties. If I write pish poetry about it, I will demand that somebody do something about my lack of cash, fitness, expertise and experience to facilitate my summitting of Everest and pay to have my lack of acting skills and looks changed so that I can take my rightful place in drug fuelled orgies with starlets. Anything less is racism.

[flatandy]

I don't think growing up as a posh academic Scot removes you from the cultural milieu of the kinds of people who climb Everest. You are not excluded because you grew up in a community where access to to Everest was particularly more excluded than other communities. Your personal failure to climb Everest can be blamed solely and directly on your own personal laziness, incompetence and unwillingness to put in the hours and cash. Basically, it's because you're a bit sh*t.

Your lack of access to Hollywood starlets and cocaine fuelled dyonisian bacchanals may, in fact, be partially due to you growing up in the wrong place - it definitely seems to be easier if you were born in Malibu or Santa Monica or Beverly Hills, and even more so if you have the right parents. But even then I think there are quite a lot of posh Scottish actors who went to university who have ended up at those orgies. Again, your failure may be more related to your uselessness and because you're not enough of a luvvie, your personal failing of unwillingness to (metaphorically and literally) suck up to people who could have got you to the right places. And because you probably didn't go to acting school.

[mids]

I would also like to wail about the racial barriers to hillwalking I experience living in Cambridgeshire. For example, Bradford with its high proportion of brown people, has easy access to Ilkley Moor whereas Cambs is hideously white yet has no hills. I demand an opportunity to whine on the BBC and money.

[flatandy]

Again, that doesn't sound like a "racial barrier". That sounds like your own stupidity in living somewhere sh*t and flat and full of fenland yokels rather than living somewhere with pretty hills.

Also, evidence suggests that you lack no opportunity to whine

[mids]

It's as much a racial barrier as a brown or a black living in Peckham and bleating that Scafell Pike isn't at the end of their street.

[flatandy]

I think you're confusing racial barriers with physical barriers.

But also, you're a rich white man who grew up ruining the landscape by wandering around it in your wellies and Barbour on stag shooting expeditions in the moorlands and highlands, so you already know what it's like to be in the hills and could choose to live somewhere else with that knowledge. Your Peckham dwelling feral child of global majority heritage has never once used his gun to hunt antelope in the wild, and has never even seen a hill so doesn't know he could move to Borrowdale and go walking in the hills every day instead of studying architecture at the Bartlett.