The countryside is waaycist.
I’ll say one thing for Wildlife And Countryside Link, the umbrella organisation for conservation charities which last week produced a report claiming that the British countryside is embedded with ‘racist and colonial legacies’. It makes rural life sound a lot more exciting than it actually is.
To read it, you would think that village greens are lit up by chapters of the Ku Klux Klan waving flaming torches. The reality is more of over-60s practising pilates in the village hall, or the parish council meeting to discuss potholes.
If, as the report claims, ‘green spaces are dominated by white people’ there is a good reason for that. The UK population is, after all, 80 per cent white, and Britain’s ethnic population is – for all kinds of historic reasons – concentrated in large cities. So yes, you don’t see as many black people tramping the bridleways of the Chilterns as you do walking the streets of Islington. But that hardly makes rural people racist. You might as well go to a village outside Nairobi and complain there are too many black faces.
All perfectly true. As our inner cities become swamped with cultural enrichment and seem like foreign countries, the countryside appears to be a blessed escape. I’m all for it. White flight really is a thing. Again, I’m all for it. Who wants to live in a third world shithole like London?
I visited my closest big town, Durham, 3 weeks ago. I haven’t seen culturally enriched faces in…3 weeks. And I do drive to large supermarkets 2-3 times a week. So there are still some pockets of decency, albeit modest wealth, left in England.
Until 2016 or so I wasn’t a racist. I used to think there are shit people equally between nationalities and races. I don’t think like that anymore.
If you watch Vera, the Northeast is full of cultural enrichment and mixed race marriages. If you visit in person, not so much.
Snap! I don’t think like that anymore either.
If I go to Bradistan, Huddistan or Dewsbury, I feel like I’m in Pakistan. Does that make those places racist as well? Or is it just wipo who can be racist?
Maybe wipo are the only mass rapists of young girls as well?
In my efforts to appear as “right on” I’ve mixed up my acronyms. Apologies to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, I meant to write wypipo instead, innit.
Maybe those BAME people just don’t see the point of putting on sturdy boots, grabbing a knobbly stick and walking for miles just to look at the scenery. I’ve done a fair bit of yomping in my time and have quite enjoyed it but I can well understand people who just don’t get it. But no, if we don’t have proportionally representative diversity absolutely everywhere, that leaves pockets of racism that still need to be eradicated.
A perfect day is walking a nice path while studying an OS Explorer map, High Cup Nick, Ullswater, North Downs Way, sandwiches and tea for lunch, back at home a hot shower, nice food and a few beers. For a Johnny Foreigner this is best of England. I didn’t bring many strange foreign habits with me, when is Rome do as the Romans do.
I can never get tea to taste good out of a flask, so I have coffee.
It’s nice to go to the country and not get stabbed.