![]() Whether reporting from drizzly Lancashire, chilly Essex or the relatively mild south coast, she paints a shocking picture of endemic bad health, high debt and low educational attainment. ![]() Instead, Bunting, a former Guardian journalist who has written extensively on social affairs, plunges deep into the ugly truth: that for the last two decades at least, England’s seaside towns have experienced among the worst levels of deprivation in the country. The result is far from being a nostalgic wander around seafronts and winter gardens with stories thrown in about the time Frank Sinatra performed in Blackpool or Edward VII got in a round of golf at Frinton. In this remarkable book, as bracing as a smack in the face by a stiff sea breeze, Madeleine Bunting tours the English coastline to discover what it reveals about the state of the nation today. Still, without quite realising it, he had nailed a crucial point about the way Britain instinctively imagines itself in terms of its edges rather than its heartland, particularly in times of crisis. ![]() The lyrics turn out to be by a New Yorker who had never set eyes on the bared teeth of Kent’s chalk coast, and didn’t realise that bluebirds are never seen outside North America. ![]() W hen Vera Lynn sang about bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, the whole thing was a nonsense, or at least a colossal projection. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |