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POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

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From: (Anonymous)

You laugh you lose:

https://crimereads.com/emma-van-straaten-essay/

'playmates would ask, and sometimes, after a long look: "why are you brown?'

Shit that DID NOT HAPPEN. 🤣🤣🤣

She's from London and she looks white. This did not happen. 100%, nope.

From: (Anonymous)

ok I'll stop cyberstalking this devastatingly marginalized writer in a minute, but I want to note that it looks like she attended a private school that currently charges fees of £21000 a year and does not offer means-tested scholarships. The max scholarship you can get is 10% off. tbf this might have changed since she was there, and I assume the fees were also lower, but still made me lol

From: (Anonymous)

I mean, she also says her quintessentially privileged middle-class white English upbringing involved “girl scouts” and holidays in Spain, so I’m not sure what’s going on there.

From: (Anonymous)

I always side-eye when authors describe themselves as growing up "middle-class", because they invariably mean the upper end. I was shocked when I went to uni and met all these people calling themselves middle-class who were the poshest mofos I'd ever met.

But also imagine spending like 100k on your kid's secondary education, because you think they're not academically capable enough to get the uni grades without a massive leg up, and then they still grow up to be a transactivist.

From: (Anonymous)

(though I don't read much into "holidays in spain", tbf; I had poor friends whose parents saved everything for travel, and rich friends who holidayed exclusively in france. She can't claim to be poor, but tbf, she's not claiming that.

Also, I don't think she's completely to blame for that cringe essay. The competition she entered asks authors to go on about their identity, tries to promote minority authors, etc. So I think she wrote about being part-Mauritian in there, neglected to mention that it had no impact on her life, successfully gamed the form (that public school training may have helped!), then when the panel met her, "hrm", so now she's doubling down. That insecurity would jive with immediately trying to destroy another author.)

From: (Anonymous)

So she's exactly what you would expect the current lit culture to create.

From: (Anonymous)

> though I don't read much into "holidays in spain", tbf; I had poor friends whose parents saved everything for travel, and rich friends who holidayed exclusively in france.

Well, yes. My point is, we don’t have “girl scouts” in the UK, and holidays in Spain (especially 25 years ago) were a chavvy, lower-class thing. If she had been super posh privileged, she’d have said she had holidays in the south of France, or Cornwall.

If she was trying to communicate a privileged upbringing to a British audience, she’d have said holidays in the South of France, or using her later examples (where she says she was mistaken for a local on holidays in Greece, Italy and Spain) she’d have said holidays in Greece and Italy where they visited historic sites and museums.

If she was trying to communicate a standard middle-class (privileged-ish) upbringing to a British audience, she’d have said it involved Brownies (or maybe Guides), which have a wider social intake than that but are stereotypically middle class (in the English sense), and holidays abroad.

That’s what I mean by “I don’t know what’s going on there”. She can’t have been a Girl Scout, and holidays in Spain don’t communicate a privileged or a middle class upbringing.

Did someone else write this instead of her? Does she really exist?

From: (Anonymous)

She's trying to subtly look poorer than she is, imo (why else include board games and books? :')), so that's why she's emphasising Spain. I think she might've said scouts rather than guides or brownies to make it more readable to a US audience?

Lol at Cornwall!

From: (Anonymous)

It’s just bizarre. If it’s written for a US audience, Spain presumably sounds exotic. She wasn’t a Girl Scout, and the connotations of that are off.

Also, yeah. Posh families go to Cornwall or Devon. They stay in super nice hotels or cottages, maybe their own holiday home or a friend’s. It is much more expensive than a Spanish holiday, and conveys higher social status. They go to beaches where you often cannot buy any plastic tat, and sometimes there are even communal litter pickers and reusable litter buckets you can borrow to use with the kids. It is a whole thing. A nice hotel in Cornwall is easily twice or more the price of an all-inclusive resort in Spain including flights.

From: (Anonymous)

Oh I know, but there are tiers with it. Everyone goes cornwall, posh ones just own the cottages! (Source: went cornwall when too poor for abroad; made enough to go abroad; now have enough to go cornwall again in a more fancy manner). But you made me laugh because I also use "cottage in Cornwall" as a synonym for "loaded". It's legit a plotpoint in a silly thing I'm writing.

From: (Anonymous)

Geographically challenged Ameridan, reporting in. I consulted with an equally culturally-illiterate friend and we both came to the same conclusions:

- Summer holidays in Spain are for the wealthy. We envisioned tennis with a view of the ocean and parties in Ibiza.
- Cornwall sounds like a generically British town in the middle of nowhere. The Kansas of England, so to speak.

From: (Anonymous)

:) Cornwall is THE tourist trap for brits (I think Windermere is the most comparable, if you've heard of it! But cornwall is sunnier and has beaches). Like most seaside places there's a local population that hate the tourists, while depending a tourism economy. I think there's standard seaside-town poverty and drug problems in some of the less popular bits, but it's in the South West of England, so I believe it's still relatively posh in the worst parts. Funnily enough, though, I've never had cause to visit the rough parts of Cornwall, so perhaps there are local gangs that would take umbrage at that. :P

From: (Anonymous)

(comparable not for landscape, but for TOURISTS TOURISTS EVERYWHERE HELP)

From: (Anonymous)

> it's in the South West of England, so I believe it's still relatively posh in the worst parts.

The South West of England has some of the worst poverty in the UK. Look at the map on page 6 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/835115/IoD2019_Statistical_Release.pdf The second homes and tourists are posh, but the locals are not, generally. They have real difficulty getting doctors, nurses, teachers, because you’d have to deal with the impoverished locals like you’re living somewhere cheap, but all housing costs are incredibly high because of tourists and second homes.

It’s the South East that tends to be posh.

From: (Anonymous)

Yeah, wasn’t that a whole thing in the Brexit discussions? That Cornwall got a lot of EU funding to off-set them being such a deprived area, and whether the UK government would match that funding or just leave them to picturesquely rot?

From: (Anonymous)

Yeah. I wonder if you super-imposed the motorways and railways on to that map, the lack of investment would show up? Because you can’t really get around that area without a car unless you spend basically entire days travelling, and even with a car it’s ridiculous. I bet you could see where the M5 stops where nearly all the spots go dark.

From: (Anonymous)

I hadn’t realised they included the Isles of Scilly, too.

https://www.cornwallislesofscillygrowthprogramme.org.uk/european-regional-development-fund/

I wonder what Cornwall would look like if they hadn’t had that extra support?

From: (Anonymous)

Dyrt

Looks like that pdf agrees with my claim tbh. Maybe I should've italicised "south".

From: (Anonymous)

(my comment initially read "it's not Blackpool"! But I took that out because I figured an Ameridan unfamiliar with Cornwall probably wouldn't know Blackpool, either.)

From: (Anonymous)

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/165612521#/?channel=RES_BUY

Yours for 10 grand!

From: (Anonymous)

Yes, which is why all the private businesses set up children’s homes there and then somehow our laws allowed local councils to send looked-after children from all over the country to cheap, for-profit homes in Blackpool where they don’t know anyone and can’t keep in touch with family and friends. But this topic makes me too sad to continue.

From: (Anonymous)

I know Blackpool! They have boat trams and football. I imagine they must have other things, too, like the ocean, but I have yet to confirm this theory.

From: (Anonymous)

This is what I thought. So she’s making it sound privileged to a US audience, but in a way that doesn’t make sense in reality. Which takes me back to wondering if someone else wrote it for her.

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