ACFM - ACFM Trip 34: The Outdoors

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

As the longest day arrives in the northern hemisphere, Jeremy, Nadia and Keir ponder our obsession with the great outdoors. How did parks become political? Why do we seek out the strenuous discomforts of hiking, camping and cold water? And what does Jem have against music festivals? They look back on a century of changing […]

Hello, and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. and I'm here as usual with my friends, Nadia Idol. Hello. And Keir Milbin. Hello. And today we are talking about the Great Outdoors.

So why are we talking about this subject today on June the 8th, 2023? Yes, why are we indoors on this beautiful summer day recording this episode? Good point, good point. I was literally explaining to my partner that I couldn't go for a bike ride because we have to record a show. about the outdoors. So that gives you the answer. It's a lovely, it's getting into summer, people's eyes are turning into the outdoors.

It's when Britain shakes off its rain, sodden, indoorsiness, and ventures out. Of course, we are willing to sacrifice our afternoon to enhance your enjoyment of the outdoors, dear listener, by giving you some context. That's why I think we should talk about it. What about you, Nadia? Yeah, so like you, I'm really interested in this time of year, Kea. I think, you know, it's particular to I think this part of the world that you can really see people emerge, you know, like flowers budding or something.

Like it really makes me feel like people are part of nature because, yeah, come May, June, that everybody wants to be outdoors. Like, we can see it. We can see it in people's behavior. We can see it in people's choice of activities. But we also can see it in like cultural production and like how people talk about the outdoors. becomes different, you know, whether it's like in magazines or like music that's produced, etc. But of course, when people go outdoors, it then necessitates the discussion about, like, where are we allowed to be outdoors? Because it's one thing to be in your, you know, garden,

with your ice lolly, you know, listening to ACFM. And another thing to be, you know, in a park or in a mountain or in other kinds of public spaces, you know, walking in the countryside, which I think we're going to talk about because there's obviously, that's political, because it comes with where we're allowed to be and where we're not allowed to be. So that's why I'm interested about talking about the outdoors. What about you, Jeremy? Well, it's interesting for all the reasons that you say, raises all kinds of interesting questions.

There's a long tradition of thinking about the relationship between the country and the city, the inside, the outside, and the outside as public or as more tendension than the public than the inside, the indoors, which are all themes we're really interested in. And also, like everyone else, I do, I do really, look, I do. spend a lot of time outdoors in the summer. Yeah, so there's loads of interesting ideas there, which I'm sure we will unpack. But before we get into the subject, just a quick reminder listeners, that we now have a newsletter. So you can get weirder and left here with us by

subscribing to our newsletter by going to navara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter that has all sorts of bits of content which we have been writing up for you. And then also, just a reminder that for more of the music and less of the chat, you can follow our expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify by just searching for ACFM and to support us and to keep doing what we're doing. And more from the ACFM Cosmos, please support our hosts, Navarra Media by going to Novara.media forward slash support. And last but not least, there may be an opportunity for exciting workshops taking place in Bristol and Bath. So if you are a fan of the show or the fan of the kind of events that we've been running and you are interested in having us come over and do

something with you. I'd love to hear from you if you are in Bristol or Bath. And you can tweet at not just you here, that's my handle on Twitter, or you can find all my contact details via link tree on my Twitter account. I'd love to hear from you, so please get in touch. Without further ado, let's get talking about the outdoors. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense to start to start with this problem that we face, which is we want to go outdoors, and yet we don't have access, we can't get access to most of the outdoors in the UK. The British public are banned from accessing 93% of the land in England. And we can only get access to something like 3% of all of the riverbanks in the UK.

There's only about 3% of those riverbanks are accessible. And there's a reason for that, which is because we live in a deeply unequal society, in which 50% of all of the land in England is owned by 1% of the population. and well over a third of the land in England is owned by the aristocracy. Most of the land of the UK is not accessible. Huge amounts are owned by large land owners. And like 90% of the population of the UK lives in cities

and cities make up about 10% of the land area in Britain, I think that is, yeah, 90% of the population of Britain rather than just England. That's the problem that the population of England and the UK more generally has faced since the enclosure of the commons and then the growth of the industrial cities, etc. There's been this sort of serial waves of urban populations

of the industrial working class and post-industrial working class having to sort of like fight to get access to this land, fight to be able to go outdoors or into the countryside and pursue various pursuits, I think. That's just the context of it and it's basically still an ongoing thing. in Scotland in 2003 they introduced a bill which basically reversed the emphasis in which the default

position is that you have access to land unless there's really good reasons for you not to have access to that land whereas in the England and the rest of the UK there is a default exclusion from land you can only have access to land where there's specific access is granted and that's usually on particular footpaths you can also gain the permission of the landowner of course but that's neither here. This is really interesting. I mean, one, it sounds, I don't know what the statistics are for other European countries,

but it sounds absolutely mad. I mean, you read those numbers that you've just told us about Kia and you just think, well, this must be an underdeveloped country. I mean, the fact that, you know, 90% of the population are living in the urban environment on 10% of the land. And you get on trains in this amazing weather in the UK

and you see all of this beautiful land and like nobody's allowed to walk on it. But what I thought would be good at this point is to kind of define terms if we know them in the sense of when we say access to land, does that mean, so like do you know in terms of like the Scottish Reform Act, does that mean you're allowed to walk on it, ramble on it, hang out, have a picnic, or can you go as far as like wild camping?

Like what are the definitions about access? Well, I know that like basically the rights to access, in England are just for walking and for climbing, actually. So, like, they don't include any rights for wild swimming, in rivers and so forth, don't include any rights to camping and so forth. You're not allowed to do anything, basically. In England and Wales, there is a network of public rights of way that go across privately owned land.

And it's always been a kind of political battle to keep them open, you know, the Ramblers Association, which is the association for people who enjoy walking outdoors, like rambling, Hiking, as it's called in America, historically, it really came into existence as a political organisation to contest the fact that lots and lots of local areas, local landowners who didn't like people walking across their land, would block off what was supposed to be public footpaths and rights of way. So if you want to go walking anywhere in England and Wales in the countryside, you have to basically know, you need to have a map which indicates where the public rights away are because you can quite easily find yourself walking down a road through some beautiful

countryside and it's all fenced off and there's no way of getting into it for miles so it's very can be very frustrating i mean there are areas of land like in the national parks which are more open although you're still not allowed to wild camp in them without except in very specific areas and with special permission so it's pretty restrictive and in scotland the situation is completely reversed. In Scotland, basically, you're not allowed to fence off land or to prevent people walking across it, whether it's on a footpath or not, without express permission from the relevant authorities. And you're not even allowed to prohibit wild camping without a good reason. I mean, there are never any good reasons, incidentally. I mean, generally speaking,

the places where people want to go walking are hills where there aren't any arable crops. There's only livestock. So the historic preference of English and Welsh landowners for keeping people off the land is completely ideological. There's nothing to do with any actual commercial or agricultural utility. Or it's more land kept, kept that way for pheasant shooting. Yeah, but the point is pheasant shooting doesn't do any, you know, doesn't make any difference having people walk across it. It only makes a difference for a few hours. Yeah. I mean, one reason why there wasn't that much pushback against it from landowners in Scotland is because a huge amount of the land in Scotland is just used for grouse shooting and stag shooting and it really doesn't make

any difference like it's huge tracts of land and it's been it's just got heather on it and as long as you're not like setting fire to the heather you're not really damaging its commercial value at all so they weren't really that bothered about allowing people to walk across it of course that aristocracy has always been like outdoorsy it's always going to be outdoorsy it the problem is with people who are not aristocrats who are trying to like do other activities that doesn't usually doesn't involve shooting something. No, that's true. And I realize I'm slightly contradicting myself here, actually, because I'm saying there's no reason for the English and Welsh people, really, apart from ideologically, to be worried about people walking across land. I mean, my understanding,

mostly sort of anecdotally, is that there's this sort of mythology amongst landowners in England of Wales about the various kinds of damage that might get done to your land by people walking across it. But also, there's this fear of people walking across it, partly because the population is so dense. And in Scotland, The situation is different, just politically, because Scotland is just much more progressive and much more left-wing in terms of its political consensus. But it is also the case that the population in Scotland is so much less dense that you don't have this kind of fear of hordes of people walking across your land if you're a landowner that really haunts the dreams

of English and Welsh landowners, especially in parts of England that are very, very densely populated. I mean, it's one thing's worth saying. It's always incredible to me that people don't know this. We have talked about this on the show before. Because England has this self-conception that's formed at the end of the 19th century of itself as somehow being an inherently pastoral country, people just don't know that it's actually one of the least pastoral places on Earth. It's one of the most urbanised countries and one of the most densely populated countries in the world, England. So, and of course that does create this incredible defensiveness among landowners and rural populations to some extent, because they're always sort of afraid that the hordes are going

to pour out of the cities and trample over their last precious remaining bits of green and pleasant England. It does mean that the whole question of, well, who has access to the last bits of land, which are actually left, especially, as I say, in southern England, but there isn't much of it left at all, really, off to centuries of urbanisation. It's always a really tense issue. I remember my friend Adam Ramsey once, who works for Open Democratic. and comes from a left-wing Scottish Aristot family. Remember me? We were walking around somewhere in southern England once after going to some event

and just talking about just the fascist feeling you had from trying to walk around the English countryside. And it is really different. It does feel really different being in Scotland, just knowing, you know, you can just walk around. And it is really challenging in parts of England and parts of Wales. really challenging just to go for a walk. So Labour are promised a right to Rome Act in England, well, the rest of the UK, I think it is. We'll see if that survives. I'm not sure, actually. It's one of those that could survive because it doesn't interfere with their main constituencies, rural aristocracy being the Tories, but we'll see if that survives and becomes reality or not.

But it's really interesting to, you know, unpack a little bit what you guys were talking about. I mean, just what you were just saying there, Jeremy, that feeling is very hard to describe it. But, you know, it is there. A lot of people have experienced this, this feeling that, you know, you go out and then you are, this feeling that you are trespassing on somebody else's land that you don't necessarily get in, you know, other countries. And people that I've spoken to also will concur with the idea that in Scotland that just doesn't feel that way. Now, of course, you're right, there are all of these paths. And it's not necessarily, I think, that you need to have a map in my experience when I've been walking in the Chilterns or whatever.

It's actually very well marked, like where is, you know, this pathway, this walkway, this bridal way, et cetera. You need to know where it starts. Yeah, you need to know, exactly. So you need to know where you walk. If you're doing a circular or whatever, sometimes you can just follow the, follow the arrows to get across a field or whatever. But yeah, it's this feeling that. This is owned by someone else, and it's not there for hours in a kind of collective sense. I find really interesting, which of course is something that comes up also in terms of modern cities

in the UK, being a multicultural country, in a sense, at least for 15% of a country, and the amount of people who are not white who have never left cities. And I think it's super interesting, like what is it that doesn't allow people to do that? And it is that thing of feeling like this belongs to someone else. It's very, very difficult to articulate, but we kind of all know that it's there. Yeah, I remember Jeremy Della talking about this. I think in his documentary about Rave,

but he never went to the countryside because he didn't know what the rules were. He didn't know who owned it. We didn't know how to behave, basically. It seemed as though it was something to look at. He didn't know how to interact with it. Well, again, it's a political issue, particularly in England, going back decades,

as I think we have talked about on the show, a bit before that the whole question of how people who are essentially members of the urban poor, which includes historically most ethnic minorities in Britain, how they negotiate or win access to those countryside spaces from which their ancestors or their social ancestors, even if not their genealogical ancestors, were driven out by the enclosure. And it has always been a historic issue, historically, politically, issue. The right to Rome is a working class demand going back to the 1930s. But it partly it comes out of its whole idea of camping, walking, hiking, this whole idea of like getting out

of the city to enjoy the countryside, something that you ought to do, you want to do. It's part of the good life. And it's interesting to think about that history, isn't it? Because of course, before urbanisation, before mass urbanisation from the 18th century onwards, it's not an issue for most people getting into the countryside and you don't even because most people just live there and a lot of what we think of today is being like the really attractive countryside in which to hike and camp and roam the mountains and the more rugged hills at least in western Europe especially I know in Britain it wasn't thought of as being like a place you wanted to go particularly it was thought of as being scary and dangerous and if you only lived there if you had basically lost

a kind of struggle over territory because where people really wanted to live and to be was in the fertile lowlands where it's easy to grow stuff and the weather's relatively temperate and it's predictable. And then as urbanisation takes hold, I think sort of across the different social classes

to some extent, it becomes a desirable thing to be able to get out of the city, especially in the summer. There's like waves, isn't there, basically, of organised hiking, rambling, cycling, etc., that take hold and become big trends. And one of the places to start with that probably is like the clarion cycling clubs.

They're sort of like socialist cycling clubs and rambling clubs. And they used to do all sorts, actually, like glee clubs and theatre groups and all these sorts of things. But one of the big things was this drive to go collectively into the countryside. So the clarion cycling clubs that exists, actually. I think it's set up in like the late 19th century where there's this. this sort of newspaper called The Clarion is formed in, I think it's 1900, by this odd character called John Blatchford.

No, Robert Blatchford, I do apologise. And it's sort of like, it's one of the first big socialist newspapers. You know, it's cited as something that really spread socialist ideas amongst the British working class in particular. And like that Clarion newspaper does this call for people that take up, like cycling, rambling, etc. There's a big, big bicycling, cycling boom towards the end of the 19th century when bikes shift from these, like, penny farthings, which are not very good for cross-country

cycling into like the A-frame bikes that we still sort of have. And so there's a big wave of cycling and people cycling out of the cities. And so the sort of Clarion cycling clubs take off, rambling clubs and these sorts of things. But what happens with those is that they get turned into this organisation called the Clarion Scout. so they have these cycling clubs and they start saying well why don't we mix this with socialist agitation and so they used to cycle round then they had this the clarion van which was a van that drove round who would meet them and they distribute socialist literature and organize mass meetings around the sort of towns and villages they went to and there's still i was in nelson recently which is

a town in lancashire just north of burnley and there's still a clarion house just up in the hills there used to be a whole series of these houses which were collectively owned and would facilitate people going up into the countryside and not to have a cup of tea and to do activities up there, etc. You say people, but do you mean men? Because women were not allowed to join most cycling clubs in the beginning. Or did the Clarion Club come later? Well, I mean, I only know this history because I did a talk in Nelson and there was somebody from Clarion House Day who did this talk. And it's a really interesting talk. And I like basically The person she taught most about,

and I can't remember her name, I should have done my prep, was a woman who was like Central to setting up the Clarion House organized the sort of raising of the money and all these sorts of these sorts of things. So I think it was mixed. There are like lots of these examples of these sorts of waves of movements which weren't mixed.

Yeah, they were. The Clarion Cycling Club, it admitted women from the moment of its foundation. Oh, right. Okay, good. In 1895. Because it's only, it's literally 1980. that women's bloomers for cycling were invented. My understanding is before that,

women did not have the clothes, didn't have the clothes that didn't get, like, caught up in the, in the bike's mechanism. And they were only, they were cycling in breaches. There's a couple of suffragettes that were saying, well, we were cycling, but we were cycling at night, wearing breaches because we're too scared to be caught by men, like not wearing a skirt and what the repercussions would be,

which is why I was asking about the dates, because it's like literally 1895. Oh, yeah, well, that's interesting. When did the Clarion Cycling Club start? It's 95. It's 95. The paper launched in 94 and the cycling clubs, the cycling clubs, which I think hadn't,

I think the cycling club gets set up around the same time, and then it becomes directly associated with the Clarian after like a year. Yeah, it's that way around, isn't it? So the Clarian Cycling Club officially is launched in 1895, and I think indeed it was the only. National Cycling Organization that allowed women at the time. The story this woman from the Clarion House gave was really interesting because the image he was given was like of this town of Nelson got formed because of the mills that got produced there, etc.

And she said, look, this is a really new thing. And there's people coming from all around the UK to Nelson. There's pollution in Nelson and this is something they're not particularly used to. And so like it's that self-organisation to get out of the pollution. Do you know what I mean? And in fact, Nelson then became like a real centre of that municipal socialism of that era. It's like a nice image of like, that's what was going on. You got these new towns built around industrialisation, heavily polluting,

and then you have the populations organising to get themselves out of there, basically, for like health reasons, but also seen it as part of, you know, as a collective activity and as part of a struggle for socialism, basically. Well, Shone and Knife, cycling is fun. You chose this, Nadia. When do you say something about it? Yeah, no, cycling is fun. It's a really, really fun song by my favorite pop punk Japanese band, Shona Nye from 1981,

and it's got, you know, bits about the green fields and stuff, and it's just a really fun summer vibe song. So one song we absolutely have to play, that I think I played when I did the folk music, Microdose, but we'll keep playing it. It's Ewan McColl, the Manchester Rambler. It is the anthem of the Ramblers Association in the post-war period. also refers back to the Communist Party of Great Britain organised mass trespass of Kinder Scout, a large area of scenic beauty in the Peak District in Derbyshire in the 1930s.

It's a song, I'll sing for you, if you want. Yes, please. If you buy me a pint. I'll do your chorus. I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler from Manchester way. I get all me pleasure. the heart northern way I may be a wait slave on Monday

but I am a free man on Sunday there you go yay nice beautiful the day was just ending and I was descending down Grinesbrook just by upper tall when a voice cried

Hey you in the way keepers do heed the worst face that ever I saw The things that he said were unpleasant in the teeth of his fury, I said. Sooner than far from the mountains, I think I would rather be dead. Hiking, like, mountain walking again is really interesting to me. I mean, I know, I don't think we've ever talked about this before, really, but I would, like, I love, like, a really serious, like, hiking in mountains. Like there's some part of my brain

is like my favourite thing to do in the world and I hardly ever get to do it because it's really hard to do if you've got little kids basically or just even big kids I was warned Is hills good enough

Or when you say mountains What kind of scale do you need? I'm talking about like the southern alps or mountains I like Scotland Now I do like going walks in the lake district and stuff You want mountain I love the Scottish

Highlands, but it's really expensive to go there, and it's the weather's bad, 90% of the time. So it's kind of interesting to me because there is this whole interesting cultural history that people have written about, about how the mountains are just sort of scary in the northern European imagination, at least, up until the Industrial Revolution and the birth of romanticism. But I'm always kind of struck by the fact that in other cultures, in other traditions, like Asian traditions, that the mountains are always thought of a sacred places, like there are always places of pilgrimage, the places where hermits go and things like this. But you don't get, but you don't get Christian mystics wandering off into the

mountains and the Middle Ages. It's just not something they do. But I suppose I'm wondering now if it's just something partly to do with weather. You know, I grew up, I grew up in, I grew up in a high, in a rambling household, you know, getting taken to the lakes or North Wales. And, yeah, all the time when I was a kid and growing up, but I think I literally never experienced like a really, really sunny day in the mountains until I was in like Northern California, like early 2000. I'd like never experienced it.

It was completely life-changing. Like it was completely life-changing. I was with Joe and I said, I can't believe this. Like, we're in some green mountains and it's not really grey and overcast. Like, I don't think I've ever seen this happen. That was what I'd never really done foreign holidays much before, and I basically learned French so that we could start going on holiday to France. So I figured out that's the nearest place in the summer you could go,

and there'll be mountains, and it's actually sunny. And so I wonder now if that is really the key difference. It's much easier to experience the mountain path as a sacred, a sacred path of pilgrimage if the weather's nice, than if it's pissing down. I think you set yourself a complex cultural problem and solved it within two sentences. But then the thing is, what's fascinating, though, is that it's also, though, it's in Britain and Germany that the romantic, where it is like cloudy and rainy, and where the idea of the mountains is the sort of the site of the sublime, as Kant calls it, you know, is born again, though. So that's not because of the weather.

The lakes, you know, Wordsworth and the lake poets and the romantics, they basically invent the modern idea of landscape and the modern idea of how you should relate to landscape by going on walks in the lake district where, you know, it isn't sunny that often. I mean, it's nice when it is. Perhaps you need that, you need that general alienation caused by the weather in order to have the revelation that actually it can be sublime and beautiful. Well, I think the experience of growing up in the north of England for me, It's like the weather's bad anywhere all the time. The weather's always bad. And so you eventually, but also life in the city is bad and polluted. So you realise that even though at that point, you are sort of forced,

you are pushed into realizing that despite the bad weather, the hills and mountains are lovely compared to the grimy city streets of your dirty old town. I guess that's the logic. Arguably the classic English sort of post-psychedelic expression of a certain kind of love of landscape in nature. Peter Gabriel, Salisbury Hill. It's one of those songs I don't really want to like. I'm not that into Peter Gabriel,

but it's so nicely done. It's sort of prog pop, I think, I would call this. It's sort of art pop being done by a post-prog musician. It is quite effective. Climbing up on Salisbury Hill, I could see the city light. Wind was blowing time stood still. Eagle flew out of the night

He was something to observe Came in close I heard a voice Standing stretching every nun I had to listen Had no choice I did not believe The information

I mean Kate Bush running out that hill It's my favorite Kate Bush song It's kind of It became a number one hit last year because of Stranger Things, because it being used on Stranger Things. Lots of people said it was very cheesy. I thought the way they

used that song on that series was beautiful actually. I thought that was great. But I sort of felt like I can't, I used to play it quite often when I was DJ. I feel like I can't really play it now because it's just associated with Stranger Things. I suppose I'll be able to start getting soon. But as songs about

Hills Go, that is a classic. I'm going to deal with God and I get them to swap our places be running up that road be running up that hill be running up that building city of only cool oh

I know I was just thinking Thinking about the cultural specificity of the idea that going for a long walk, which we've been talking about implicitly throughout, you know, the beginning of this show, like the idea that going walking for a long walk in, you know, the countryside or in a big green space is a thing that is good for you. My understanding is it's a post-industrial revolution, like post-highly, you know, cities becoming highly populated in the UK. like phenomenon and this kind of rise of like the Victorian sense of you know what is good for a person to do and then of course obviously there are class implications there and everything that you said about the ramblers because of course in other countries progress is seen you know in the in the 20th century progress is seen as moving into cities and that you know it's the it's the peasants

that live in the countryside so if you're first generation city dweller the idea that you would go back there for some air is not really something that, you know, people think, it's not how people think about their health. You know, urbanization and sitting down and not having to do the back breaking work of the countryside is what's seen as progress was because we're so far away from the Industrial Revolution, the idea that, you know, people have been sitting down, quite a lot of people have been sitting down. Okay, fair enough, there's obviously been a lot of manual labor but for both there's both the reasons of health if you were a manual labor you know for in the 20th century but also because now people are sitting down there's this kind of conception

that's been built over time that health health and walking like going for a walk is is like a thing and it's a very UK thing my Egyptian family for example like they don't get it like what do you mean go for a walk you don't go for a walk unless you're trying to get somewhere and then you take you get in a car if you could you see what i mean yeah it's a very different conception of health uh and i'm fascinated by that and it took me a long time to to even understand that in fact there's probably about um it's probably a good like seven in seven years into living here for me understanding people going for a walk like i'd go for a picnic or i'll go to a park but i'd never really been hiking before except when i was a very young kid in switzerland with my father

I'd not done that as an adult, and then I got completely hooked, and it's something I do, you know, as many weekends as I possibly can now, because I think, like, the effect on my body and brain is incredible, especially in this kind of weather. All I want to do is go out for, like, a 20-kilometer hike or something. Well, I've always assumed it's something to do with the onset of sedentary lifestyles. That's why it starts off with the upper middle of the professional classes, like the romantic poets, that they are the voice of the emerging professional class. and then it spreads to the industrial working class only really after there's been a very high level of automation in the factories so people aren't getting the same level of physical exercise at work they would have been getting as well as having spent all their time indoors

because obviously if you're a peasant laboring in a field outdoors all day that you're not going to get the massive endorphine hit from going outside and going for a walk. Yeah, exactly. That you get if you're someone who works at a desk all day or works on an assembly line. all day. And I think that, I mean, in psychophysical terms, that's what it is really. It's the enormous endorphin here you get from the combination of daylight and exercise. Yeah, and

physical movement. And the colour green, isn't it? Yeah. Yes. And England's amazing green. I'm very, I'm very pro-England's green. I don't think there's a, there's a set of greens like it anywhere. We should take a new departure for the show and play a bit of what you might call classical music. We should play The Lark Ascending by Vaughn Williams. A beautiful 15 minute piece of music written in 1920 and it's sort of, it's this really nostalgic sort of, the idea is it's following a lark as it goes through the day sort of the people sort of read it as a sort of nostalgic sort of thing. written by Vaughn Williams you know he's probably suffering

from like post-traumatic stress disorder actually we would call it now you know from the horrific experiences he had in the First World War it's just an incredibly popular piece of music it's like that I think it's the most requested song on Desert Island discs and it's like

people sort of play at a funerals a lot etc and Vaughn Williams is sort of an interesting guy because he was one of these big collectors of folk music basically Lark ascending is also the title of a book by Richard King, which is a really interesting book, which covers this sort of topic.

It's basically about music and the British landscape. I'd recommend that book. Yeah, sort of interesting to think about how much of this, because there's waves of this, waves of like, you know, fascination with the outdoors, and then it subsides and it grows again through the sort of 20th century, anyway, Aliana 19th century, I think.

And so it is interesting to think about how much of that is like a corporeal sort of physical thing about like, you know, the need to get outside and have that sunshine, et cetera, the sedentary lives we live and, and in previous times, the incredibly polluted cities that people were trying to escape. How much of it is this sort of like spread of ideas and the ideas that get spread from romanticism, etc. Because I was just going to go back briefly to talk about the Clarion newspaper and the guy Robert Blatchford, who sat the Clarion newspaper, was just sort of his guru. Because he was a sort of awesome. He was a sort of odd character, who had a bit of a mix of ideas within him, basically.

You know, he probably did more to spread the ideas of socialism in that period than to the working class and any other else in that period. But, like, he ended up as he called himself a Tory socialist. He wrote a book called Merry England, basically, which sort of like two million copies around the world and stuff, which persuaded loads of people of the, of the desirability of socialism, but it was rooted in a very, Not quite a blood and soil, but, like, you know, that's sort of like a particular idea of of Britain or England, basically.

Yeah, he was a very odd character, basically. And then I was going to, I was going to sort of say that, like, you can see other moments where, where this, like, you know, this big surge of, like, going hiking, etc., has quite complex sort of ideological things tied up to it because, like, the inheritance of romanticism is really complex and can split in various ways. politically. So I wanted to mention the von der Vogel, which is this German youth movement at the beginning of the 20th century, just up to the First World War really, what is its glory days? So von der Vogel means wandering burden. So it's this primarily sort of like Protestant

middle class kids from the cities. You know, they have this big youth movement, which consists of basically going on really extended long hikes, and like camping as well, because that's what you need to do, but it was like that. Long, long, hikes into the countryside and the thing that went along with that was like a rejection of modernity with some sort of pastoral sort of ideas that sort of stuff and it became huge basically like the dominant youth movement of that section of society in the run up to the First World War then after the first world war obviously Germany becomes this highly politicised environment and like the von der Vogel break up into you know different factions etc the dominant part of that

becomes really fixated with this, you know, this emerging thing around, well, not emerging, this thing around blood and soil and like the sort of like German nationalism around blood and soil and, you know, reading anti-Semitic sort of racist sort of authors, you know what I mean? And then another another element becomes, embraces homosexuality and becomes much more sort of like leftist, if you know what I mean. And like one of the way, one of the places that ends up is in the Hitler youth who also take on this, you know, outdoors, sort of hiking, camping sort of thing, as actually does a sort of like communist youth movement. Yeah, well, I mean, the Boy Scouts starts off as an explicitly, explicitly colonialist

organisation. The whole justification for the Boy Scouts is this perception that the Boa War had demonstrated that the English working class soldiery were not sufficiently healthy and fit and prepared for war. And so you needed an organisation that would prepare people to become low-ranking colonial soldiers because, of course, the English public schools were already preparing the officer class. I mean, I would say, I mean, what you see going on there is a classic case of there's a kind of emerging cultural practice, an emergent cultural practice to do with kind of outdoorsiness, like hiking, rambling, cycling, camping, doing things in organized groups. And there's a political contest over its meaning. There's a really fierce political

context of its meaning because it doesn't have any one necessary political meaning. It can be articulated to or assembled with any a number of different political projects with different valencies. Yeah and in the UK I suppose that is the emergence of the woodcraft folk as an alternative to the Boy Scouts and so the woodcraft folk are based around sort of like socialist utopian ideals. I'm mixed up with like spiritual regeneration and like learning woodcraft skills and all these sorts of things. And the Woodcraft folk emerged at this very odd group called the Kindred of the Kibbo-Kift. It's Kift.

That's a MISD, that's a Taipei there, Clift. Yeah, yeah, Kift, yeah. The kindred of the Kibbo Kift. That was a really weird, like, semi-esoteric organization. Yeah, semi-neopagan sort of, you know, basically with loads of invented rituals and these sorts of... Sounds amazing. Yeah, I think they have sweat lodgers. The early...

20-20th century is completely mad. Like, I've been promising care for ages already that one day, they're going to run this role, role-playing game set in the kind of the world of, but the Edwardian, sort of Edwardian world of like radical socialist and feminist and occultist and esotericist and it's weird, it's so mad. All the stuff that's going on there.

Sounds like Plan C's Fast World Festival. It is, yeah. I think it is. Those are always in the countryside. That's where I got to walk through the Peak District and had amazing conversations with people. So let's have a track by our own producer, Matt Huxley, recording as muckers.

It's an example of what Matt refers to as his style of pastoral house. Or what I've called Acid Morris. This is Out of County on Circle Dance Records. We're going to be able to be. Should we talk about camping? Yes. Is this something that you guys did?

Did your parents take you camping when you were kids? Yeah, it was our main form of going on holiday. We didn't have a foreign holiday until I was like 15 or something. We used to go camping quite often down to Cornwall or something like that. And in fact, I think the first foreign holiday we had was in France. And it's one of those, I can't remember what it's cold, but it's one of those. those campsites where they already have the tent set up so you don't have to bring a tent with you.

Can't remember what they're called now. Glamping, that's what that's called. Well, it was pre-glamping and it wasn't very glamorous, I recall. I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure. But yeah, we used to camping a lot, yeah. Well, I do. I love wild camping. I do, but I prefer, I very much prefer it.

Once again, in the Mediterranean climate of the Southern Alps. This is a cup out. about Britain and you keep taking us to mountains in the south of France. All I'm saying, I'm just going to say this, right? I know people are going to think, oh, middle class privilege. If you go, there are loads of places in France that are basically ski regions, places that is probably true in Italy and Spain as well, but I don't know to be those languages where it's really, really cheap to go on holiday in the summer.

Their high season is the winter. And it's much cheaper than almost anywhere you can go on holiday in England or Britain, which is actually really expensive, like almost any way. where you can go with kids. So I'm just, that's in my defence. So. I don't need to defend it. It's perfectly, it's perfectly reasonable.

I'm just checking which local we're in. It is sort of, it's an interesting thing to me. It's kind of, it's shock. I mean, I suppose this only becomes an issue once you're trying to take kids on holiday. And it's also probably not true if you've got, if you've got a car, which we do not don't know a car. We have a car. We have a car.

So if you've got a car, you want a high car and you go camping, then it's relatively cheap to go on holiday with kids in Britain. But if you don't want to camp with the kids, which in my experience, is a bit of a nightmare because they just don't sleep very well. They get very tired and grumpy after a couple of days. Then it's really, really, it's very shockingly expensive to go on holiday in the English countryside because it's because, as I've said, because it's so densely populated. And despite what, you know, despite, you know, the sort of predilections of a certain

sections of the cosmopolitan lily, you know, the vast majority of people in Britain don't want to go on holiday anywhere where they don't speak English all the time. So the demand for any kind of access in holiday time, in school holidays, to any sort of rural area, it's really, really high. It's actually, it's really expensive. I would say prohibitively expensive, sort of go on holiday in places like the West Country, if you're not quite rich. So we've got a camper van, you see. That's the perfect solution. So you don't have to put the tenter.

Yeah, I mean, you even bring your camper van to, like, you know, conferences. Well, only rural conferences, I would have. I mean, there's something, I will say something here. So this also relates directly to my holiday practices, is that I do have a driving license, but my partner doesn't drive, and I have not actually driven a car for like 30 years. And it's partly because I live in London,

and I decided after two years of having a car in London in the 90s, it was stupid, and I got radicalised by reclaim the streets and didn't want one anymore. So I've really had to learn how to have, like, car-free holidays. And again, it's basically easier to go to France or somewhere like that, if you're relying on the rail network to have a nice holiday than it is in Britain. So it's very, very hard to get access to British countryside without a car still because of the total decimation of the rural train network in the 60s

when the planning agenda for the country was all organised around the assumption that the future was everybody living in a two-car household. So there is really an issue because access to the countryside is, people who don't live in it, which is most people, is partly dependent upon transport networks. And if you don't have a functioning, ecologically sound transport network, then people can't get there. It's one of the reasons why the revival of the rail network in Britain is like an important socialist in mind, I think. Totally. And I think we should do a whole episode that is just on holidays, because I think there's all sorts of things and like history around that.

But if we're like, if we're thinking about camping, because the camping is not just about like the, you know, the tents and the campavan. It's like having an outdoor barbecue. It's like campsites are another thing. Like, it's not all about like campfires, like having a campfire. Like the thing, I love campfires. I love, in fact, almost every song I can play on guitar is annoyingly a campfire song. Like, I absolutely love a good campfire.

And it's, and I feel like it's one of those experiences that every single year I forget is a thing that happens in the UK in the summer. Like, I'm completely taken in by this. seasons in a way that I forget every year that like all of these outdoorsy things are possible because it's like we've had like nine months of them not being possible in a sense and so yeah camping is all about all of those things as well like you could go with a camper van you could be on a campsite you know you could be wild camping or whatever but then like suddenly there's that kind of this relationship to like the land and sound and the stars things like the stars if you live in

London I mean fuck it hell you don't get to see the stars you know The other thing to say about camping before we move off the topic is that it's become a big, you know, like wild camping has become a big issue again, isn't it? Because there was like Dartmoor, which is this huge area in Devon, Devon. So basically there was this landowner, this guy, Alexander Darwall, who just bought this this biggest state on Dartmoor. Dartmouth was the only place where you had a right to wild camp, basically. The only place in England?

Yeah, the only place in England, I mean to say. and he bought this estate which he wants to use for like pheasant shooting etc and all these sorts of deer stalking etc and then brought a legal case to get wild camping banned basically he's like tailor-made from central casting as an evil he's mr burns he's absolutely the mr burns figure funding the tories funding you kit funding the league totally horrible but what is the current state of that legal court do we know well i think he won but then that people are repealing it because there were like big mass trespasses where people were going in and while camping on Dartmoor basically in protested at it being made illegal. One of those things I think which is sort of coming, but like the right to Rome and the right

to access to the country is something that's coming back, you know, as a slightly bigger issue. That's my sense of it as well. I think COVID held with that stuff as well. I think like after COVID people are like, I just want to get out. And nobody has any money because of the cost of living. situation so like people are looking for like you know ability to access space i think you know yeah because other trends like wild swimming and stuff like that which is a really really big trend that's took off over the last i don't know 10 years probably i don't know perhaps five years

you know wild swimming is just like swimming in rivers and the sea etc um and you know which of course get me involved it's rivers it's rivers not the sea is assumed to be wild okay that's true that's i was thinking about that earlier actually when we were talking about that about land access. When we were talking about the specificity of land access in England, one of the relatively unusual features of land access rules in Britain is it's very, very difficult for anybody to enclose coastline. This is a good point. And that is something that you do grow up in Britain and even in England, used to the idea that the beach is always open, the beach is always free. There are no private beaches. And that is always really shocking.

if you go to other countries, even like Ireland, for example. So anyone can swim in the sea, but you wouldn't want to because European Union and World Health Organisation advice is very strongly against swimming in most English coastal waters because of the level of sewage pollution. Let's recognise who we have to thank for our access to the seaside. It's King Charles. We don't give King Charles enough respect on this show. And it's because the coastline in England, anywhere, in Wales, is owned by the Crown or the Crown of States, basically.

And in Scotland, it's been handed over. It's still owned by the Crown of State, but the sovereignty resides with, I think it's like a minister, one of the Scottish ministers or something like that. Perhaps it's the Scottish Parliament, I can't quite remember. Anyway, just wanted to give King Charles his props because he's the one who allows us to have access. Well, thank you. Anyway, let's moan about shit in the sea. I mean, it's just an absolute scat. I mean, but it's beyond the scandal. Like, I can't even find the words to talk about it, the fact that there's so many of Britain's waterways just have

like consistently, these private companies are dumping wastewater and shit in it. And people are obviously in uproar and, you know, people have always done petitions, like, you know, written to MPs, all the usual kind of campaign things. But it's a very difficult thing to take direct direct action on. It's horrendous. And I don't know how it's ever, it's going to be solved this one. Like, it's as if there is no political will, because it is about political will. Let's lay it out a bit, though. I'm going to get you even more angry. Okay, go on. Look, because it's to do privatisation. I get very passionate about water. It's like what I did my master's on is about the privatisation of water. It's like the one thing that I'm

like really passionate about. Yeah, go for it. I'm against it, the privatisation of water. It should all be handed back to King Charles. It's obviously the way to go. No, but I Google some facts just to make Nadia incredibly furious. And so basically, since privatisation, water companies have paid out $66 billion in dividends to their shareholders. At the same time, they've taken on $56 billion in debt. So they've loaded their companies up with debt, basically, to $56 billion. And they've used that to pay out these huge dividends. And at the same time, they basically are not investing in infrastructure, etc.

I've got some good news for you. got some great news for you. The water companies have announced they're going to do 10 billion pounds worth of investments in infrastructure, which is good news. They say they're going to have to raise bills

by as much as £91. The public are going to pay for that. They're not going to take it from dividends. So bills are going to go up $91 a year and average to pay for this $10 billion. Because where else would it come from, $56 billion in dividends,

$66 billion in dividends. Where else would it go? it come from, possibly, apart from out of your pocket? You're right now that it is absolutely prime for some sort of campaign. Working at what you do about it is difficult, basically. No, it's just difficult to imagine, like, what the direct action is? Do you know what I mean? Like, what is that direct action?

That's why I think there's a problem with it. Don't pay water bills. Can't get cut off. That would be a, that would be a method. It would be a good campaign. That would be a good campaign around water. We could, because you mobilise the mum's. The mums are out who love while swimming and the surfers against sewage. We've got a coalition to put together.

I'm not. I'm serious. I mean, that's the... Yeah, and so the Labour Party are not, say they don't, they're not going to renationalise. Will they put regulations around it? I don't know. Because like basically, then you look at like the ex-bright-wing Labour MP like Angela Smith,

her who thinks Asians look like have a funny tinge about them. You know, where do these people go? she goes and works for water companies. Do you know what I mean? Of the privatised entities, you know, that's where they've all gone. All of those. Well, the experiment in privatisation plus regulation has been conducted over the past 30 years. The results are in of that experiment.

Yeah. I think we needed to state that very categorically. It was a nice idea in the 90s. Maybe we didn't have to bother nationalising everything. You could just have strict rules. We said it wouldn't work. It didn't work. So we were right.

And what happens? Environmental Agency's budget, stripped back. Absolutely. They're the regulators. You underfund the regulators. Let the dividends pile up for the shareholders. Let those fat wadges come in from the ex-Labour MPs.

Everybody's happy, of course. We should play Go Wild in the country by Bawa-Wao. Baw-W are a group put together by the Sex Pistols Manager, Mark McClaran in 1980, I think. and then Go Wild in the Country is like a top 10 hit for them in 1982 so he puts it together and famously there's a group of

some people from Adam and the Ants I think who are X from Adam and the Ants and then his 13 year old singer Annabella Lewin and there was a big scandal around the album that Go Wild in a country from the album called Jungle Sea Jungle Go join your gang

yeah city all over go ape crazy the front cover of that was It was a recreation of the band, recreating Manet's Le Degener Se Le Herb. And it caused a big scandal because 14-year-old, then 14-year-old, Annabelle Lewin, was nude in it on the position so that you couldn't see any of her naughty bits, I think, would be the 1970s way of putting that. It's a great song, though, about Go Wild in the country. All the wild, wild, wild in the country where snakes in the grass are absolutely free. All right, so you like camping, so you like camping, but you didn't go camping as a kid.

Is that right? No, no, I love, yeah, I love, yeah, I definitely didn't go camping as a kid. My dad did not, was not escaping being born in a farm in Kendall to like, then go camping. No, he's kind of like the working class guy done good that is never do something like that, you know. And, you know, my Egyptian family is from Egypt and camping was not even a thing. Like, it's not even on the radar as a fun thing to do. Why would you do that sleep in a tent is what they would say? Yeah, see, I can sort of understand that because generally speaking, my answer to the question,

why would you sleep in a tent is, because that is the only way to wake up next to the lake, you know, at 2,000 metres up in the Southern Alps on a beautiful summer morning. But without that being the reason, I am a bit on the side of why would you sleep in a tent? It's uncomfortable. No, because you want to go to Glastonbury when you're 17, which is what I did. and I was initiated at Glastonbury and then

and then since then because I was living in the UK I've been into it ever since like I absolutely love it all sorts of different camping but for that reason it's that thing like

the nothing rivals like waking up and just being in the country with the sounds of the country and just like where the grass smells and everything I love it the thing it militates against that though

is that thing about the camp fire in that collective thing where you go camping with a few people and you gather around the fire and you sort of have a little drink. Always with other people. I'm a woman and a woman that doesn't have enough courage to go camping by myself. Definitely. I've never done that. That's definitely gendered. But yeah, with a crew, with your crew of mate. Yeah. See, this is something I think about quite a lot. Because for me, being outdoors, it does have a lot to do with wanting to get away from the crowd industry. It does have a lot to do with solitude and wanting a sort of meditative. experience.

No, but I recognise that. I mean, because I go running, basically. I run around the same woods most of the time. Sykeswood, the Atong, southwest of Leeds, Fenner was looking. And that's my, yeah, and it's like I want to be on my own, really. Because that's the bit where I see, I mean, I feel as I'm in the countryside. Because you're running around the same area, you notice the seasons, etc. I always get excited when the wild garlic pops up, that sort of stuff.

because you don't notice the seasons if you're in the city, not in the same way, not in that different plants emerge sort of thing. Yeah, and I think we haven't taught at all qualities. Like I really have a thing about being able to experience a soundscape where even if you're listening very, very carefully, there's no hum of traffic in the background.

And that's really, it's very difficult in the British Isles. Basically, you cannot experience that in the southeast. I think the nearest place to London you might be able to experience. So that is the Black Mountains in Wales. Yeah, I think you've got, yeah, I don't, my ears are not that sensitive. I mean, I live in the suburbs. Coming from a city like Cairo, England is always quiet. I mean, I might come from the suburbs of Cairo as well, but it's like another level.

Like there are people shouting all of the time, which is at least something that you don't always get in the whole of London. But also, but this, it's this love of the quiet, my association of camping and the countryside with, the complete absence of any mechanical noise, which is why, as I think we've said on the show before, I hate music festivals. I think they're an abominable formation that ought to be abolished and replaced with some other kind of activity. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's so much to say about festivals. It's a classic ACFM topic. But like you could construct, let me construct a little story then of like these waves of like people wanted to get out of the cities into the countryside. You can sort of see that sort of like the festival and then the sort of like the

people who the movement of like new age travellers as they were called and peace convo the peace convoise it was always also called which were basically primarily like urban young young people like quite a lot of them you know unemployed etc in the sort of like late 1970s early to mid 1980s basically kitting out like lute and vans and old buses and stuff and and and and living in them and then, you know, adopting a sort of traveling lifestyle of moving around. And, like, what went along with that was this wave of, of like, free festivals, festivals, which, you know, bet you didn't have to pay to get in, and it was sort of self-organized and these sorts of things.

Like, festivals had emerged before that, you know, you had, like, the Newport Jazz Festival, these sorts of things. And then you had, like, a whole series of, like, music festivals that emerged in the 1970s. But, like, the free festival and then the traveling thing, it sort of fits with this wave of people wanting to leave the city for a particular reason and like you know the early 1980s a time of really high youth unemployment etc but also a time of like you know relatively generous benefits and these sorts of things and when I was coming up it was that was a big like experience in a free festival was like a mind-blowing thing for me

they were I mean we're the same age really and they were they were they were the cultural social form of what was left of the counterculture through the 80s and it's sort of extraordinary to recall that they did exist. As I've said before in the show you could spend your entire summer just visiting free festivals every weekend in the 80s.

What was the food like? The food, oh Jesus Christ, you pretty much had to take your own up and a lot of the time and there would be sometimes people with really ropy kind of really ropy like vegan or veggie stew on sale and stuff. I mean I

I mean, from what I remember, it was really, you didn't start to even get like the nice garlic mushrooms at Glastonbury until the end of the... A nice garlic mushrooms and flattles and stuff. But I don't... They didn't do much eating, you know, five-day speed binge, teeth grinding. For me, they were just, it was always sort of a, it's somehow the part, even at free festivals and definitely commercial festivals, it's somehow they're always less than the sum of their parts. for me. Like I like music. We might, people may have gathered, like I'm an

aficionado of music and I love being outdoors but why, but for me like you to have to be camping in a really nice part of the countryside and then have it have a temporary city erected there with loads of loads of kind of competing noise sources and stuff. He's just really. 25 parties man

that's what it was all about. I know but they don't I know but I don't for me I just don't really you know they're always less than the sum of their parts for me that's the trouble they're always less than the sum of their parts i like the idea of it and i think that the you know given all our theoretical predilections like the festival ought to be the cultural form which most expresses our sort of priorities and that's why we are going to do a whole episode about it but the one exception i'll mention and again we're going to this in more detail another time but it's worth reflecting on why for me it's so different is that is the also

now disappeared phenomenon of the municipal festivals. I mean, there was actually, there was a blurry relationship between the free festivals proper in Britain, in the 80s and 90s, even into the 2000s, and the municipal festivals. There was, so there was things like Strawberry Fair in Cambridge, which was a proper, which was part of the crusty New Age Tramp of the Free Festival circuit. Still on, it was on last weekend. But was always supported by the council.

You know, it was, it was, it was had a municipal support. And in London, like, we've talked about this before. We all get, Nardia and I base get misty-eyed about this. But, you know, basically the one reason we didn't bother, like, schlepping around the free festivals in the 90s was because you could just go to a municipal festival, almost every weekend. And it would just be a festival in a park somewhere in South London or East London or North London.

It would just be a public part, supportive of the council. And you would see a lot of the same bands as it would be playing at the free festival. festivals and there would be sort of dance tents and free party sound systems and all the stuff but then you could just go home in the evening and sleep in a nice room bed so and that was a direct legacy of the GLC in London as well so anyway let's keep let's keep our tinder dry on that festival it's a big it's worth going into in some depth on an episode yeah but thinking about that about festival's should take us on to also thinking about the places where they happened, which is parks.

Yeah. You know, parks are really interesting phenomenon. We mentioned, I mentioned this when we were talking about parks and recreation on the, the sitcoms microdose, that, you know, the park, the public park has often been seen historically as like the exemplary institution of municipal socialism. It's the thing which is not going to happen without some sort of commitment to public provision by a municipality or even just by philanthropists. And historically, it was one of the things that defines the landscape of places like London

was the fact that it turned out that even though when public parks were first being developed and opened, rich people wanted to try to keep poor people out of them or keep them somehow segregated. It just wasn't possible. The smooth space, as Deleuze in Gutari would say, the smooth grassy space of the park couldn't be adequately striated. apart from by creating those horrible little gated squares you get all around the Bloomsbury in West London but so there is something

there is something sort of magical about parks you just can't because you're not going to get they don't make any money for anybody a park cannot make money for people and yet it's a completely definitive feature of urban life for a lot of people at least in Britain they are so so so good I mean just thinking about what we went through with the pandemic

and if we did not have parks, I mean, fuck it out. You know, I did not see. It was me and the park for like months. The other thing with parks is like they help us tell a sort of historical story of like ever greater access to land basically. Because in Leeds, like they're really big parks. You know, they're ex sort of like stately homes and stuff like that, which got municipalized via inheritance tax and these sorts of things, you know.

And so there's a story there, you know, the National Trust. get set up in 1937, I think. I think it gets set up before then, but then there's a National Trust Act, which means that the National Trust can hold land and can hold buildings and these sorts of things. And because, you know, what's going on there is inherit, or death duties, inheritance, tax, etc., which, like the big stately homes that have been built up, you know, they basically become owned by the National Trust, etc.

Areas in cities become municipalized, or, you know, areas in cities. It's become interspice into parks through inheritance tax. And there's this sort of ever-widening sort of, which goes along with like the country becoming more materially equal, you know, in the post-war period and so forth, right up until the end of the 1970s, basically, when that goes into complete reverse. And there's actually less and less access to land. Traspass becomes ever more serious act until it becomes a criminal act and these sorts of things. You know, this move is completely linked up, or it's tied up, that our access to the land is completely tied up. with the waves of growing and shrinking or shrinking and then growing inequality. So that's what we need to do.

Get 100% inheritance tax, turn everybody, all of the richest homes and land into parks. That's my manifesto. I'm pretty sure that's going to make it into the next Labour Party manifesto. I'm pushing quite hard actually for that. Yes, 100% inheritance tax. As the resident Britpop fan, I think we should have. Park Life by Blur, just a classic song, obviously, about park. Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as.

A morning suit can be avoided if you take a route straight through what is known as. John's got Brewers' prune. It gets intimidated by the dirty pigeons. They love a bit of him. Who's that gullible marching? You should cut down on your point. There's this whole relationship between psychedelia and pastoralism, especially in Britain. You know, if the American acid scene in the late 60s is centred on the beautiful, sunny, semi-mountainous and beach-bless climate and environment of Northern California in the Bay Area.

Well, in Britain, you know, it's all about dropping acid in parks in the summer. The classic Small Faces song, Itchiku Park, with the chorus, it's all too beautiful, said to be about dropping acid in a park, it's either West Ham Park or a park in Ilford. There people dispute that. Over bridge of size to rest my eyes in shades of green. Under dreaming spots To Itchiku Park That's where I've been

What didn't you do there I've got high What did you feel there When I cry But why the tea is there Tell you why It's all too beautiful It's all too beautiful

Featured on the very first episode of FACEF. Yeah, there's that, but also one of my favourites, this kind of super, super pastoral, is Pink Floyd's Granchester Meadows, which is about lying around in the sunshine, stoned or tripping in a park in a famous park in Cambridge. And I can neither confirm or deny that I've done those things in both Granchester Meadows

and West Ham Park. I see wind of nights be gone. This is not your domain. In the sky your bird is heard to cry. Misty morning whisperings and gentle stand south. Nadia, you wanted to talk about picnics. Well, I mean, I just thought it would be interesting to, like, reflect on as a phenomenon, as, like, as a way for people to, like, you know, have a collective, you know, get together or event or hang out in, in parks. It's just something that I observe. I mean, people in England love a picnic. They love them. I don't love picnics. I like Nigella. I like tables. So I don't really.

like sitting on the floor and eating in a park. I like sitting down in a park and hanging out, but not so much eating, but it's something that I think in Britain, I've observed at least people absolutely love it. Like when the weather is good, it's like, let's get some dips,

which is another thing I hate, and go to the park. I'm like, okay, I'm not anti it. Like I won't, you know, I won't block invitations to a picnic. It's just not my favourite thing. I love a picnic. Going to the seaside for me would be like,

you know, you take a picnic with you because it would be about... No, you get fish and chips, don't you? Come on. No. No. Okay, talk me through this. What's in your picnic? You have a picnic on the beach, basically. Everything gets sand in all your sandwiches. It's disgusting, but it's like that's what you do. I think it's partly because you go down the beach and it takes a while to get there. So you've got to, you know, spend a few hours there. You can only spend like 10 minutes in the sea because it's absolutely freezing.

So you've got to have other activities that you do around that. And the picnic is a central part of it, I think. which you enjoy even though like the food becomes like secondary because it's got sand in it, which is a bit that I don't get. It's like because the food is the most important thing for me. We've talked about swimming and we talked about parks. But of course these things are also can go together. And one of the most sort of unexpected features of municipal life in Britain in recent years

has been the resurgence of interest in Lido's. It's really interesting to think about that, I guess. Like why, you know, why have life? Why do people like Lido's when they were sort of seen as this relic of the past 20 years ago? I like canteens. Every time you mention a Lido, I get that kind of warm municipal futures feeling. Like I've not been to that many canteens or that many Lido's, but in my future, in my utopia, I want there to be lots of canteens and lots of Lido's.

The wave of, like, of building municipal Lido's was primarily in the 1930s, which was like, there's another wave of this sort of like sun-loving, outdoorsy sort of trend, basically. And they all are like the design of Lylos, you know, the architecture of Lido's, I mean to say, is like, I love it because it looks like that 1930s municipal socialist sort of feel, basically. Lots of concrete, painted white and all that sort of stuff. I love it. They went out of fashion because, well, British. is freezing. Lido's are freezing and it's hot in Spain basically. So it was that growth of

foreign holidays that sort of killed off the Lido. It might well be that it is the, I don't know if there is a decline in foreign holidays, but basically, you know, there is some sort of, like, you know, people sort of feel as though they shouldn't be going flying everywhere all the time. I haven't got the stats. I'm sure that foreign holidays are just increasing in popularity just to contradict me. But like this, I think it's that, that idea that, like, you know, you can go on holiday in the UK a bit more. And that trend towards wild swimming is like carrying over into like Lido's, which is like semi-while swimming. I don't know. Well, I think it's, I think the overall phenomenon is an, is a big increase in people wanting to swim outdoors, whether

it's in the countryside or whether it's in a municipally provided pool. Yeah. And I'm not sure why it is, but then, you know, I belong to the generation of people who, you've done this. Like, I love wild swimming, you know, and I like Lydos. In fact, my partner, Jay, right now is at London Fields swimming in the Lido. So the bigger question is why did people stop? Why did swimming outdoors stop being a thing? Because it seems like a really obviously pleasant thing to do. Why did it decline?

Because I was tempted to think, well, it's just something to do with climate change, again, the weather again. And I'm sure that is partly what's driving the popularity of Lydos, I think. just there are just far more days in a year now where you might want to go and swim outside because it's hotter, it's warmer. But of course, as you said, Kear, the big, the big explosion of Lido building was the 30s and it wasn't warm particularly. So although people also wore a lot more clothes when swimming in those days. So that could be something to do with it. It could be partly climate related. But it's also what I think that, I mean, my sense, is that swimming really moved indoors

that the post-war ideal was the indoor heated swimming pool and it was something to do it was something to do with an ideal of modern comfort you know it was the era of the rolling out of central heating it was the idea that what it meant now to live in a world that was

better than the moment we left behind was that you didn't have to do anything as physically uncomfortable as like be cold swimming outside in a lake when you could be swimming in a lovely warm heated municipal barns and I guess somehow somehow we've shifted into a culture in which there's much more

there's more value placed on doing things outdoors even if it's cold because the wild swimming is there's also I mean I've got friend so they're really into this cold water swimming like it's really a thing and it is this sort of it is this sort of remedy for alienation is how people seem to experience it there's something about the sheer intensity the sheer raw physicality and corporal reality of your body hitting the cold water. But it's also something to do with this, you know, this notion of what a body can do.

You know, I've always got to mention Deleuze, Marks, or Spinoza at some point on an episode. And Spinoza famously says, nobody knows what a body can do. But he's only famous for saying that because Deleuze goes on and on about him saying it. Otherwise, it would have been just a passing comment in his book. And, I mean, people who are really into cold water swimming

are really interested in the fact that you can, can swim in much cold water than you think you can. And I grew up being really afraid, having it sort of inculcated in me, that if you got into water that was below sort of 12 degrees, there's a very serious chance you might just freeze, you might just be paralysed and die. So there's something about experimenting with the body's capacities, it seems, to do with this fondness for cold water swimming.

Yeah, there's something to that, I think, because like the enjoyable thing, there's like an intensity to it. Because the enjoyable thing about the cold water swimming is when you get out and your whole body's tingling, basically. Partly because, you know, your nerves are revelling against you, but freezing them, etc. But it's that like you feel really alive because your body's all tingling, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. But I think the contrast for me is it's like is the cultural specificity of what you were just talking about, Jeremy, the other way around. So like the idea of hot water indoors, for me, is the same as like warm.

plates. This is something that people do in the UK. I've noticed sometimes they warm a plate before they serve a meal. And it never occurred to me because I grew up in a hot country that anybody would want to warm a plate because the meal could cool, you know, cool down. In the same vein, the reason I'm bringing this up is I have never swam in an inside pool. I find it very weird to be in a warm pool indoors or in a warm pool full stop. Like it's just not an enjoyable thing to me. So while I, you know, maybe I could get used to it, but while outdoor swimming in like really cold water might be a massive shock, it's this idea of like what the ritual is for like taking care of yourself like afterwards and like how is it related to the climate outdoors and

whatever. And it's a much more natural thing that I think I get rather than as you said, like there being this cultural moment where people want the luxury of I still want to swim, but it has to be in warm water and indoors, which I frankly find really weird. All right. I'm going to say, because we talked a lot about swimming, we should definitely play Let's Go Swimming by cellist and pioneering underground disco producer Arthur Russell. Yeah, so I think the outdoors, it's really important for us to think about because it is, to some extent, it's the thing which has always not yet been privatised. It's not been enclosed by definition.

And the capitalist logic of enclosure and privatisation to some extent is, always trying to make everything indoors, even if it's only inside fences, if it's inside hedges. And to some extent, the outdoors is always the common. I think that's partly why even when I'm on my own, even when I'm physically solitary outdoors, I feel like I'm connected to things, including other people, because to some extent we're all breathing the same air, we're all under the same sky, we're all swimming in the same water. So I think the outdoors is the common. It's the thing which is always common to all of us, which we can always share in which we can share together. So I think it is really important to defend it as generations before it has defended it from

capitalist enclosure and privatisation. I like that because the form that privatisation takes is denial of access or just pollution, pollution of the commons, basically. Yeah, exactly. To get outdoors. Oh, that's pretty far out. Deep far out.