"The chocolate boxes are manufactured in crumbling pre-fab units on industrial estates of Middlesbrough by a callow proletarian youths grateful of a minimum wage."

More like China, these days... ;0) Gawd, even the National Trust's bits and bobs come from China, more often than not..Yikes!


"Te pictures on the boxes have no meaning for them,..."

Yeah, but er..that's because they've turned off from their history BIGTIME, because they've been told they're nothing but a bunch of Slave Trade Oppressors, so they've never seen carts horses, or thatched cottage lit by candlelight, or merry peasants dancing their hearts out when the fiddler fiddled..


"but the bucolic idyll persists even in the riot-torn housing estates where they dwell in shadows. In one such chocolate box a junkie keeps her syringes and stash; in another a gangster keeps his knife and gun; in yet another a paedophile keeps his cherished computer disks and faded polaroids. "

Damned handy things those Chinese Chocolate Boxes...but there's also the chocolate box that is filled with photos of English cricket, being played upon the Village Greens, and Spitfires flying overhead...pictures of a country brought together by a war, a war that they went to fight willingly, for the good of the whole world..and in the corner of that chocolate box lies a half smoked cigar, and a few frayed remains of a black hat, together with the words of a great Englishman, called William..."So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the Trade's wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition."

All of these items sit upon a CD by The Imagined Village...



"Those same thatched cottages are now owned by wealthy commuters and second-homers whose wealth has pushed up the house prices so the locals can no longer afford to live there; worse still, the ancient interiors have been torn out and replaced by neo-rural DIY blandness."

Double yeah, but......the villagers themselves sold their cottages to they grockles and they emmits (as we call them down here), then they b*ggered off to Spain to live in Eldorado, whilst moaning that they can no longer afford their own homes in their own villages. ????

And of course, why would the Proles want to live in ancient cottages which speak of England's history, because they know that her history is Big Brother and The X Factor, and the way forward is Posh and Becks....innit?

Oh...and they've no time to use the village shop or post office, 'cos they've all got 4X4's which speed through the lanes to Sainsbury's and Tesco's so they can all have 24/7 food throughout 24/7 seasons..and most of 'em couldn't even tell you what fruit and vegetables grow in which season, in an English Country Garden...


........and cue song!



Very emotive piece of writing though, SOP.