Ethnographic flash shorts about Worthing, West Sussex, UK
Ethnographic Shorts
A blog of flash ethnography, based on interview and participant-observation work around Worthing, a seaside town in West Sussex, England.
Flash fiction – micro-stories or sawn-off tales. Ethnography – writing about culture. What anthropologists do. Flash-ethnography – a format. Micro-ethnographic moments turning around a specific question or issue.
As post-post-moderns, we can still get a kick from those fantasies of piracy, running away to sea, and wearing cool matelot clothes.
Contemporary pub scene is full of yearnings.
We’re in the middle of vibe shift, for sure.
Why would a globetrotter with 66 countires under their belt return again and again to Worthing? Can it be the vegan sausage rolls? Ot the bountiful opportunities to get a nose hair wax? Terry tells me what pulls him here.
White poppies remember and respect civilian deaths, deaths in all wars, and deaths from wherever they came. They’re a much less 19th-century approach to grief and mourning than the ‘only our boys’ approach of the red poppy campaign.
The town appeared to have somehow catapulted straight from 1960s to the 2000s. Time felt woozy. Millenial nostalgia for the mid-century modern collided with memories of actual mid-century, when life really did feel modern, in a not-ironic way.For an hour or two, I lived the fantasy of moving to Whitstable for the last part of my life: a return to Kentish birthplace but folding in that seaside vibe I’ve grown to love.
Aunty Eileen’s doctor advised her to take up smoking for her asthma. You have to understand that this was in the 1960s. Doctors now are prescribing choir as part of proven Singing for Lung Health programmes.You might not yet have heard about ‘social prescribing’ – but you will.
The vest is mine, the underpants too, the cock – well I suppose it’s mine. I bought it. I wrote the little piece above about the time when I took my drag king persona Eddie onto a public stage in Brighton.
White, mainstream, middle-class, respectable, assimilated gaydom?As Edelman’s global ethnographic review from 2001 will tell you, liberation doesn’t tend to emerge from such spaces.
I’m not a fan of stand-up, but we needed a group night out and I mistakenly assumed that a Black comedian would be offering something interesting to us here in melanin-starved Worthing. When he opened with an anti-royalist joke and a poke at Brexiteers, I knew we weren’t going to be getting creative absurdist monologue or Afrofuturist mould-breaking humour, but I thought we’d be fairly ok.
We weren’t.
A huge contrast to last Friday’s cabaret night over at Worthing’s The Factory, where Revolver Revue served up a signature blend of humour with burlesque and some sheer daftness.
Anyone who passes down South Farm Road has spent months of their life waiting at the railway crossing there. Romances have come to inception and ruination during long moments of boredom or tetchiness at that crossing. Dogs and children whine why, why when they’re told again and again that they cannot move – yet. (There’s still another train coming through, apparently, although we’ve seen 2 pass already).
One minute everybody was scoffing 2 or 3 choc-chip brioches a day, leading to mild stockpiling on my part. Those bloody ‘3 for 2’ offers play their own guilty part in this practice. And then, bugger me, 3 weeks later, everyone was ‘off brioche’ and ‘into mini cheeses’.
I do this blog because I’ve always been a scribbler and a communicator-by-writing. My over-long text messages are notorious in the family and I’d like to think that the blog outlet has saved some of them from having to scroll through my thoughts on a tiny badly-lit screen at 11pm, just in case I was going to say something important.
And so that was Christmas. Or Hannukkah. Or just another holiday season. But have you noticed, my dear one, that nothing feels quite the same these days? Have you noticed, my dear one, that nothing feels quite the same these days? This December was heavy with undertones and reminders of last December – when … Read more
An old post from October 2017. (When vegans in Worthing were still remarkable – how we’ve moved on!) We’re in The Orchard cafe for their vegan tea event. There’s 7 of us, in a chock-full cafe (tickets sold out weeks ago), and we look around in wonder, interested to know who are the vegan-or-vegan-curious of Worthing, then? … Read more
‘Patriotic Alternative’, the extremist organisation of which Worthing Conservative councillor Tim Wills was a member, appears on Princeton University’s TRAC terrorism’s list of 4000 terrorist organisations to watch. It is noted for its sophisticated recruitment methods, high competence in social media and the massive disjunct between its outward-facing communications and the inward-facing rhetorics. The gamification of extremism has arrived. … We are fortunate that we have many Worthing locals who won’t stand for a takeover by extremism. No Fascists in Worthing. That’s something to hold fast to, this coming remembrance day.
Whether we think of ourselves as connected by, or divided by, the seas that lap at land masses is a profoundly political question.The Indian Ocean coast has been imagined and lived as a porous boundary where people freely leave and travel, return or arrive – a place that has been valued as a space of hybridity and cosmopolitanism. (The latter, of course, are engines of creativity and innovation).
While there is a familiar shared trajectory to the gentrification and regeneration process, there can be many missed opportunities to intervene and shape the (inevitable) process of change in positive and inclusive ways.
Things were getting nasty. Anyone opening the fridge door would find me right behind them, reminding them that, “Those are the only olives we have”, or “I was planning on using that mozzarella on a home-made pizza tomorrow”. I wasn’t exactly hiding the chickpeas, but I did count the tins every morning.
After going all un-Boomer ish last post and plastering my personal life all over the blog, which has had great positive responses, I thought I’d do a quick share of something I got into over lockdown, which began as something of a time-pass and then turned into both a kind of mindfulness practice and also … Read more
A Sussex lockdown queer wedding. Blending some old and well-known traditions with Celtic spirituality and a nod to church roots worked. And at no point did it ever feel like ‘Sheilaism’ (the term Robert Bellah famously used for describing the contemporary fall from traditional religion and rituals and into an utterly individualistic solipsistic pick-and-mix contemporary state of ‘spiritual but not religious’). The celebrant reminded us Boomers how far we’ve come since our teens, when ‘gay wedding’ was preposterous blasphemy. Keep an open mind. Allow the unexpected into your life.
On one of our weekend lockdowns, at a Worthing hotel (where we drive just 10 minutes up the road once every few weeks, to get away from domestic life and the over-familiarity of home) I asked. Shocked, she responded, “thank you”. We both laughed at the response and at the thrill of making something good happen in the middle of all the horror around us. The older you get, the more you understand the cosmic complex truth that, somehow, when the house is burning down, remembering to laugh and to dance is important.
A chaotic mix of entrepreneurial hustle, neighbourly compassion, lost pets, reports about traffic, queues and crowds, curiosity about roadworks or wildlife species spotted- and a fair bit of baiting and toxic trouble-stirring. Lockdown has intensified both the volume of traffic and the emotional charge.
Lindyhop is all about free expression and getting into the music. When you look at absolute beginners and very advanced dancers, they look very similar… Programmes like ‘Strictly’ don’t help. Amanda and I resist the temptation right there to do a ‘deplorable things about Strictly’ talk.
One man kept backtracking as he remembered things the family might need in case of shortages – “sorry, sorry”, he kept apologising, unaware in those days of magic hand-sanitiser that his outbreath and loud ‘sorry’ could itself be a vector for spread.
From the consumer point of view, frankly, one six-foot tall and beefy 20 year old’s session is likely a five-foot skinny 50 year old’s downfall, so you have to take this ‘session’ concept a bit personally
Dry January feels like a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. For society. Even at a personal level. I remember I had all my friends round the house on day 30, and they rolled a foot-long and I remember feeling sick and thinking – well, that was pointless, that whole month.
What do you feel about the AA-style sobriety (or even ‘hip sobriety’) as opposed to the ‘mindful drinking’ approach? I’ll never climb a mountain, but I’ll get up Cissbury Ring alright.
An Alcohol Free Drinks Party My neighbour breezes into the kitchen with a posh looking bottle, glasses, a shaker and snacks, which she sets up on the island*. Whoa, what’s this? – it’s only 3 o’clock. (She thinks I’m one of those work-from-homers who don’t know how to discipline their daytimes?) She grins. You’re interested … Read more
We came over to Worthing to look around for nice places, but really, we just needed an excuse – we’d chosen.
What’s missing from Worthing? I don’t think anything. It doesn’t need to be like anywhere else. It’s got everything that a place needs.
We’re still junkies for the gaudy – hooked on brilliant colours. Years of drooling over websites and catalogues full of wine-gum annuals have blunted our taste. We’re in recovery from bedding plants, and it’s going to take a while.
I’m 19 and still working through what it left me with. I think it’s gonna take time to get rid of the self-hate.
People who are straight often see high school as the best years of their life, but if you’re gay, it’s the worst. Still now.
To be clear, this is not a head shop, and they don’t want to be confused with a traditional drug paraphernalia shop (as Nicole puts it). They’re seeing themselves very much as a dispensary.
Most people do live precariously. You only need a couple of upsets and anyone could end up there. Anyone. People seem to live in ignorance of this fact.
Did you choose old-fashioned steak-and-kidney or a bougie steak-and-stilton? Mushroom-asparagus? Humble beef-and-onion, perhaps? Maybe you went wild and bought steak, mushroom and truffle? Did you, did you? And did you also buy gravy? And – (Granny! Don’t listen!) – ready-made mash?
Splashpoint. Monday Morning, 10am. Lauren briskly swags in and sets up, no nonsense. Smiles at us all, asks us if we’re ready. Gets the music blasting and we all follow her lead and raise our fists, bounce on our toes, try to zone in. Lauren’s smile never drops and her energy is extraordinary. She’s … Read more
There’s a green festival at the Other place, and they do a plenty of musical dreaming up the road, but what’s especially dear to the hearts of many Worthing folk is the future of the planet and questions of how we can support sustainability. This was the 3rd Green Dreams festival, where a very motley crew of … Read more
The blog ‘worthing By Accident’ (WoBy) shifts here from its old home at SOAS blogs (university of London, UK). Ethnographic short flashes by Caroline Osella.
Bhangra at a Worthing family party, queer art at the town hall, online apologies for experiences of racism: signs of conviviality in Worthing?
