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Let your next career move come to you.

Britain is a dirty country

Coming back from holiday in the 1st world and I can’t believe how filthy this country is

litter all along the roadside

the roads are in an awful state too

The odd thing is that after a week or so you stop noticing the litter and grime 

 

 

After a holiday in Japan I realised that all Japanese tourists in the UK must spend their time stifling their revulsion at the level of dirt we create and tolerate.

They don't have litter bins in beauty spots because they consider, correctly, that if you had a backpack to to transport a drink or sandwich with you to the place, you are equally able to take the can and the wrapper back out with you, in your backpack, and later that evening disassemble them into the correct recycling bins at your own house. I don't remember if they have bins in city public areas but if they didn't they would still keep the place perfectly clean without them. 

It is true 

London particularly 

That's what Tory cuts get you 

Luckily (and it is by luck) London doesn't have that awful smell most European countries have - rotting sewage. Horrid.

 

christ, the big eye-opener after returning from Japan was how rude or indifferent UK staff are.  Someone took my order at a coffee shop, took money and handed over the drink without looking up or uttering more than "next".  

I don't mind surly customer service as long as they call me Sir. What infuriates me is being addressed as "bruv", "buddy", etc. It's not as bad in the sticks as the cities.

London is just about habitable these days compared to how it was 20 years ago. Most Brits have no concept of how rich the US is by comparison. Especially the nice bits. Just buy the wedge issues eh, that’s a sign of real intelligence.

A nice bit of America

The majority of America is a dirty disgusting depressed sh1thole.

It is just massively massively segregated and massively unequal and tourists don't tend to go to the shit bits, because if they do, they get robbed.

You have just been in a posh enclave, which does not reflect the entirety of the US.

 Basically you are the same as somone flying back into the UK from South Africa in the apartheid era going - the UK is so dirty, not like Cape Town....

christ, the big eye-opener after returning from Japan was how rude or indifferent UK staff are.  

Yes, but have you seen their pornography? All that politeness comes at a cost. The more repressed people are, the viler their grot - Exhibit A - the Japanese. Exhibit B - the Germans.

So on balance I'd rather have the honest English rudeness and grossness, rather than a load of excessively polite compulsive tidiers who then masturbate to scat pron.

I've only ever once been called BRUV.  I was wearing a hi-viz jacket (for cycling - but it was the first waterproof to hand) but was otherwise dressed in gardening/work type clothes.  The guy in the shop thought I was a workman, so "bruv'd" me.  I rather liked it.

Most Brits have no concept of how rich the US is by comparison. Especially the nice bits. Just buy the wedge issues eh, that’s a sign of real intelligence.

This.  I think even the poorest US state (Mississippi iirc) has a slightly higher median income than the UK.

Admittedly the worst bits of the poorest states are awful (e.g. when I was working in Louisiana there was a dead dog just lying on the sidewalk of one the small towns I stopped in).

The UK is filthy. Exemplified by Boots, which is only the most famous pharmacy the UK has ever created. The stores have grime everywhere. In the ME they are like surgery theatres staffed by female Asian fitness models.

Agree also on the absence of deference to the customer in the UK. Call it phoney but it works.

We essentially have European GDP per capita, public services that are the same standard or worse than public services for the poorest in the US and we work longer hours than Europeans.

i.e. the UK is a productivity disaster

the uk never used 2 b so rank. i remember going 2 france as a child on holiday and u could pop out the channel tunnel and, not just round calais, but all the way across normandy there would b litter and grime

now it’s the polar opposite

as sed above, it’s entirely due 2 tozza govt, money out of public services and in2 the pockets of their m7s

“under the left”

given “the right” have held dict7torial control of this country 4 nearly 2/3s of the last 40 years and 4 the brief period the other lot were in charge it did not happen…

ur chatting absolute bodge tozz gargling shit as usual eeyore

really can’t hear u very well through all that gargling of bodge jizz ur doing m7

but u seem 2 b nattering some non-sequitur about rubbish and dirt on the streets being due 2 something that happened in the 70s? that can’t be right, only an idiot would say that

London is a fecking disgrace in this regard. Just one of the many ways it went to sh1t after Ken stopped being Mayor. 

Public spaces (town centres, parks etc) in the UK generally are not that bad outside London I agree but roadsides are pretty awful. 

The US GDP per capita advantage is largely driven by a combination of natural resources and (crucially) a long hours/long working life culture that sees normal people work very hard well into old age.  They also die younger than Europeans (the two may or may not be connected).

Whether it is something for us to aspire to is very much a matter for debate I think, although we could definitely learn a thing or two from about avoiding ageism in the labour market. 

The problem with Britain is everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job to fix it, and we’re all conditioned to find someone to look down on socially so we don’t feel so bad and get a pass to do fvck all. But it’s noticeably worse now than at any time since the late 70s/early 80s. So you can either concentrate on things that matte, or let the bots continue to wedge you all apart.

"we’re all conditioned to find someone to look down on socially"

It's called human nature. 

But millennials (of all nationalities) do seem to have an inflated sense of entitlement, I agree. 

Well, this is a red letter day - I never thought I'd see the day when the words "what HB said" even crossed my mind.  * shudders * 

Nothing comes for nothing /  give with one hand, take with another / whatever other appropriate cliche anyone wants to insert : Japan may be clean as a whistle and polite as feck (creepily so, in my opinion, when half the time, they are thinking that you are unclean and inferior because you are not ethnically Japanese), but it is also a country in which masturbating over the used underwear of young children is practically a national sport - sexual repression is okay, it seems, if your vvankbank is only stuffed with images of children, has one of the higher suicide rates in the world, and in which actual death by overwork (not manual work, not because you've been stuck working down a mine and developed a respiratory illness, but because you're so scared to leave your desk fvcking job before anyone else you literally die in your office chair) is a real thing.

And, as for the US - there are no roads clean enough, or service personnel obsequious enough to make the US as a whole (not random, disparate monied parts of it) better than the UK.

Yes, some part of the UK, particularly London, are grubby and some people are lazy as feck (moaners : meet humankind), but for most people (and particularly for women) it still easily kicks the arse of most countries in most material ways. 

I don’t agree I think generally the U.K. is cleaner and with fewer unpleasant smells than much of Europe - London for example is far cleaner than Paris 

Funny I got back from Spain this week and thought the exact opposite getting back home, albeit to a relatively nice leafy area.  Even picturesque Spanish resorts would have scrubland with rubbish and rubble dumped, and regular eyesore parts, whereas everything in England near me seemed clean and tidy and ordered.

As said above, depends where you are in the country(ies) innit.

I also disagree re France - well, Paris, anyway : last time I was there, coming out of the station, the smell of wee and general human sadness was overwhelming, probably due to the enormous tent city that has grown outside of the station.  The closest thing I can think of in London was in the bad old days, what, 7 or 8 years ago?, when Charing X station at night became a satellite homeless shelter, with all the unpleasantness that would involve, but that's gone now (admittedly, one of the very few improvements in the last several years when it comes to the homeless).

I do notice how sparkling clean pretty much any shop you go in in Spain is compared with here. Somewhere like Mercadona, or even Lidl, the floors are pristine and they constantly have staff going round on machines cleaning them.

Costa are I think the worst of the coffee chains for grubbiness.

When did eeyore become as big a Tory meatshield as Amit and risky? U ok babe?

Heh, and also touché, m9.

Where we're at now does remind me of the run-up to the winter of discontent in some ways. Couldn't resist a picture of that. Always dangerous to stand in the middle of the road though.

Eeyore is not somewhere between ivan the terrible and vidkun quisling. At least he doesn’t talk complete rubbish sandwiched in abuse all day every day. 
 

Agree re parts of London. I was near Euston yesterday. I noticed how dirty the buildings were. Road works, building sites covering everything. However is a main route into London. British Library pretty smart inside and spotless. 

We need to be harder on those who drop litter.I pick up all litter on the few roads round my house almost every day. I wish I could have cameras up to and name and shame the litter louts

British roadsides are not generally bad. Much tidier than in, say, France.

Another massive factor in American relative prosperity is how abundant, and therefore cheap, land is. In Britain we pay a Not Being a Country the Size of a Continent tax daily.

No material part of Britain is a “shithole” by any sensible standard and if u think otherwise you are a pearl-clutching, queening old woman.

Heh, I was thinking of South Bank actually when I saw you’d responded m88. And I don’t mean the royal festival hall and surrounding precincts.

I used to go in The Bongo on the South Bank after working until 3am at an Italian restaurant.  From the age of 15.  Saw some fvcking sights there.

Remember a Roy Chubby Brown joke about growing up in South Bank, saying it was so rough there were no Jehovah's Witnesses.  Only Jehovah's Bystanders.  They witnessed fvck all.

Total horseshit. Funnily enough have just walked through Leicester Square, undoubtedly one of the shittest parts of London. There is no rubbish and as I typed this I saw a street cleaner pass picking up a tiny piece of rubbish.

London is much cleaner than it was when I was growing up in the 80s/90s. This is a classic case of people assuming things were better in the past.

As others have said Europe is way worse from a rubbish perspective and CBD US is a whole nother realm. OK not the gated suburbs but that’s the same anywhere. 

Where I am, the local schools all do a regular litter pick. Also some of the local old boys are regularly up and down the streets with a bag and litter picker. Not that it’s a big issue here but it’s nice to see. 
 
The Truckers’ Tizer issue is another thing altogether and only on dual a roads and motorways. 

Our A roads have a healthy coating of McDonald’s wrappers, Costa cups and crisp packets 

It’s pretty disgusting really when you consider they must have been chucked out of a van or car (but let’s face it, van) window at some point - I can’t really understand the mentality of somebody who would do that rather than chuck their rubbish in the bin at a petrol station or just take it home.

A bit like the way I can’t understand the mentality of people who hang around sex crime trials so they can bang on the side of the van.

The roads are filthy and poorly maintained. The grass isn’t mown and the trees aren’t trimmed back. I don’t remember things being this bad in the 90s.

The cities (including London) don’t seem too bad and no worse than many other European cities but far behind Germany. 
 

My mortuary car park is a total disgrace with litter and weeds. It is used by families coming to view deceased relatives so really should be better. 

“Our A roads have a healthy coating of McDonald’s wrappers, Costa cups and crisp packets ”

No they don’t, give over. I live in the same country you do, and in a recidivist tory bit of it that consistently votes in public service haters or the riskyite tendency, and our main roads are nothing like this. 

The state of the road surfacing and markings is a disgrace, but they are perfectly free of litter. Even when the local travellers go fly-tipping it gets cleaned up within a day or two.

I was down your way last weekend Laz as it goes 

I was thinking specifically of the A2 between Faversham and Canterbury…. (although there is low to moderate level littering everywhere) 

Do stop trying to link litter and porn.  Non sequitur.  That’s a bit like saying, “ok, I have permanent BO, but at least I don’t go around mass-shooting people, so I win the debate.”  No you don’t.  It’s presumably not as if the UK only watches wholesome porn either.  And I very much doubt whether there are any peer-reviewed studies which purport to show a link between ethical porn usage and a higher propensity for littering, or conversely.  Nonsensical speculating.   

Rather than getting into a racist litterometer debate, let's instead ponder on wtf makes people litter.  In rural parts, I've seen tossers (literally) travelling miles, with neatly-bagged rubbish, which they then proceed to toss into a hedgerow miles from their home, but of course a few metres from your front gate.  Maybe their bin was having a rest that week.    

And the insane compulsion never to allow a can or wrapper rest briefly on your car floor!  "Quick, quick, get it out the window ... phew, my car floor feels better already!  Imagine if I’d had to drive home with a wrapper on the floor, before putting it in the bin – what a nightmare that would have been!"

What is wrong with them?

I knew I had reached peaked litter tosser when I saw a bloke tidying the roadway by, get this, chucking the rubbish into a nearby farmer's field, so that “the road would look tidier”.   

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