ABSTRACT
This chapter chronicles the leisure life-world which is ‘the lads’’spiritual ‘home’. It talks about ‘the lads’ and the kind of people we are. Around this discussion, it begins the task of tracing the genealogy of the leisure life-world and explaining how self and identity are constructed through the discourse of the leisure life-world. In order to achieve these two aims, in the first instance, the narrative focuses on the ‘arrival’ of Stout in the summer of 1979. This evokes a powerful scene which provides the hinge upon which the rest of the discussion in this chapter swings. For in that particular summer the leisure life-world was made singularly secure by a newcomer with a reputation for being ‘hard’. It freezeframes and rolls the credits at this point to reveal how Stout came to be accepted, but more importantly to offer the reader a sense of the verisimilitude of the leisure life-world to show how that world is both lived and understood by ‘the lads’. The telling of the story takes the form of narrative ‘episodes’, which I interrupt from time to time, to add to, shift or refocus the discussion. This style of writing confirms that the relationship between the rest of ‘the lads’ and myself is not detached but, on the contrary, irrevocably discursive and passionately involved. It is also illustrative of the idea of complexity of ‘the self as ethnographer’ which was discussed in Chapter 2.
