Coastalblog

I quite like the Internet, on the whole. Slightly too big a subject to get into within the confines of a blog post perhaps, "the Internet: how about that?" but heigh ho.  On balance, I'm pro. Or at least, not too virulent anti, I am, admittedly, less pro than I was a few years ago, what with the enabling of fascism and the poisoning of millions of minds with lies and bigotry, but I have a suspicion that that would probably have happened one way or another. The Daily Mail predates the World Wide Web after  all. And I wouldn't be able to escape people's terrible ill-informed opinions either, I run a pub, listening to half-baked theorising and spectacularly wrong-headed nonsense is very much part of the deal. No, my beef with the internet in this particular instance is more the legitimisation of said dreadful opinions, and I'm sorry, Amir from Cardiff, but you're the example that I'm picking. A few weeks ago, a football club lost a game of football. This ...

It's all too easy to feel a bit down at the moment. As events across the pond roll the cause of truth, decency and not-all-dying-in-a-catastrophic-climate-event back a few decades, it's all too easy for the shoulders to drop, to think fucking hell, they've won. The grifters and chances, the con artists and thieves, the liars, the haters, the celebrators of all the worst traits in human nature not only won, they did so convincingly. And now all the things they said they'd do, they're doing. It's also hard to have faith in any future shaped by the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, men rich enough to fix all poverty and hunger on Earth, but who instead prefer to get ever richer by making others ever poorer, and morality be damned. Harder still to believe in a world where truth is valued, when it becomes increasingly impossible to believe the evidence of one's own eyes, when tech bros high on money force their shitty AI on you whether you want it or not, but ...

Ironic, I suppose, that I'm attempting brevity in the service of defending floral speech, but needs must. No one wants to hear me wang on, after all. This has been a recurrent theme of my life. I make no great claims for my intellect, and my exam results would bear that out, but I've always had a fondness for words, which comes out when I write, sometimes when I speak, and it's often been regarded with suspicion. I suspect it's one of the things about me that winds a lot of people up. As with so many insecurities and minor worries, it started at school; I remember sitting SATs in yr 7, and being marked down for using the word "ululation" which, according to my teachers, didn't exist, but which anyone with access to a copy of Chambers would know means a hiring or screeching sound. The same thing happened at A-level (!) when a teacher regarded me with deep suspicion over the word "verderer" (basically a medieval park ranger). In my professional lif...

It's the most magical time of the year again. Yes, the liminal, soft-edged space between Christmas and New Year is here once more. It's almost as if calendars were a thing. And, once more, we get to see the wonders of the season, a million columnists writing the same column that they do every year: "how does any one know what day it is?" they chorus, ho ho "how can anyone one tell what time it is? I've had too much chocolate ha ha". It seems that over-consumption of food has a direct effect on one's ability to, I don't know, look at that supercomputer in your pocket which devotes an infinitesimal fraction of its power to displaying the date and the time at all times. No, I don't have a lot of time for that particular trope, I understand it, I spent a pleasantly fuzzy day yesterday not doing a great deal, but, y'know, as an observation I feel it's somewhat run its course, even the Today programme was at it today (which, I appreciate, i...

Well, I sort of had to, try as one might, it's been impossible to escape the fucker. Turn on the news, Gregg Wallace, look at your phone, Gregg Wallace, strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, Gregg Wallace. I'm pretty sure he just served me this frankly mediocre tea I'm currently drinking, sat in Starbucks (look, it's the only place open that's not booze, alright) while I while away the time that my youngest is at tutoring, thinking about Gregg sodding Wallace. I am, fairly obviously, not going to go into the details of the story. You, presumably, already know all about it, because it's been nigh on impossible to escape it. That is more what concerns me regarding this whole sorry farrago. That a middle aged man has spoken inappropriately throughout his career is, to my mind, not exactly news. I do not wish to downplay the importance of this story, to be clear, I find his actions deplorable, and his defence even more so. But I am somewhat nonplussed a...

Been a bit quiet here of late, I know. There are reasons (not, I hasten to add, particularly bad ones, merely reasons) beyond the usual ennui, and, for once, I've decided to write about them. As for once I genuinely was being kept away by circumstance, as opposed to my own laziness  I'm normally reluctant to reflect too much on my own life and the meaning I derived from it or, God forbid, the lessons I've learned . It's the most tedious sort of solipsism,and, to my mind, requires one to think one is the centre of the known Universe. Which, thankfully, despite my manifold other faults, I don't. It's why I've never got a job as a columnist. But it is probably worth blogging about the reasons I've been quiet on here, and *spit* what I've learned from it, if only as an exercise in driving the truth into my own thick skull. I see that my last post here was the 30th of September, that tracks, because, I had  quite the October and, to my surprise (this is t...