Coastalblog

So I managed to take a couple of days off to swing by the south east and give poor old grandparents (who for various reasons have been unable to thus far) a taste of The Boy. Jolly pleasant it was too, he sat and cooed and gurgled obligingly thus cheering grandparents up no end. Familial duties discharged it was warm glows all round.

However, with no disrespect intended to the relloes (who it was, as ever, a pleasure to see) it was with no small relief that I headed back north. There's something about the home counties which never fails to get on my nerves. Note, this is not intended as a swipe at the south east in general, I'm reliably informed some parts are quite nice, but never do I ever feel as though I'm intruding on Hallmark card as when ploughing through darkest Bucks.

It took me a while to realise why. Normally I'm a sucker for the picture perfect, glorious villages of old england, village greens, bell-towers, all that jazz. Show me a thatched roof and I'll coo and gurgle in a manner not entirely dissimilar to my son in paragraph one. But as we tootled past one best kept village sign after another it dawned on me. No shops.

No shops. No schools. No bus-stops. No (shudder) pubs. Village after village of the damned. Houses for sleeping in and nothing else, no community, no life, not the faintest hint of soul. Millions of pounds worth of property used solely as a hyper-expensive dormitory. An entire area enslaved by cars, no public transport to speak of. An area where it makes sense to shop once a week so it's no problem travelling. Driveway after driveway of four by fours which have never seen a speck of mud in their existence, show-room shiny. Everything neat. Everything tidy. It's easy to be neat and tidy when you don't live there. Scary shit.

So thank fuck for Ormskirk, when I saw the spray paint on the town's sign I nearly cried with relief.

I've been thinking a lot about ownership recently.

I work in two spheres where originality is a nebulous concept. In writing we talk of all influences having a direct bearing on one's personal style, an unconscious script. If you've read Creeley then some Creeley ineivitably creeps in; if you've read Berrigan then some wanders up without you realising; if you've read Andrew Motion then you'll make fucking sure that none gets anywhere near you whatsoever. In cooking we damn well know about influences having a direct bearing on one's personal style. All those of us cooking at some point owe a debt to Careme, to Elizabeth David, to Escoffier, to Mrs Beeton, to an unnamed army of cooks down the centuries.

I've been thinking about this because I think I've found the line. A grauniad review of some overpriced london eaterie made reference to a deep fried jam sandwich, a dish which I fucking well KNOW to be a creation of the talented bunch in the kitchen at Liverpool's 60 Hope St (which, despite good notices for the frankly overrated London Carriageworks remains liverpool's best restaurant). Now, I knock out a hazelnut tart which is a direct lift from Sat Bains, which I'm sure to mention. My raspberry shortcake is Jeremy Lee's raspberry shortcake, to be frank. When customers comment, I make sure those guys get the credit.

Where it gets murkier is when recipes are adapted, mutated. I serve a honey cheesecake which owes something to James Martin, but I've tinkered with the recipe to an extent that I can confidently claim it as my own. My tomato sauce owes a little something to Elizabeth David, but more to north africa, which was my doing (though it wasn't, because it took thousands of years of culinary tradition to get to the stage where a blue-eyed gaijin like me comes along and lifts the idea for his own). Conversely I know I was knocking out heavily spiced chickpea stews years before Nigel Slater stuck a recipe for one in his observer column.

But what I never do is fail to acknowledge when the idea was someone elses. Which is what this grauniad review did. Which got on my nerves. Hence this blog post.

Here at Coastal Towers it is rapidly approaching what everyones favourite beetroot-fizogged professional Scot Sir Alex Ferguson once memorably described as squeaky bum time (though I suspect he may have nicked the line off everyones favourite wheely-bin Ashley Giles). Yes, the coffers are empty, the credit card's maxed out and it's time to see if the business can actually stand me taking a wage out of it. Probably it can, hopefully.

You see, whilst starting your own business is an exceedingly entertaining experience, it does come lightly seasoned with a smidgeon of stress. And whilst you may think you've planned everything to the last possible iota, you've invariably missed a few things, and these few things invariably cost money, which, as we have already established, I don't have any of any more. So whilst the whole thing is going swimmingly now, thanks very much, busier and busier all the time, we're still feeling the effects of the costs of the start-up. So it better get very busy, very quickly. Which, let's hope, it will. Because I would like to buy some beer. I could really use one right now.

Everything else, however, bonzer. But if one more person looks at my shop and coos "oh it's just what Ormskirk needs" and then leaves WITHOUT BUYING ANYTHING then I will not be responsible for my actions.

Look, I'm aware that I'm talking to myself here. Two months is an unconscionably long time in Internetland, where the hours waiting for the next reply to your witty comment on someone elses blog attenuate beyond the capability of mere temporal nomenclature to contain them. Here in the actual living, breathing, husbanding, fathering, cooking world, however, it shoots by like a very fast thing. Possibly a cheetah. They're quite rapid, I'm reliably informed.

So yes, the blog lay fallow. Purely and simply cos I was too damn busy to do anything with it. Too busy to do a lot of things I'd like to. But heigh ho. Such is the exciting and glamorous world of coastalblog. Why only yesterday I was scrubbing out an extractor fan canopy. Don't you wish you were me?

But yet, but yet..I can't let go of dear old coastalblog. I toyed with the idea of making this a one final post and saying cheerio to the zero people still checking in, but couldn't quite bring myself to do it. It would have seemed an admission of defeat, and admission that there is nothing left beyond domesticity and commerce. Which, of course, I should like to imagine that there is.

There is, for example, issue 12a of Neon Highway, edited by Alice Lenkiewicz and Dee Mcmahon, with a small amount of help from me. 13 follows in April, with luck, a following wind and afew hours of free time. I have a few spare copies, drop me a line to the usual address should you want one. It does, however, cost actual English Pounds.

There's also the garden. Laugh along as Matt attempts to learn how to acually deal with one with no idea what he's doing. I was out there the other day, enthusiastically hacking away. I suspect I may have done a couple of grand's worth of damage.

There's a new writing project, which I shall endeavour to keep up with, details murky as of present, the urge is ever present, the chances, however, are scant.

There's also the dear old business. Which is ticking along okay, thanks for asking. Not to the extent that I can actually pay myself any Real Money as of yet, but hope springs eternal, as the mother of someone called Hope once said when she bought her a trampoline. Possibly.

So there we go. I'm still here. I'm not entirely subsumed by Commerce. Just yet. I'm just talking to myself because I can't let go.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is, of course one of those oh, bugger, moments when you can see all manner of shit hitting a cornucopia of fans.

All politicking aside, it behooves us to recall that someone has been murdered. Any response other than feeling appalled is inappropriate in the extreme.

So a silver medal of twatdom for Miliband's shrugging "well, she knew the risks", but the gold, as ever, to Dubya for jumping merrily onto the freedom bandwagon and wittering on about her "bravely giving her life" possibly in pursuit of some ersatz notion of "freedom"

She didn't bravely give her life. She was murdered. Please to remember this simple dictum: killing people is wrong.

To cheer us all up, then, a quick visit to longtime perpetual mockarena Have Your Say, and thanks to the marvellous Speak your Branes for flagging it up, a response to teddygate (remember that?) from some random gorm deploring those crazy muslims: "Thank God we live in a secular society"

Drink it in, people, drink it in and feel the cold hand of fear upon your spine. This person has the power of the vote. I've said it before and I'll say it again. These are the End Times

Look, I'm not going into it. The paint, the constant sore throat, the hammers and walls and tiles oh my.

But we managed to open.

So your humble correspondent has been an upstanding pillar of the community, one of Bonaparte's famed nation of shopkeepers for a whole three weeks though, most of which has been spent in a state of blind panic staring at the door and willing it to open. Things seem to be taking a turn for the cautiously optimistic though, and I have been knocking out some seriously decent grub and yes, it is a relief to be my own boss and yes, it is a relief to get to cook with decent ingredients rather than worry about some distant owners unit cost percentage, indeed it's a relief to never hear the words unit cost percentage. It's nice to work my way slowly though the beer list (should you ever come across anything by the Marble brewery of Manchester, buy it, better yet, come to Ormskirk and buy it from me). It's nice to actually HAVE to taste a variety of cheeses, it's particularly gratifying to have people come back and ask if there's any more of a dessert I made that their friend bought and loved (banana and maple bread and butter pudding, since you ask), it's an actual thrill to have people try the ice cream we stock and see the surprise and delight on their faces as they realise what the damn stuff is actually supposed to taste like. It's fun tracking down obscure cheeses that customers ask for, it's amusing handing our vouchers for a free coffee outside the local Costa.

Quadruple the amount of customers and I might even say I'm enjoying myself. Still, early days.

Post about end of an earhole and leaving my stove will follow shortly.

In the meantime, remember how I bang on about the frankly terrifying nature of the BBC's Have your Say feature?

These collate it far better than I ever could