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Oh fuck it's Mother's Day

There are a few days in the calendar which Hospitality staff would prefer to avoid if at all possible. The days when the people who don't really know how to behave in restaurants come out to play, the overbooked days, the days when people walk in and are frankly astonished,  nay,  outraged that no table is available for them. New Year's Eve? Yes, to an extent, though that's generally mitigated by high prices, the Christmas season in general is a cockpit for terrible behaviour on the part of the general public, so NYE doesn't really stand out so much as you'd think. Valentine's Day is always a shithouse, not only because all of your tables becomes tables of 2, so the amount of people you do is generally quite disappointing, but because it's normally booked by blokes, so doesn't fill up until the last second (yes, yes, a terrible generalisation, I know, also true). But it does have the upside of there generally being a spectacular break-up to gawp at, plus
Recent posts

Oh look, racists

 I'm always surprised that people are surprised. Yes, I know, that makes me the idiot. Unless you've been very sensibly ignoring all broadcast and print media over the last week, you'll doubtless be aware that the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain are having a normal one. It all started when Suella Braverman, like a garden gnome made of spite, decided to start opining about how "Islamists" are in "in charge of Britain" (Community notes added context that some readers may find useful: they are not). So far, so unsurprising, Braverman's rhetoric has often tended towards the wilfully oppositional, and she's clearly on manoeuvres to be the leadership candidate of choice when the Tories are immolated at the next election. The intensity of the charge, and the spouting of the conspiracy theory that Sharia law is incoming in the UK (where a grand total of 11% of the population identify as Muslim, reality fans) were slightly eyebrow raising

I haven't seen Saltburn

I haven't seen Saltburn. And that's okay. I don't say this to seem in any sense superior, contrary to some impressions I may give, I don't set a great deal of store by the cultural cachet of what media people consume. I haven't seen The Traitors either, not because I sneer at that sort of thing, more because I just haven't. Judging from some of the discourse surrounding it, it seems I'm missing out. Ah well. In fact, of all the big things that everyone simply has to see of the last year I managed just the one ( Barbie , since you ask  It was okay). This blog isn't really about not seeing Saltburn, well, it is, in part, but only in that not seeing it is a necessary function of the wider observation, which is that discourse is now so pervasive that one simply doesn't need  to see these big cultural events. I've spent the first few weeks of the year on jury service, not really a barrel of laughs, and I am very much not allowed to talk about it, well

The Coastalblog Christmas Message

When you're a public figure with literally some readers (hi Dad!) it is incumbent upon you at this time of year to try to put the previous twelve months into some sort of perspective, maybe with a few sage thoughts on how we proceed, and wry reflections on some aspects of the year that lesser titanic intellects may have missed. Well, sod that, it's Christmas Eve and I've got a prep list longer than than the wait for an NHS hip replacement (little bit of politics there). You don't need me to tell you that the year's been a shitshow, the country's a basket case and it's literally not stopped raining since April. So I shan't waste any of your time pointing out the bleeding obvious. All I shall do, because I really do only have two minutes before I have to go and start making gravy, us wish you all as peaceful a holiday season as us possible under your personal circumstances, and that, if you are one of the millions who, for one reason or another, find this

Further adventures in wilful ignorance

Loth though I am to repeat myself (arch look to camera) I'm afraid that I'm going to be partly re-treading old ground this week. I hadn't intended to, but then all the fun and games of yesterday occurred and I thought oh bugger me, they're at it again. Yes, sorry, but I'm irritated with the press again, well the media in general, but mostly the commentariat concerned with the news. You may recall that  last time  I got round to posting a blog, it was to express disquiet at the collective forgetting of what the early days of Covid were like, and how the Government's chaotic response is somehow a surprise to people who presumably were being paid to notice at the time. This week, in the latest instalment of "Britain, WTF?" Pretend Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has Done A Politics, and been, the commentators all agree, Very Clever by engineering the return to frontline politics of one David Cameron, the semi-retired halfwit whose fault *all this* largely is.

Wilful ignorance

If you don't have any skin in the game, the Covid enquiries have been riotously entertaining. Well, riotous may be over-egging an already fairly rich pudding, but there has been a degree of grim amusement. Watching all these minor characters from a fairly so-so season of " Britain, fucking hell" indulge in an orgy of incrimination, blame, self-justification and good old-fashioned chucking everybody else under the bus has come with a pleasurable frisson of schadenfreude,and how I enjoy applying those European words to the Big Brane of Brexit, the never knowingly undersworn Dominic Cummings, whose petulant, teenage-levels of resentment have been particularly amusing. The fucking around has occurred, now we get to enjoy the finding out. I fully appreciate, however, that if you're one of the millions who lost a loved one, who missed a funeral, who stayed home and followed the rules, it might be less funny. If you're one of those who suffered as domestic abuse ran riot

20

Huh. It turns out that this blog is, as of, well, roughly about now-ish, 20 years old. 20. I've been doing this (very intermittently) for twenty bloody years. And, I cannot help but note, still am, for some reason. I've done posts in the past, when this whole thing was comparatively blemish free and dewy-skinned looking back on its history and how it's changed down the years, there's not really a lot of point in doing that again. It's reflected what concerns me at the time, is, I think, the most charitable way of phrasing it (a  polite way of saying that it's been self-absorbed and solipsistic, but then, it's a blog, this should not come as a shock), it's interesting for me to look back over the lists of posts, but not so much for you, I imagine. Likewise, pondering how I've changed in the intervening years is also fairly pointless. It's painfully obvious that I was a very different person at 25 to 45, my experience of jobs and kids and marriage