Coastalblog

Roe has moved in now, I am now officially part of a co-habiting couple, which is a strange sensation. I have, I'm afraid, always been a bit of a recluse. I have friends whom I love dearly, but I prefer to keep the numbver small and select. I am very fond of my own company, and working in the business that I do leaves me generally all our of bonhomie and goodwill come the end of a shift. And now, into my loosely ordered and vaguely sordid bachelory lifestyle a force for control and change has impacted like a meteor. I rather like it, as it happens. Only time will tell whether or not it'll work this time (we've attempted it before, and it all went very, very wrong). I suspect it will. I hope so.

I am not by nature a lazy man. I am not by nature a man inclined to let his life slide out of control, either. However I am a man who simply hates dealing with certain things, namely banking employees at the other end of a phone line. It's just the entire rigmarole of being shuffled from one bored and harrassed school-leaver to another until my simple request is granted. I get round this problem by avoiding it. Now, I am relatively prudent, I have credit cards, but the sums on them are dealable with (though moderately hefty when totalled up), one of my credit cards dates from my student days, and still bears the scars of a slightly more carefree me, the other is a recent acquisition. I decided to do something adult and sensible, and get a credt card with a low rate to tranfer ruinously high interest rate store cards onto (and I'm boring myself). I steeled myself to the task, completed the necessary forms, made the necessary phone calls through gritted teeth (why the hell did

Is today. Tomorrow the troops will be rallied (our numbers somewhat depleted these days)and pints will be drunk, but today...today I shall be concentrating mostly on feeling as twenty six as humanly possible. Though the big two seven isn't too irksome, as birthdays go. The Shiel turns thirty on friday, which is cheering. Not just yet...

Holiday soon, good job. I'm getting a little too oblique with customers. "Excuse me, you've forgotten our chips" "Yes sir, I've also forgotten about Dre" Puzzling.

So I've had my first couple of kitchen shifts, and have to say that I found them very enjoyable. Obviously it's way, way too early to be making any decisions, but I am convinced that the decision to give it a go was the right one, so that's okay. I think the satisfaction in part derives from the sensation of actually making something rather than serving it. This is in no way to devalue my job, I derive a great deal of joy from sending customers home happy; but conversely I have recently started losing patience with the sort of customers who in the past I would just have laughed off. You see the thing is, I'm just doing a job to the best of my ability, and I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I simply don't need a lot of our customers in my life. I don't know if this is a peculiarly English thing (when I was working in cornwall, and a far higher proportion of the customers were foreign) but we've had a lot of people in recently who have cause

Ah well, this is the logical apotheosis of coastalblog. Inspired largely by Cel and Porl's air-clearing post on Porl's blog, and tapping into things I may have alluded to in other posts. There's no other way to say it, I am deeply unhappy. I'm unhappy about being unhappy, I am unhappy about people perceiving me as being unhappy. I'm just plain fucked off about pretty much everything. So I'm seriously considering retraining as a chef, as alluded to below. In order to take it up professionally would require a wage cut of about fifteeen grand, which I can't afford, to be honest, but I'm doing the training on my days off, if it looks like I might be good at it then it's cheerio comfy wage, cheerio meandering, hello again to the greatest feeling on earth; the feeling where it's you, on your arse facing the world down. I fear I may be addicted to pulling myself out of the gutter but I just LOVE planning day to day, shifting the odd quid to where

God I love Autumn when it's like this. It's something to do with the taste of the air, I think, that freh crispness which one forgets about over summer and which, when it catches your nostris for the first time makes you think oh yeah jumpers! Walks! Drifts of leaves!. it also heralds the incipient arrival of the hell on stilts that is Christmas, but more of such things later. So what am I doing at the mo? Weeeeell, there's one thing occurring which may prove to be of pivotal importance in my life, but I'm reluctant to blog about it just yet, from some strange puritan hangover about not tempting fate. Also I'm having fun editing last year's Nanowrimo piece, having left it for nearly a year, in the hope that I'll rustle up a few ideas for this year's piece. I'm getting lots of reading and writing done, largely as a result of having knackered my knee (again) which kind of precludes any exercise except swimming, and I get VERY bored swimming a

Is the short answer to the question "So what've you been up to?" I've been on an extended binge of which this is my first night of sobriety. Water is so lovely, isn't it? Highlights included me and the manager, in an outraged drunken state pulling the ovens apart one night and then leaving them out to demonstrate how mucky they were. The chefs were not happy. Also a wine tasting last monday which ended with me and The Shiel getting blind drunk in Chorley by about two o clock in the afternoon, trying to get home and the next thing we knew we were drinking Guinness in The Temple. We'd got lost (on a train for fuck's sake), ended up in Manchester, and promptly decided to go out on the lash, obviously, but neither of us can recall this occurring. Ruin (he wrote off his car the next day, I learned this evening). The best bit, however, was visiting Paul and Cel at their stately pile in the country. It was nice to see with my own two eyes that Stalybridge looks