Skip to main content

Well, that was fun

What a jolly pleasant few days that was. I always forget how energising just a short change of scenery is. Plus there's the added smug factor of knowing that you've made in effort with family (I'm only half-joking, it is by no means a chore to see my relations, quite the opposite, but my odd days off make it difficult for me to do so, so when I am able to I feel quite the dutiful chap). Lords was enjoyable, even if the cricket was the worst sort of mismatch, and I even found time to get into a ruck with a short fat bearded bloke who felt it necessary to shout racial abuse (as well as a bizarre sequence of non sequiturs) at the action. So that was entertaining.

It was also good to be able to put some faces to names vis a vis ILX (and what a strange coincidence that the very next night Jim, Porl and Cel should have their very own close encounter of the FAP kind) and hopefully I shall do so again, as in my sun-dazed state I'm not sure the poor chaps got a great deal of sense out of me.

But the two best things I took from my break, two things which went some way towards restoreing my faith in existence were the discovery that one can now eat at train stations without just buying a burger or sandwich (thankyou Marks and Spencers, and thankyou the Japanese for inventing sushi) and a moment that occurred half way through extra time during "the miracle of Istanbul" (TM). There I was, stood in a pub in Stevenage (not renowned as a hotbed of Liverpool support) when up on the screen came a notice informing us that Celebrity Mercy Fuck (or whatever it's called, you know the one) would follow the football. As one, the pub voiced an imaginative suggestion as to what that programme could do to itself.

And I thought the Great British Public liked that sort of shit, there may be hope after all.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A whole new world.

I appear to have moved into the pub. Now, I don't wish to give the impression that this has come as a complete surprise to me, we'be been planning to do so since shortly after I bought it, but still, it's sort of snuck up on me and now I'm waking up and thinking what happened? How come I'm here? The reason for this discombobulation is that this move was initially a temporary measure. Mrs Coastalblog had some relatives coming to stay, and it made sense to put them up in our house while we decamped to the flat. It's still a work in progress, but a mad week of cleaning and carting stuff around made it habitable. I had a suspicion that once we were in we'd be back and forth for a few weeks. As with many of my hunches, I was completely and utterly wrong. As it turned out, once we were here, we were here. Things moved at pace and, now our kitchen appliances have been installed, there's no going back, the old house is unusable. It's left me with slightly mi

Mad Dogs and Immigration Ministers

It is with no small degree of distress that I'm afraid to say I've been thinking about Robert Jenrick. I know, I know, in this beautiful world with its myriad of wonders, thetre are many other things about which I could think, the play of sunlight upon dappled water, the laughter of my children, the song thrush calling from the sycamore tree a few yards away from where I type this. Yet the shiny, faintly porcine features of the Minister for Immigration keep bubbling up into my consciousness. It's a pain in the arse, I tell you. A few years ago on here I wrote a piece entitled The cruelty is the point in which I argued that some policies are cruelty simply for the sake of it, pour decourager les autres . I was reminded of that recently when I listened to Jenrick defending his unpleasant, petty decision to order murals at a migrant children's centre to be painted over. You've probably heard the story already; deeming pictures of cartoon characters "too welcoming&

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