Skip to main content

Saving Ormskirk's soul.

This coastalblog update brought to you thanks to the intrepid reporting of Lesley.

It's not often my walk home is interrupted by an urgent cry of "Matt, you've got to come, there's people stood around the clocktower and they're singing". Not often enough amyway. So I tagged along behind an in-full-flight Jim, to see some genuine Ormskirk weirdness.

We met Lesley on a bench, at a safe distance. There was a group of people there all right, but they'd stopped singing, and instead circled the clocktower as though it were some chi-chi Victorian maypole, banging staffs on the ground at each point of the compass inset into the paving.

With impeccable timing, the alarm went off at work, so I had to go and see to that, but I am informed that Ormskirk is being menaced by a great evil, and this wednesday night ritual is in order to save us from said looming menace, and will continue.

Of course, in a couple of weeks time the students get back, and wednesday night is their traditional getting arsehold night. Drunk students, meet robed cultists. Robed cultists, drunk students. I'm sure you'll all get on just fine. I may buy a deck chair.

And what of this evil? Clearly it bears further investigation. Maybe these are the End Times, presaged as they have been by arson and inadequate model boating facilities? Watch this space.

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