Skip to main content

Ow Ow Ow, mmm

In the not too distant past there was an advertising campaign for a brand of yoghurt. the conceit of this campaign was that the yoghurt was tasty, but good for you, thus having pleasure without the pain. The joke being that some other sucker was getting the pain. Hail of nails, rabid dogs etc. They referred to this gag as the "pleasure/pain principle", of which I, yesterday, was a one man example. My final student loan repayment has been made this month, so I had only my outstanding credit card bill to go before being effectively debt free. In a spirit of clearing the decks, bracing fiscal prudence and what have, I decided to get rid of it in one hit.

It was not a small cheque that I wrote, and the creamy yoghurty joy of being WITHOUT DEBT FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1996 (mmmm) was counterbalanced somehwta by the sharp stinging pain in my wallet (ow ow ow)

Elsewhere, a bumper crop of entertainment in ths week's super soaraway Ormskirk Champion (which, rather sweetly, is boasting about it's circulation rise on the front. It's a freesheet, I take it this just means that they delivered more). the headline features the further fury of a group close to Coastalblog's heart, the Ormskirk and West Lancs Model Boat Club (known mystifyingly as OWLS). I have reported before on their travails as they attempt to put Model Boating in its rightful place on the map by constructing a giant lake, and their touching inability to understand why the council suspect that construction of said lake for the interests of model boating (and NOTHING ELSE. Regular readers will recall OWLS campaign aganst the invidious ducks taking up space with their wings and their quacking)might not be the hottest idea since Balti Pies warms the cockles of your correspondents heart. I am a particular fan of this quote, local journalism at its finest:

"If we had our own lake it would bring a lot of pleasure to all age groups including the disabled."

Marvellous stuff.

Further pleasure was to be derived upon reading the Champ's editorial. There are many ills in the world today. War, Famine, Religious persecution, June Sarpong and Global Warming to name but five. So what does the Champ address, bringing the full power of its journalistic prowess to bear?

Under the headline "We want clackety clack" (which in itself is worthy of several minutes of awed contemplation) they complain that improvements to the rail network to make track silent will make journeys more stressful, what with the drone of other's conversations and "personal" music players (their inverted commas, oh how I love sniffy inverted commas in local newspaper editorials, they actually use "progress" towards the end of the piece as well. Fantastic)not being drowned out by the train's rumble. As if this weren't wonderful enough in itself, they then liken said rumble to "being safe back in the womb." That's right. The womb.

I mean, what's not to love?

Comments

Post a Comment

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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&
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more