Coastalblog

it is with a great degree of sadness that I recently got news of the death of poet, academic and all round good egg Bill Griffiths. A long time hero of mine (a link to his website, now broken, has been in the sidebar since day one) it was reading his vital, playful and above all engaging poems which first nudged me off the somewhat formulaic path I'd been treading into the more fruitful areas I've been exploring ever since. I have a lot to thank him for. Every poem I've written since 2000 owes him, in some part, a debt.

I was fortunate enough to meet him, too. One of the rare poets I'd confidently take a non-poet to see read he entertained the Rose theatre richly before, to my delight, terrifying the bejaysus out of my students the next morning at a highly stimulating which I was saddened to note the students in question seemed too hungover / tired / confused by the experiene of a man with love and hate tattooed on his knuckles barking Shelley at them to fully get into. Their loss.

So. Bill Griffiths. Coastalblog hero non pareil. Polymath, scholar, biker and damned fine writer. RIP.

I was vaguely amused last night by a slew of facebook status updates featuring people moaning about monday being imminent. I couldn't concur, for the last few weeks it's been my only day off. Sometimes not even then (witness intemperate outburst of rage at bank hoidays not so long ago). I'm inclined to like them as a result. Should you work in the catering industry and you're lucky enough to get two days off at the same time they tend to be Sunday/Monday or Wednesday/Thursday (Mon/Tue if your employer is an absolute swine). This is why, as Anthony Bourdain points out, your best bet for going to a restaurant is midweek, the chefs are rested, the horrors of the weekend are at the back of our minds, we're refreshed, we're eager to send you out a nice meal.

Saturday, as I may well have noted elsewhere, is amateur night.

But this is all grossly off topic, the point of this post is to eulogise Monday, the day of rest, when half the chefs in the country have their feet up. When even if you are a poor restaurant lifer with the midweek weekend, you know you're going to get a relatively easy day, go over your stock, a bit of light prep maybe.

And this is a particularly picquant day of rest for me, as it is conceivably the last one I'll have for a loooong time. I'm working cover for the next fortnight after this, so no days off, and at some point in the next 2-3 weeks Mrs Coastaltown will phone me half way through a shift, tell me to drop everything and get my arse home, and an unspecified period after that a small Coastalbaby will rock up. And that will be that.

So. Peace and quiet today it is. And in that spirit I'm going to go and have a nice sit down. Enjoy your Mondays.

That's BBC Entertainment reporter Mark Savage.

Now, this being the intenet and all, you're doubtless well aware of Ms Britney Spears distressing appearance at some telly do or other.

(I'll have to pause here in wonderment that I'm actually writing a blog post [in part] about Britney Spears).

You've all seen it, it was unedifying, the girl was blitzed out of her skull.

Now, whether or not she's brought it on herself I don't care. She's a grown woman, she makes her own decisions. Generally bad ones, it would seem. What I object to is Savage's descrition of her as "out-of-shape." I saw the footage, and thought Ms Spears looked a damn sight healthier (if you can ignore the blank, zombie eyes) than she has for some time. Referring to someone who looks a normal, healthy weight as being "out of shape" is callous, irresponsible and in itself a cause of the celebrity disease of which Ms Spears is so distressingly obvious a symptom.

So, I repeat. Mark Savage is a tit.

In other news, the new issue of the soon to be relaunched Neon Highway is down to the last few arguments and thrashings-out of bits and bobs. Subs details and what have you up here soon.

In further writing-related news, there's a new Ormskirk Short Story up, after a sixteen-month hiatus. To be fair, I was getting married and buying a house, so I was pretty busy. The next couple of months see the neon highway relaunch, the business opening and (gulp) the birth of Coastalbaby. So I don't know how regularly I'll manage to get anything up there. But it feels good to get something on the board, at any road. Write and let me know what you think.

Bill Bailey has this entertaining song written from the perspective of a teenager with excellent parents who "pickme up from school / you attended all my sporting functions", the payoff of course being his rage at the very fact of their good parenting "How can I feel pain / when you're being so supportive?". It is a fact that teenagers are feeble-minded (sorry chaps, but it just goes with the turf, I was too, you won't always be, chin up), and furthermore it is a fact that the feebleminded are only capable of defining themselves in opposition to something.

And this was the first thought that popped into my head this morning to discover that Britain gets to carry on using ounces, pints and miles, as well as retaining the right to rise at 5 a.m to genuflect before a photo of the Queen Muvva gawd love 'er. Sure it will be hailed as a victory for (cough) common sense. Sure the Sun and Mail will doubtless splash pictures of punters enjoying a pint, or buying a pound of bananas. But, in a manner not dissimilar to the morning after a massive pill bender it s only a matter of time before the euphoria fades and in the grim light of morning the baggy eyed, grey skinned eurosceptics will whisper what now? How do we face the day when the night was so exciting?

For the Imperial system is one of the great shibboleths of the parochial little englander, and what Brussels has done is the political equivalent of a shrug and a drawled "whatever". The wonderful quote from Gunter Verheugen, the industry commissioner: "I want to bring to an end a bitter, bitter battle that has lasted for decades and which in my view is completely pointless" underlines european indifference to this talismanic issue; which the rabid nationalists have frothed for years was the number one target for faceless belgians, first they take our pound of bananas, next they'll make us watch Monsieur Hulot's holiday endlessly, next thing you nkow it'll be the old Etats Unis all over again. As it turns out they couldn't give a monkeys.

Coastalblog looks forward to seeing which bogeyman gets drummed up to fill the void. Anyone care to place your bets?

I've been lounging it up in a hotel in darkest Bucks, celebrating my grandparents frankly astonishing feat of reaching a fiftieth wedding anniversary. All well and good, nice to see family, even nicer to have a weekend away with Mrs Coastaltown. Less nice to pay southern hotel drinks prices (A tenner for two drinks? Thank christ I'm back in the north) but the hotel was paid for us so win some, lose some.

I did, however, get slightly exercised about the breakfast. Now, I am a man who is fond of the british breakfast, one of this sceptered isle's most laudable contributions to world cuisine. Done well, it is a things of joy (remind me to bang on at length about the quality of scran avbailable at Lancaster's estimable Sun Hotel one of these days). On those rare occasions that I have enough time to cook one before dragging my sorry carcass back into work I will endeavour to do so. Sausages, bacon, beans and black pudding are all dear friends of mine, devilled kidneys, roasted mushrooms, grilled tomatoes all occupy a place in my heart. Kippers and kedgeree have me singing hosannas. A well cooked breakfast is balm to the soul.

There is, of course, a place for the potato at this feast. Indeed, one of the fixtures of the correct full english is refried mash, or bubble and squeak. The scots (and some of the more enlightened northerners) enjoy the fragile bauty of the tattie scone. My father swears by refried spuds from the sunday roast, saved as a breakfast treat for a weekday morning.

The rest of this beknighted, budweiser-swigging nation of morons digs into the hash brown.

Hash browns, how many ways do I hate you? They stand for corporate mass catering at its very worst: box after box of processed garbage which at no point has been even on nodding terms with a potato, slung in a deepfat fryer and left to congeal under heatlamps. They are all that is wrong with lazy hotel kitchens, serving up a smorgasbord of short-cuts in place of the real deal.

This could easily become a rant levelled at the poor standard of breakfast catering nationwide that I've endured over the years, scrambled egg from powder, fried eggs cooked to rubber, sausages barely cooked at all, tomatoes that have never known the touch of the griddle, mushrooms sauteed in vegetable oil (if ever an ingredient cried out for butter): the whole Brake Brothers/3663 hellstorm of unit cost percentage, wave after wave of mediocrity. But I choose to level my criticism as hash browns because, well, they're not even british, they're an american interloper on the saxon plate. They have no place in a full english, full scottish or welsh. They have no place in Ulster fry. They are an abomination unto the very idea of the glorious fry-up. An indictment of Britain, one of our national dishes and we can't get it right (don't even get me started on carverys).

So please, next time you find yourself at some middling salesman's rest, the sort of place with a motorway juntion number for a name, strike a blow for the noble breakfast. Poke dubiously at your hash brown, ask them if they've leftover mash, ask if they can make potato scones. Point out that they're shit. For as long as you keep taking this crap is as long as they'll dish it out.