Skip to main content

Easy targets

Some notes for your diary, the following words and phrases are banned in my hearing until further notice.

"In real terms"
"Contextualised"
"Knocking it out of the park"
"That's old-school"
"That's what I bring to the table/party (delete as applicable)"
"Punch and Judy politics"

Any figure over 100% is banned should it succeed the words "giving it" in a verb clause, all other usages are acceptable. Any mention of MP's expenses is banned should you yourself have an expense account/petty cash tin/access to a stationery cupboard. Discussion of the BNP voting for non-whites to be allowed to join is banned, likewise anything which could be deemed a liberal hot button du jour. John Terry is banned, likewise Ashley Cole. Vernon Kay's ban is not be rescinded under any circumstances. George Lamb will remain banned until such time as his accent ascends to its correct social class. And he fucks off. Florence and the Machine are banned before nine a.m and after five p.m., and all day Sunday. Unless she stops shouting. Any discussion of how if Pete Doherty wasn't a rock star (which to the best of my knowledge he is not) he'd be in prison by now is banned banned thrice fucking banned.

That is 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