Skip to main content

Chosen by you!

I inhabit an appalling duality, seriously. Some days it's nigh on impossible to get out of bed. You see, there are two of me.

I know, I know, we're all multi-faceted, each of us is terribly complex etc etc. I am not, however, there are, simply put, two of me.

As a general rule of thumb I'm relatively liberal, reasonably relaxed and inclined to see the best in people. However I am, also, a chef. And chefs, as you're doubtless aware, are for the most part temperamental, egomaniacal arseholes. Goes with the turf, I'm afraid, when your business and reputation ride on each and every plate you send out, and you send out hundreds, it tends to make you prone to stress.

And so I and I struggle on, mutually mistrustful but attempting to rub along as best we can. And then something like Asda'a new "Chosen by you" range comes along. The concept being that they've stuck this label on items "Chosen by you" d'you see, and in no sense chosen by a program crunching the most popular lines in any given area. Normal me regards this as irritatingly twee but recognises that hey, a lot of people lack the capacity to shop properly for whatever reason, and it doesn't do to sneer, supermarkets are a necessary evil, it's not ideal but y'know, they're not going away, might as well just live with it, and being arsey about that sort of thing smacks of elitism in a deeply unpleasant manner which doesn't sit well at all. Chef me, on the other hand, thinks that anyone who shops at asda is a mouth-breathing idiot devoid of even a rudimentary palate and should at no time be given a "choice" in anything unless they do themselves a sullen, lardy mischief; in fact just bus KFC in to the fuckers and let them eat themselves to a damply explosive death, it's what they would have wanted.

How on earth can we possibly get along?

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