Coastalblog

A rare occurence for me yesterday, a saturday off. Doesn't happen terribly often and, much like Tony Bourdain feeling guilty about the ease of his new life post Kitchen Confidential I did have the odd twinge of anxiety about leaving the kitchen behind on what's normally our busiest day of the week. Not enough to stop me though, as I was indulging the other part of my split work personality, getting back to being a writer for once. Yup, yesterday afternoon found me upstairs at the mighty Ship and Mitre (Coastalblog passim) reading away from my last chapbook "Delete, recover, delete". Fun enough in and of itself, and it felt good to be stretching the poetry muscles again, but a reading's only as good as the other readers, and sin this case I was in excellent company. Honourable mentions to Colin Winborn, but the show was stolen by Sarah Crewe and Sophie Mayer, reading from their joint work "Signs of the Sistership" (available here ). Both compelling read

The news that those wacky Taliban have taken the bourgeois imperialist capitalist pigdog move of opening an honest to goodness office, where like, they can be faxed n'stuff should be cheering to all those of us who believe firmly in the power of office mundanity to dampen any fire in the human soul. Sure, the Taliban think they're engaging with the world, but all they're effectively doing is allowing the world to seep into them. Their unique brand of religious insanity will inexorably be subsumed beneath a tide of petty arguments about stationery, arguments over who has yet to contribute to the tea kitty and fretting about whose turn it is to wash the mugs with "old men make better lovers" and "world's greatest dad" printed on the side. The fires of righteousness may yet burn strong in these crazy kids, but can they survive a team-building weekend in Wales?

So the G8 are meeting in a secluded island hideaway just outside Enniskillen. Anti-Capitalist protesters converge on the locality, local police stockpile paracetamol and rennies, local shopkeepers gleefully anticipate the sales of thousands of wellies to ill-shod protestors if the weather, as is its wont in that neck of the woods,is a touch mardy. Doubtless much Ballykissangel style whimsy will ensue. However,one aspect of the imminent wingding rather jarred with your jaundiced correspondent. The town is marred, as are many in these straitened times by a bunch of empty shops. A bleakly eloquent statement on the current state of the ecoomy, gaps in the high street. Yet, mystifyingly, they're being tarted up by the local council to attempt to give an impression of being in use, so the world's mighty aren't upset by the visible effects of their relentless buggering about with macroeconomics. Which rather begs the question,if these are the guys who have to sort the whole sorr