Coastalblog

Oh I dunno, you turn your back for a few weeks getting your arse handed to you by the lunch-hungry public and the world and his civil partner fall over themselves to ladle blogworthy soup into my news-hungry bowl (that image worked better in my head than on the page, I realise). Should I have posted about Cambo deflecting attention from his mates at HSBC enabling fraud by pointing the finger at fat people? Possibly. A despairing state of the nation address about the England cricket teams almost heroic cock-ups in the World Cup? Perhaps. I should certainly have written something about the Telegraph’s disgraceful attempt to use the suicides of News UK employees to distract from its own appalling kowtowing to aforementioned fraud-enablers HSBC. Yes, should definitely have done that. I could have written about the first signs of spring in the garden, the rhubarb shyly poking its pinks spears up. I could have written about how I’m rereading Gravity’s Rainbow, and loving every syllable.

So this is heading to be the messiest election in history, and, in sympathy, the media coverage has been the messiest in history. Whilst by no means a Labour tribalist, it’s been dismaying to me to see the news outlets falling over each other in their eagerness to give Ed Miliband a kicking. Rofl he can’t eat a bacon sandwich, lol what a weirdo etc. And the more this sort of thing occurs the more it makes me wonder why the coverage has been so shrill, so personal, so unpleasant. They don’t think he’ll actually win ? Do they? Because it certainly seems like it. There’s been very little in the media about dissection of Labour policies, all the talk is of party rifts, of the Greens nicking votes in England, the SNP wiping them out in Scotland and yet, stubbornly, the polling puts Labour slightly, ever so slightly, ahead. So the old ways crank back into action, Osborne chucks pensioners a bribe in the shape of a bond, because he knows they’ll vote, the Tories' donors sigh, reach