Coastalblog

I think I may have blogged about this before, but I can't find it anywhere. I strongly suspect that when I come to look back upon my life, I'll regard my twenties and thirties as wilderness years, of a sort. Not because I wasn't doing anything, far from it, I've been doing a bunch of stuff. Got married, bought a house, had kids, important stuff. But because I've spent that time working in catering, as floor staff for a bit and then a long stint in kitchens. I love what I do, and I'm pretty good at it, but the problem with feeding people for a living is that it's an absolute hoover of time. Sixty, seventy hour weeks are a normal state of affairs. It pretty much takes over your life. And by the time you get home there's no appetite to do anything other than collapse. Normal life largely goes by the wayside, what few speare hours are left are reserved for family (and there's never enough to do them justice). I should point out here that this is not

i don't know, you get yourself all geared up for blogging more regularly, finally start getting some sene fo routine about the thing, even get the paperowrk down to manageable elevels, and then the intenet goes down. And then the internet coes back but you're ill. and that, o my children is why I shall never be a famous writer. Because sometimes it's nicer to go "oh cobblers to this" and get an early night. That said, I have been doing a bit. There're a couple of new posts over at The armchair dissident , but as that's potry related it may not be fare for the standard coastalblog, but as proof that I haven't been entriely lazy, it'll have to do.

What is it with underdogs? Or rather, what have we got against winners? I was reflecting on the yesterday morning whilst listening to Andy Murray succumb to yet another of his regular beatings from Novak Djokovic. I have only a passing interest in tennis, to be honest, but I'll pay attention from time to time. And I've paid enough attention to know that, whilst these two (and the fading Federer) are head and shoulders above the others in the game, the boy Novak has that little bit more head, that little bit more shoulder. So, it was unsurprising that, for all Murray's undoubted excellence and skill he was beaten. And the unsurprising bit was depressing, and I found myself growing irritated with Djokovic, words like "boring" and "robotic" started leaping to mind. Which is, of course, patently nonsense. he's an incredibly highly skilled athlete, a supreme performer in his field. It's not him that's boring, but the ineivitability of the outc