Skip to main content

Some nostalgia. Not all good, but mostly.

My wife is away for the weekend.

This could be the prelude to some humorous meanderings about how I, a hapless male, have spent the weekend having rings run round me by my winningly cheeky progeny, what with their rosy cheeks and amazing banter and what have you. Some of that may have occurred. They do seem to be quite bright. But, bar the baby, I haven't seen a huge amount of them, what with children having infinitely more interesting social lives than their parents. But one of the things we did was a pizza and film night. This may not impress you, but I should point out that as a professional chef I am rarely at home of an evening, so the prospect of a night on the sofa with my kids is a rare and relishable treat. So out we went, we bought the stuff to make the dinner and then we went to go and hunt for a DVD to watch. The boys picked a film and I, in a fit of nostalgia, picked up a DVD of The Mighty Boosh

Ah, the pre children days. I remember watching this series on the nascent iPlayer, when it was a tiny window in the corner of your monitor. I wasn't married, there were no children, but the short gap in technology makes it seem surprisingly recent. For all of the advances in technology in the interim I watched this much as I did then, slightly shoddily on a laptop. It hadn't dated as badly as I feared, there were genuine LOLs, but the fit of nostalgia it induced was nothing to do with getting old, and nothing to do with a misplaced love for a time long gone. There were pangs for what I recognised as a mid-noughties ish sense of optimism and absurdity (and drugs, ah well, no more of that til the kids move out) but what nailed me was the episode entitled "Nanageddon".

You see, years ago, when we started Source, there was a group of ladies of a certainish age who adopted us and, in the dark times when no fucker came through the door, they could be relied upon to rock up and neck a few coffees, it wasn't much, but it was better than nothing, a small flicker of hope in the wilderness. They were named Nanageddon by the staff (whether it was me or my second chef is a matter of some debate) after this episode. Then, as time moved on, we got busier, they still came in, but there was a rate of what we shall politely refer to as natural attrition. But, to the bitter end, we weren't busy, but there were still a couple who popped in from time to time, and to my intense delight one of them's booked in for lunch a couple of times in my new gaff. All those ladies. All those years. All that polite acknowledgement in passing. It's not intense. It's not Hollywood. But it's a certain fucking something. And a half joke from an old DVD which came out before my children were born and any of this happened well, that's something too.

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