Coastalblog

It's so easy to forget that they exist, poor sods. In amongst all the sturm und drang of this week's "Previously on Brexenders", the midnight meetings behind closed doors, the patently unhinged press conferences, the breathless media coverage, the rancour, the name-calling, golf-club bore Mark "TA" Francois cropping up absolutely sodding everywhere (rumours that it's because his interview fee is only a jumbo bag of pork scratchings, thus making him a reasonable option in these licence-fee straitened times, are a vicious falsehood started by me, just then), the giddy excitement of signing petitions and all the rest, one forgotten band struggles on, ignored and, if remembered at all, only with a mixture of pity and contempt. Yes, Nigel Farage's Brexit march, for it is they, gamely struggling on somewhere in England's racist East, sustained only by the occasional lay-by snack bar. And to treat them with disdain is, I would argue, largely unfair. W

As Brexit day draws nearer with the fetid inevitability of a drunken sales rep making a pass at your wife at a works do that you really didn't want to go to but you'd made excuses for the last five, it is reasonable to say that I've been, at last, gripped by The Fear. Not of the day itself, or it's aftermath; it's been patently obvious to anyone with half a brain that THAT was going to be the biggest clusterfuck since the Somme since the get-go (though argument could be made for mid-nineties Tottenham Hotspur, I still wake up in a cold sweat at the memory of a team containing Dean Austin AND Justin Edinburgh). No, I've long since reconciled myself to having to go to war with neighbouring tribes for the last box of Ventolin inhalers, and have been busy collecting beads which I can trade with gullible natives of richer pastures who I can then infect with my advanced diseases. The Fear that has clasped me so implacably has been more of an existential funk. It'

I knew I'd have to get round to it eventually, and a rainy Tuesday morning with the conservatory roof making even a light shower sound like the end of days seems to be as good a time as any. I'd like to talk about failure. Regular readers will recall that at the start of last year I set myself a variety of challenges to accomplish in 2018: reading fifty books, running 1500 miles and spotting at least 200 separate bird species. You will be unsurprised to hear that I failed signally in each and every one of them. For the record, I managed just over 1000 miles, read 32 books and saw about 102 species. So, by any stretch of the imagination, I fell a long way short. I failed. But then, I always rather suspected I would. the purpose of these arbitrary targets, as I wrote at the time, was more to stimulate myself into getting stuff done; getting out there and interacting with the world with the running and the birds, enriching my inner life and getting back into reading as opposed