Coastalblog

I have a lot of admiration for Diane Abbott. A pioneer for black women in parliament, for her to have risen as far as she has in the face of the twin obstacles of racism and misogyny speaks to a canny and formidable political operator, for her to have held her ground in the warm beer and curly sandwiches Labour party of the 1980's speaks to her tenacity, courage and intelligence. She has been much traduced, unfairly vilified and highlighted by a media which has carried at times an only thinly veiled racist subtext. Which is why it was all the more disappointing to hear her making an absolute arse of herself about everyone's favourite toxic truth-seeker, Julian Assange, on the radio this morning. You see, I get entirely why the Labour line has been to oppose the extradition of Assange to the US, her equivalence to the case of Gary MacKinnon has some merit, his crime there is essentially to have embarrassed the military, something which is generally to be applauded. It would ...

As some of you will doubtless be aware, in my professional life I work as a chef. It's not something I tend to write too much about, as the industry can be arcane and opaque, and as the inner workings of my kitchen are of little interest to anyone other than other chefs, so I have tended, in the past, to keep details of restaurant life away from the blogging beyond the occasional inchoate howl of tiredness and desperation. But, two days out and suitably calmed from Mother's Day, one of the most fraught days in the catering calendar, there is one aspect of the trade which I would like to share with you all, if only as a cautionary tale, and possibly an injunction not to do This Sort of Thing. Because Mother's Day, you see, is Amateur Hour. By which I mean it's one of the three days of the year, the others being New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day, when you can be certain that you're going to be packed full of the dreaded tribe: People With No Idea How To Beh...