Coastalblog

Have you put the bunting up? Have you baked the Brexit Cake? Well, I couldn't just let it slide past without comment, could I? So, the thirty-first of October is here, When we would be out of the EU "do or die", the date when Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson would rather "die in a ditch" (bit obsessed with the old death, that lad. I can relate, as a fellow fat bloke I, too, am preoccupied with thoughts of mortality), and I can't help but note that we're still, um, in the EU. But wait, what was it that everyone's favourite one-time Territorial globe impersonator, Mark Francois said, shortly after brushing fried egg off his tie. I'm pretty sure he said there would be riots, if we weren't out by now. I think.....I think he said the country would....explode? Something like that. Come to think of it, animatronic frog-corpse, Nigel Farage, said something pretty similar. We had to leave by now, or this nation was going to rise up in bloody rev

I imagine that you're pretty bored of blog posts about Brexit. In truth, I am too, a bit. It's sucked the life out of the room for so long now that it's difficult to conceive of a time when it didn't dominate the conversation, it's even more difficult to imagine that there's anything left to write about it. Which is fine, because this post isn't really about Brexit as such, but more about the rise of a peculiar strain of thought that it seems to have engendered and enabled, one, which was until quite recently considered a byword for naivete at best, stupidity at worst. I speak of course, of red lines. They're all over the shop, one can barely move for them. There are so many red lines that the floor of parliament resembles nothing more than one of those multi-sport indoor centres, where the markings aren't just for badminton, netball and five a side, but korfball, handball and possibly the Eton Wall Game. And what no one has yet gathered is tha

I've been watching the reaction to the various Extinction Rebellion protests with a degree of interest over the last week or so. Not the protests themselves as such, though top marks for variety, more the chorus of voices predictably raised against them. When there are events of this sort, it's always instructive to watch the people criticising, and how they go about doing it. There's also a deal of innocent entertainment to be derived from wondering why. I should point out at this point that I'm talking exclusively of people who are paid to have reactions and opinions, I fully understand the disgruntlement of commuters and cabbies, of which, more later. That the climate is changing is now undeniable, it has been for a number of years, it's just taken some people a lot longer to catch on than others; and now that the effects are visible with every record hot summer, every biggest typhoon ever, then the people who are going to be left with this world to live in are

As coastalblog has always been as time poor as it is ego-rich, I've started a bunch of blog posts this week without ever actually having an opportunity to finish any of them, so here they are, hastily lumped together to give me some vague sense of having accomplished something this week. What's the sodding point? Blogging is, as I am painfully aware, a monstrously self-indulgent exercise, but it seems to have been rendered even more pointless over the last couple of years by the astonishing rapidity of the news cycle, from the what's-he-done-now permaspaff of Trump's disorienting outrage-spray, to who's-getting-cancelled-by-an outraged-Twitter-mob-this-minute it's been a time when even the most comitted hack could be forgiven for only filing at around half-four in the morning, the only time of the day when you might get ten minutes without something unprecedented happening. This dizzying whirl has reached yet further levels of oh-sod-this this week, which th