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 the startling evolution of the PM's shiny new Brexit plans (see below). It felt like every time I was ready to hit publish, the landscape had changed fundamentally. So don't bother! I hear you cry, do us all a favour and stop foisting this half-baked mess on us! Give up! And you certainly have a point, but the other thing is, it's all weirdly compelling.
Just who are the people, exactly?
I have found myself wondering, yet again, who the people are this week. They've been evoked a lot again over the last few days, that raddled old workhorse of a phrase "will of the people" (how soon a phrase which, when first uttered, seemed uneasily to evoke soviet-style totalitarianism, has evolved into just a think that C or D list politicians reflexively use as conversational punctuation, like Millenials starting every sentence with "So...") has been bandied about with gay abandon by Brexity types like Andrew Bridgen or Mark Francois, Which leads me to wonder who on Earth the people are, and how these lads know them. Though in the case of Francois, it's probably because he's eaten them. The Beeb have decided to get "The People" to do their job for them, as their news programmes now consist entirely of sending a reporter to a shopping centre in Stoke when most of "The People" are at work, vox-popping half a dozen angry pensioners and then deciding that This Is The News.
The answer, of course, is that "The People" are whoever agrees with your side. Remainers talk about their poll numbers, Brexiteers cling on to the hallowed 17.4 million. Trump points at the "Impeach this" map displaying a swathe of sparsely populated red states, the press use the public interest argument (of which, more below) to justify whatever snotty thinkpiece some ratbag columnist has thunked about the Duchess of Sussex this week. MPs talk about he people they've met "on the doorstep" as if one weren't able to have a bath without some junior trade minister knocking on the door and saying "can you please say you just want to get Brexit done?"
Am I...a royalist now?
Nazi fancy dress? What Nazi fancy dress? Yes, that old trope, my enemy's enemy is my friend, reared treacherously into view this week as people with a hitherto pathological dislike of monarchy found themselves cheering Prince Harry on as he launched a broadside against the tabloid press, who've been conducting a campaign of low-level sniping against his wife ever since they realised that she was a) not St Kate of Middleton (who receives plaudits for wearing the same coat twice) and b) not white. There has been shock and disquiet in some quarters, and any amount of column inches from faux-concerned royal-watchers (a mysterious job which seems to consist largely of interpreting the hat choices of Princess Michael of Kent as commentary on the vexed question of when to get India back) but not at Coastalblog towers, where I'm surprised at his restraint, taking the view that anyone slagging off Mrs Coastalblog in print for years would receive distinctly more than an angry letter, particularly if they'd also killed my mum. The press have responded with the well-worn public interest argument, which doesn't reflect terribly well on the public, because if you're the sort of person that gets their kicks from hating on people for not immediately presenting their baby to you for inspection / dissection / judgement then you....well, you need a better hobby.
Whiff-whaff's coming home
(with thanks, if memory serves, to Robin MacKenzie, I have a feeling it was his joke originally)
Oh Christ, where to start? I've had to junk this piece and re-write it so many times, so I'm just going to try for a general overview, hit publish and then run away before something else happens. As far as I can make out, Overstuffed-sofa-alike, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, spaffed his Brexit plans all over the Tory conference, and they loved it, the slags. Not many others did, though, with the EU, in particular the Irish, pointing out that this now means two borders where there were previously none, Jeremy Corbyn pointing at the erosion of worker's rights and a few people scratching their heads and saying isn't this basically May's deal but you've crossed out the word "Backstop" and replaced it with the words "Magical Science Stuff". Still, who cares about detail when it's time to Get Brexit Done (or, alternatively, quietly file the documents to ask for an extension and hope to god that nobody notices). Still, we're coming out on the 31st, unless there's no deal, in which case we aren't. Or are we? And on we go, for years and years, until the last Remainer and the last Brexiteer are locked together in an arid hellscape, fighting to the death for the last word.
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 the startling evolution of the PM's shiny new Brexit plans (see below). It felt like every time I was ready to hit publish, the landscape had changed fundamentally. So don't bother! I hear you cry, do us all a favour and stop foisting this half-baked mess on us! Give up! And you certainly have a point, but the other thing is, it's all weirdly compelling.
Just who are the people, exactly?
I have found myself wondering, yet again, who the people are this week. They've been evoked a lot again over the last few days, that raddled old workhorse of a phrase "will of the people" (how soon a phrase which, when first uttered, seemed uneasily to evoke soviet-style totalitarianism, has evolved into just a think that C or D list politicians reflexively use as conversational punctuation, like Millenials starting every sentence with "So...") has been bandied about with gay abandon by Brexity types like Andrew Bridgen or Mark Francois, Which leads me to wonder who on Earth the people are, and how these lads know them. Though in the case of Francois, it's probably because he's eaten them. The Beeb have decided to get "The People" to do their job for them, as their news programmes now consist entirely of sending a reporter to a shopping centre in Stoke when most of "The People" are at work, vox-popping half a dozen angry pensioners and then deciding that This Is The News.
The answer, of course, is that "The People" are whoever agrees with your side. Remainers talk about their poll numbers, Brexiteers cling on to the hallowed 17.4 million. Trump points at the "Impeach this" map displaying a swathe of sparsely populated red states, the press use the public interest argument (of which, more below) to justify whatever snotty thinkpiece some ratbag columnist has thunked about the Duchess of Sussex this week. MPs talk about he people they've met "on the doorstep" as if one weren't able to have a bath without some junior trade minister knocking on the door and saying "can you please say you just want to get Brexit done?"
Am I...a royalist now?
Nazi fancy dress? What Nazi fancy dress? Yes, that old trope, my enemy's enemy is my friend, reared treacherously into view this week as people with a hitherto pathological dislike of monarchy found themselves cheering Prince Harry on as he launched a broadside against the tabloid press, who've been conducting a campaign of low-level sniping against his wife ever since they realised that she was a) not St Kate of Middleton (who receives plaudits for wearing the same coat twice) and b) not white. There has been shock and disquiet in some quarters, and any amount of column inches from faux-concerned royal-watchers (a mysterious job which seems to consist largely of interpreting the hat choices of Princess Michael of Kent as commentary on the vexed question of when to get India back) but not at Coastalblog towers, where I'm surprised at his restraint, taking the view that anyone slagging off Mrs Coastalblog in print for years would receive distinctly more than an angry letter, particularly if they'd also killed my mum. The press have responded with the well-worn public interest argument, which doesn't reflect terribly well on the public, because if you're the sort of person that gets their kicks from hating on people for not immediately presenting their baby to you for inspection / dissection / judgement then you....well, you need a better hobby.
Whiff-whaff's coming home
(with thanks, if memory serves, to Robin MacKenzie, I have a feeling it was his joke originally)
Oh Christ, where to start? I've had to junk this piece and re-write it so many times, so I'm just going to try for a general overview, hit publish and then run away before something else happens. As far as I can make out, Overstuffed-sofa-alike, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, spaffed his Brexit plans all over the Tory conference, and they loved it, the slags. Not many others did, though, with the EU, in particular the Irish, pointing out that this now means two borders where there were previously none, Jeremy Corbyn pointing at the erosion of worker's rights and a few people scratching their heads and saying isn't this basically May's deal but you've crossed out the word "Backstop" and replaced it with the words "Magical Science Stuff". Still, who cares about detail when it's time to Get Brexit Done (or, alternatively, quietly file the documents to ask for an extension and hope to god that nobody notices). Still, we're coming out on the 31st, unless there's no deal, in which case we aren't. Or are we? And on we go, for years and years, until the last Remainer and the last Brexiteer are locked together in an arid hellscape, fighting to the death for the last word.
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