Coastalblog

The suicide last week of the Television presenter Caroline Flack, is I admit, not the cheeriest of subjects for a blog, but it's one that bears a bit of thinking about. Not so much the poor woman herself, what went on in her private life was her own affair, as far as I'm concerned, and as to her imminent court appearance, I tend towards the view that it's best not to speculate on these things until after the due course of justice has been run. But what's happened has lain bare a few of the less savoury aspects of British public and private life. Now, far be it for me to speak indifferently of the dead, but up until her sad end, your correspondent wouldn't have known Caroline Flack from a bite in the leg, I knew the name, I was dimly aware of the upcoming court case, but that was pretty much it. I have, however, found the fallout from her death to be indicative of a peculiar strain of public discourse which is, to my mind, one of the root causes of misery in societ...

Ah, here we are, cabinet reshuffle day. Kind of like transfer deadline day for nerds. Nope, not going to go into the ins and outs of the World King's swings and roundabouts, though I will note (as I did earlier elsewhere, recycling one's own remarks is, I feel, very much in keeping with the spirit of a thrifty age, and if Ant and Dec can make an entire career out of one joke, I see no reason why I shouldn't recycle a tweet) that Leadsom and McVey getting shown the boot is something that can only add greatly to the gaiety of nations. I thought about it, but I can't be arsed. Since the election, and the subsequent nodding thorough of the withdrawal bill, I've felt a political ennui settle slowly on me, indeed, almost a sort of grim satisfaction. Fine, you've got what you wanted, let's see how you like it. I'll snap out of it at some point, I imagine, but not even the red meat of Sajid Javid resigning can really rouse me to take much interest in the cur...

I have learned a couple of reasonably important lessons from blogging this week. The first, as it occurs to me, is that is comforting to realise that I can learn new lessons, and am not, as yet, entirely set in my ways; I'll explain. I have just, prior to typing this, deleted a post that ran to several thousand words, which I'd been working on for a couple of days, but I just couldn't get it to work. It bore the title above, which was a reference to the fact that I don't drive, and the ire it seems to excite in some people. I made a fairly apposite comparison to Piers Morgan's performative rage about the arrival of the vegan sausage roll, my point being, if you don't like it, don't eat it. Likewise, if you object to my lifestyle choice, that's fine, but keep it to yourself. I expanded on this with a brief discursion into how it appears that intolerance is a growth industry at the moment. I thought I made a few good points, but I just couldn't quite...