Coastalblog

Some crimes are so commonplace that no one considers them to be so. Some crimes are committed by so many people that the line between criminal act and normal behaviour is obscured. In the eighties everyone taped albums for their mates, in the noughties no one thought anything of illegally downloading. Dodging tax is a national sport, paying your builder cash in hand, working for a few notes on the golf club bar to help out. It's all fine, isn't it? It's not like anyone gets hurt, as such. No one's going to get arrested over an eighth of weed, these days even a bit of cocaine can be overlooked. When everyone's doing it, is it even a crime any more? (Before I can be accused of climbing on my moral high horse, I should point out that I have committed all these acts, and far worse, I'm not judging here, more illustrating a point) I point this out because this week, something else commonplace, something nearly everyone does, crossed the line into criminal act. Not as

 In an unusual experience for me, I turn out to have been  fairly accurate  in my predictions of what was going to happen this December. I sit here tapping away at my keyboard in the fathomless depths of Tier 3, a position to which I have largely reconciled myself (because there's not a lot of point doing anything else). This isn't going to be a post bemoaning the fate of the hospitality industry this December, there's no point to it. The Government made their choice, and they chose retail, and no amount of reasoned argument will change that. So, as my kitchen lies silent, I find myself in the highly unusual position of not having much to do in December. A spot of pottering to keep the place ticking over, but not much else. Bad news for me, even worse news for you, reader, as I have free time to bang out my ill-informed opinions and foist them upon a quite reasonably uncaring public. As already somewhat smugly noted, I got a fair bit about what was likely to happen this mon

 I don't know about you, but I tell myself quite a lot of lies. It's a habit so deeply ingrained in me that I have no idea when it started, but for as long as I can recall I have told myself three absolute whoppers on a more or less daily basis.  1)There's plenty of time for that. 2) It'll probably work out okay because it's me. 3) Yes, yes, I'll definitely get that done today. Probably, unless you're a spectacularly together individual, you tell yourself something similar (or maybe none of you do, and my idea of "spectacularly together" is humanity's benchmark for "normal" but, given the conduct of various people in public life, I deduce that's probably not the case), in many cases it's sensible. If you didn't lie to yourself in this manner then you'd be in a permanent state of panic at not getting things done, and a bottomless well of despair at your own failure to act in a manner befitting a functioning human. I, de