Coastalblog

Of all the bloody things, is it going to be a sofa that does for Johnson?* As the cash for curtains scandal engulfs the nation, "Carrie Antoinette" trends and John Lewis takes the opportunity to score a few open goals. The man who is currenntly cosplaying as Prime Minister looks, for the first time in a career full of disgraces, to be visibly rattled. His ranty, spittle-flecked performance at PMQs yesterday,where he gamely attempted to  rebut the charges of being a liar by indulging in some high-speed, rapid-fire lying (presumably in an attempt to disorient the oppo, all's fair in love and wiff-waff),managing in one sentence to say that Labour hadn't voted for the deal that everyone clearly remembers them voting for, that the ESL would have succeeded if it wasn't for Brexit and that it's impossible for the EU to distribute vaccines,he resembled nothing so much as an android in the last spasms of its existence, its memory banks melting and jamming unrelated wor...

 Much harrumphing and kerfuffle in the land from Sunday to Tuesday, as the European Super League was announced, deplored and abandoned faster than Boris Johnson impregnating an intern (allegedly). And lo there were many angry Facebook statuses, and verily did twitter work into a froth, and yea did a bunch of rather silly looking Chelsea fans make the front page of the Grauniad. All thoroughly gripping / bemusing / infuriating/ dull, depending on where you stand on football's insistence that it is the single most important thing inn the world ever. I can't take the piss too much, I did my share of deploring and frothing. But I will take the piss a little. What struck me most of all amidst the bile and dottle was that there was very little self-reflection among the decriers. Chief amongst the critics was one Mr G Neville,late of the parish of Manchester United. That's the Manchester Utd that was bought out with its own money in a leveraged deal which has loaded the club with ...

Much hilarity and mirth at Coastalblog towers, as I am directed to one of the most  spectacularly dimwitted  articles about "moving to the country" that I have ever seen. You know the ones, the escape rom the city for a simpler life, all yomps with the chocolate labs and beach bonfires in fetching knitwear. But wait! This one's a witty twist on the genre, you see, because, right, instead of being about how amazing moving to the country is, it's about how horrid it is! How clever! Hunter Wellies and G&Ts all round! Oh dear. There is a distressing tendency among the the sort of people who write lifestyle pieces for newspapers to think only in primary colours. It's a disease that they've caught by associating too closely with their close relatives, columnists who write opinion pieces; much as coronavirus hopped from host creature to human. In these pieces, if a thing is not one thing, it must perforce be the other thing. Therefore, if the countryside is not p...