Coastalblog

 I'm going to stick my neck out a bit here and venture an opinion which, given that this is the internet, some may consider controversial. The opinion is this, I, personally, don't give two shits about the Pen Farthing story and regard it more as an annoying side-note than anything else. If you're unaware of the latest farrago exercising the finest minds of Twitter, count yourself lucky, stop reading now (it already counts as a view, so it makes no odds to me), and go and have a nice time elsewher;e knock yourself out, go and have a nice cup of tea and a sit down instead. There's an incredibly annoying interview with Sally Rooney in the Guardian, try that, or maybe watch match of the day and howl like a drain at the enduring performance piece of absurdist art that is Arsenal football club. Whatever. If, however, you  are  aware, then indulge me for a moment while I explain that, while the whole thing is undoubtedly absurd, it's probably not worth spending your day s...

 So the shelves are emptying. You'll have seen it at your local supermarket. Gaps, where things used to be. A disruption of the usual service. It's disquieting, as consumers we are, perhaps wrongly, used to abundance, to the availability of all things. This carries echoes of those news reports from the end of the Soviet Union. An intimation that all is not as it normally is. The strange, seemingly arbitrary nature of the disappearances hides, to an extent, their cause. That's weird, this week the mayonnaise is missing, this week the cucumbers. McDonald's has run out of milkshakes. Nando's hasn't got any chicken. Each discrete news story a puzzler. The story, of course, isn't what's  missing, it's that things are. The reasons are various and  manifold, but they essentially boil down to Brexit. Yes, you might have a little bit of a Covidian fig-leaf covering our national embarrassment, but the brutal reality is that the haulage industry, the seamless t...

An unusual occurrence for me today,  I baked an apple pie. Three of them, in fact. And? You might reasonably reply. You are, are you not, a professional chef? Making food is pretty much your thing, no? Perhaps if you had been wrangling stallions at Appleby Horse Fair, or been improbably called up to the England Test team, that would be noteworthy, that , I would pay attention to, but cooking a thing? Pfft. And this would be a reasonable response. But the thing that makes the baking noteworthy was the reason. We do a lot of wakes at the pub, we're the nearest place to the crem and we can hold a lot of people. I'm used to booking them in, and generally try to  do so with as little fuss or questioning as possible, we have a few off the peg options and people generally plump for one of them. The way I see it, this is not a time you want to spend fretting about canapés. So normally it's pick an option and then I'll make sure there's plenty of it, for one of the most cert...

 Oh right, now  we're talking about incels.  The horrors of Plymouth, when some arsehole who's name I'm not going to bother remembering because you shouldn't  decided the right course of action was to kill some innocent people are too fresh and too raw to consider with an objective eye, but the story is one that's as old as time itself, a sickening rehash of a theme that we've heard many, many times before. A fragile male ego snaps, women are blamed. I've had enough of this shit. In the immediate aftermath, it took only the width of a second for various chin-stroking male wankers to start opining about the causes of the incel movement, the poisonous kool-aid which beardy mc fuckface who's name I'm not going to bother remembering had been glugging. Unsurprisingly, they concluded that it was the fault of women. If you're unfamiliar with it, the term stands for "involuntarily celibate": that is to say, no sane woman would go near you with ...

 He's at it again. Yes, Piers Morgan, currently locked in a death battle with Piers Corbyn for the uncoveted title of "UK's most irritating Piers" has been flapping his jowls about the mental fragility or other wise of otherworldly, gravity-defying gymnast, Simone Biles, who, reasonably enough, given one wrong move could break her neck, has decided to sit the bulk of this Olympics out due to her mental state not being of the best. Never having been an elite sportsperson, or been in an Olympic final, I'll confess I feel underqualified to comment on the stress levels that such a situation entails. If only Piers did. He is, however, quieter on the subject of England's all-round behemoth, Ben Stokes, to take an indefinite time out from the game to look after his  mental health, (Unsurprisingly, others who weighed on on the mental health of young female athletes are also being somewhat reticent on the subject of Ben Stokes, probably because there's a very good ...