Coastalblog

When you're a public figure with literally some readers (hi Dad!) it is incumbent upon you at this time of year to try to put the previous twelve months into some sort of perspective, maybe with a few sage thoughts on how we proceed, and wry reflections on some aspects of the year that lesser titanic intellects may have missed. Well, sod that, it's Christmas Eve and I've got a prep list longer than than the wait for an NHS hip replacement (little bit of politics there). You don't need me to tell you that the year's been a shitshow, the country's a basket case and it's literally not stopped raining since April. So I shan't waste any of your time pointing out the bleeding obvious. All I shall do, because I really do only have two minutes before I have to go and start making gravy, us wish you all as peaceful a holiday season as us possible under your personal circumstances, and that, if you are one of the millions who, for one reason or another, find this ...

Loth though I am to repeat myself (arch look to camera) I'm afraid that I'm going to be partly re-treading old ground this week. I hadn't intended to, but then all the fun and games of yesterday occurred and I thought oh bugger me, they're at it again. Yes, sorry, but I'm irritated with the press again, well the media in general, but mostly the commentariat concerned with the news. You may recall that  last time  I got round to posting a blog, it was to express disquiet at the collective forgetting of what the early days of Covid were like, and how the Government's chaotic response is somehow a surprise to people who presumably were being paid to notice at the time. This week, in the latest instalment of "Britain, WTF?" Pretend Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has Done A Politics, and been, the commentators all agree, Very Clever by engineering the return to frontline politics of one David Cameron, the semi-retired halfwit whose fault *all this* largely is. ...

If you don't have any skin in the game, the Covid enquiries have been riotously entertaining. Well, riotous may be over-egging an already fairly rich pudding, but there has been a degree of grim amusement. Watching all these minor characters from a fairly so-so season of " Britain, fucking hell" indulge in an orgy of incrimination, blame, self-justification and good old-fashioned chucking everybody else under the bus has come with a pleasurable frisson of schadenfreude,and how I enjoy applying those European words to the Big Brane of Brexit, the never knowingly undersworn Dominic Cummings, whose petulant, teenage-levels of resentment have been particularly amusing. The fucking around has occurred, now we get to enjoy the finding out. I fully appreciate, however, that if you're one of the millions who lost a loved one, who missed a funeral, who stayed home and followed the rules, it might be less funny. If you're one of those who suffered as domestic abuse ran riot...

Huh. It turns out that this blog is, as of, well, roughly about now-ish, 20 years old. 20. I've been doing this (very intermittently) for twenty bloody years. And, I cannot help but note, still am, for some reason. I've done posts in the past, when this whole thing was comparatively blemish free and dewy-skinned looking back on its history and how it's changed down the years, there's not really a lot of point in doing that again. It's reflected what concerns me at the time, is, I think, the most charitable way of phrasing it (a  polite way of saying that it's been self-absorbed and solipsistic, but then, it's a blog, this should not come as a shock), it's interesting for me to look back over the lists of posts, but not so much for you, I imagine. Likewise, pondering how I've changed in the intervening years is also fairly pointless. It's painfully obvious that I was a very different person at 25 to 45, my experience of jobs and kids and marriage ...

 At the back end of last week, I heard a sound which told me Autumn had truly arrived. It seemed out of place, as we sweltered in unseasonable warmth, but it is as reliable an indicator if the seasons turning as leaves browning. A slightly comical, slightly mournful honking, early in the morning then again at the turn of the day The pink-footed geese are back. It is one of those sounds which is part of the fabric of this place, the siren being tested at Ashworth Hospital means it's Monday, Bringing practice means it's Tuesday, and the migration of the Pinks to their wintering grounds at Martin Mere means it's time to dig the jumpers out. It is one thing I do think I'd miss if I moved away. The arrival of these faintly ludicrous birds, strung out loosely against the sky in their rough v formations is something which seems to have burrowed its way deep into my consciousness, a sign that yes, things are definitely not all they could be, but some things are still working. T...

It's got nothing to do with your Vorsprung Durch Technik you know (one for the teenagers, there). We've been in here a month now, and it's safe to say my life is considerably different to how it once was. Before moving in, my biggest worry about living above the shop was that it would be impossible to delineate where work ends and home life starts. This has been the case to an extent, but I've been pleased to discover that it cuts both ways. What I had feared was that work would take over my life, that I'd be unable to resist just popping downstairs and clearing "just a couple of prep jobs, I won't be ten minutes". I will admit, this has happened, but the reverse is also true, being able to pop upstairs and say goodnight before the kids go to bed is worth the price of admission alone. Likewise finishing service this evening and being able to pop upstairs and have dinner and a glass of wine with Mrs Coastalblog before going back down to supervise the ki...

It's rare that a shock in the world of Hospitality crosses over to the mainstream news. But with the news emerging yesterday that Le Gavroche is to close, we had one of those moments of a topic which is a something if an obsession in our industry actually becoming public, a very visible symptom of a disease which has been incubating for a fair old while now. Talk amongst chefs has changed in the last few years, as we've navigated the successive shocks of Brexit and Covid, from who's doing what, who's rolling out, who's going for a star and are they worth it to the simpler questions: who's going under? how are you keeping going? When the news about Le Gav broke, my sous and I exchanged a look and asked the same question, if Michel Roux can't make it work, what hope for the rest of us? That wasn't the only closure I heard of yesterday, but it's unlikely you've heard about the other one. About nineish, just as I was ticking off my fish order, a guy ...

I appear to have moved into the pub. Now, I don't wish to give the impression that this has come as a complete surprise to me, we'be been planning to do so since shortly after I bought it, but still, it's sort of snuck up on me and now I'm waking up and thinking what happened? How come I'm here? The reason for this discombobulation is that this move was initially a temporary measure. Mrs Coastalblog had some relatives coming to stay, and it made sense to put them up in our house while we decamped to the flat. It's still a work in progress, but a mad week of cleaning and carting stuff around made it habitable. I had a suspicion that once we were in we'd be back and forth for a few weeks. As with many of my hunches, I was completely and utterly wrong. As it turned out, once we were here, we were here. Things moved at pace and, now our kitchen appliances have been installed, there's no going back, the old house is unusable. It's left me with slightly mi...

It is with no small degree of distress that I'm afraid to say I've been thinking about Robert Jenrick. I know, I know, in this beautiful world with its myriad of wonders, thetre are many other things about which I could think, the play of sunlight upon dappled water, the laughter of my children, the song thrush calling from the sycamore tree a few yards away from where I type this. Yet the shiny, faintly porcine features of the Minister for Immigration keep bubbling up into my consciousness. It's a pain in the arse, I tell you. A few years ago on here I wrote a piece entitled The cruelty is the point in which I argued that some policies are cruelty simply for the sake of it, pour decourager les autres . I was reminded of that recently when I listened to Jenrick defending his unpleasant, petty decision to order murals at a migrant children's centre to be painted over. You've probably heard the story already; deeming pictures of cartoon characters "too welcoming...

For a number of reasons I rarely tend towards the autobiographical here. I'm not really sure why. Looking back to the earliest posts here, I didn't have any qualms about it then. But then, I was much more convinced of my own capacity to be interesting in those days. Of late, this blog has been more about things than me, at least I've tried to make that the case. Writing about oneself seems to me to be a fairly spectacular act of egotism at best, monstrously gauche at worst. It occurs to me, however, that this is somewhat self-defeating since, at a stage of my life when I'm struggling to write about anything at all, this is one of the few things I am qualified to write about. I am now, at least, relatively confident that the world doesn't need me adding my opinions to the torrent that we are subjected to anytime we're unwise enough to stray too close to the internet. So I suppose it makes sense that I step back a bit, look inward a bit, and reflect. Become less b...

 There was a TV series a few years ago where various men of a certain age chuntered into the camera about the vexing iniquities of the modern age. Grumpy Old Men was a very British sort of programme. A celebration of whining where the whingers were in on the joke. Futile raging against minor annoyances is, I would argue, one of the pillars of our National Sensibility, or stereotype, at any rate. The point of me dragging up this quite minor TV show is that, at the time, I chortled along with the joke, while at the same time missing the essential tragedy. While they were nodding and winking along to their own grumpiness, and celebrating their own pettiness, it was nevertheless an incontrovertible fact that these were opinions that they held deeply, that the world was passing them by. I've thought about this a lot recently, as I too descend into middle age (45 now, no getting away with "young" any more), I try to avoid my thinking ossifying, I try to question my own prejudic...

I wonder why I'm still doing this. Here I am, but why? I'm pretty sure a fairly recent (ish, well, recent by my standards) post has posited the same question, but repeating myself is pretty much all I've got at the minute, so that's what'll have to do, here, now, while I wait for a couple of tables to leave. "Might as well" isn't really the most compelling reason to write, is it? I mean, it's not the worst reason, it's not doing any harm, but it's hardly a passionate, driven compulsion. It's not having to write or else your head might burst. Might as well. February the 11th. That's the last time that I posted something here. Seems a long time ago, is a long time ago, really. At least by the standards of the content driven age, where four posts a day is slacking off, I might as well be chalking some mammoths on a cave wall. I'm not built for these times, I don't have time for these times. Seriously, the one thing that always ...

"Left-wing economic establishment" now, is it? Yes, Liz Truss is BACK baby, and absolutely none of it was her fault, as it turns out. The fever dream that was her premiership, with mortgage rates soaring, markets crashing and billions wiped off pension funds was nowt to do with her. Rather, it was that her policies were thwarted by the *checks notes* "Left-wing economic establishment." Leaving aside the obvious jokes about the bonds markets being hotbeds of Marxism, Our Liz's spectacular re-engagement with politics is an absolutely prime example of one of the few things this Government's ever been any good at, to whit, calling people names. If you can remember far enough back, I think it was George Osborne that started it, when he attempted to demonise everyone on benefits as "shirkers". It didn't really stick, largely because it sounded like something out of a minor Dickens novel. Big Tegsy May had more luck with "Citizens of Nowhere...

A brief blog this week, because the temptation to rant is too strong. I'm only posting this because the story it concerns, the  abduction  of children by criminal gangs from hotels run by the Home Office, seems to have bewilderingly little traction in the mainstream press. I'm not qualifying the word children with the term asylum seeker. Because that's the point of this blog. The second you do that, you are othering them, you are trying to lessen the impact of this horror which is taking place on British soil at this present time. When the odious Jonathan Gullis roared idiotically that "they shoudn't have come here", when Nick Robinson on the Today  programme leaned heavily on the racist's bogeyman du jour, Albania, when they paid some scant attention to this story, they were trying to distract from the fundamental point. That children are being abducted by criminal gangs, and Suella Braverman is somehow still in a job, even though this is happening on her...

Blearrgh It is a truth universally acknowledged in hospitality circles that everyone gets ill in January. You've been wound up tight in December, surviving on not enough sleep and probably too much to drink, your immune system isn't in the best of shape, the moment you relax your body goes right, you bastard, now you're for it. So I was expecting it, happens every year. What I hadn't factored into account was that this was the Winter of The Multiple Lurgies, where everyone's immune systems are in ruins from two years of covid and various diseases stalk the land in unhappy conjunction, so when the chef flu got me, I wasn't as ready as I should be. After a busy New Year's Day in the pub (following a frankly unhinged New Year's Eve in the pub) I wasn't well rested, my defences weren't high, but still, I felt okay on the Monday morning. Indeed, we took a little trip to Martin Mere, so I could get the year's birding off to a flier (because that...