Coastalblog

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...