Coastalblog

Well, I sort of had to, try as one might, it's been impossible to escape the fucker. Turn on the news, Gregg Wallace, look at your phone, Gregg Wallace, strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, Gregg Wallace. I'm pretty sure he just served me this frankly mediocre tea I'm currently drinking, sat in Starbucks (look, it's the only place open that's not booze, alright) while I while away the time that my youngest is at tutoring, thinking about Gregg sodding Wallace. I am, fairly obviously, not going to go into the details of the story. You, presumably, already know all about it, because it's been nigh on impossible to escape it. That is more what concerns me regarding this whole sorry farrago. That a middle aged man has spoken inappropriately throughout his career is, to my mind, not exactly news. I do not wish to downplay the importance of this story, to be clear, I find his actions deplorable, and his defence even more so. But I am somewhat nonplussed a...

Been a bit quiet here of late, I know. There are reasons (not, I hasten to add, particularly bad ones, merely reasons) beyond the usual ennui, and, for once, I've decided to write about them. As for once I genuinely was being kept away by circumstance, as opposed to my own laziness  I'm normally reluctant to reflect too much on my own life and the meaning I derived from it or, God forbid, the lessons I've learned . It's the most tedious sort of solipsism,and, to my mind, requires one to think one is the centre of the known Universe. Which, thankfully, despite my manifold other faults, I don't. It's why I've never got a job as a columnist. But it is probably worth blogging about the reasons I've been quiet on here, and *spit* what I've learned from it, if only as an exercise in driving the truth into my own thick skull. I see that my last post here was the 30th of September, that tracks, because, I had  quite the October and, to my surprise (this is t...

 Look, I never claimed to be cool. As a a cliched middle aged male, I have a number of interests which, if not exactly niche, are perhaps not freighted with glamour. Not exactly ones to set the heart racing. I yearn not for wakeboarding, my cocaine with minor celebrities days are well and truly behind me, you are unlikely to catch me writing graffiti under a motorway bridge. I do cycle, but only as a way of getting from point A to point B, you are unlikely, you will be relieved to hear, to see me purchasing lycra and or/doing triathlons. I like going for a nice walk. I'm fond of a good book. I have a deep attachment to county cricket. Yes, that's right, county, not even the international stuff which briefly captures the nation's fleeting attention once in a blue moon. County cricket. Somerset CCC to be precise, though I'll watch / listen to any of it. The unpopular part of an unpopular sport. Well, that's the public perception, the much maligned two men and a dog. N...

I have bow, I think, entered the arena of Not Understanding The Kids. This is a profound relief. As a father of three, it is my role to be baffled by slang, wrong-footed by culture and perplexed by concerns. I am not supposed to understand what they're on about. It is my job to frown slightly from over the top of a newspaper and be amiably run rings round. But, until fairly recently, I was relatively on top of the whole thing, through no fault of my own. I work in a job where the average worker is quite young, I'm certainly the only one over forty, and there's only one other 30+. This, whilst undoubtedly annoying, has the effect of meaning you do keep relatively up to date, simply by failing to tune out the chatter around you. (You also get to laugh quietly to yourself as each new cohort imagines they're the first ones ever to try to phone in sick with a hangover, or the first ones to ever take drugs). I was also, until quite recently, Very Online. I do not mean Faceboo...

 There is an idea, much beloved if a certain type of politician, that you can get away with any old cobblers if you wrap it in a flag. This week, seeking to jostle his way clear of the roiling mass of mediocrity that is the Conservative Party leadership contest, it is previously fond-of-a-pie, now 24hr-Ozempic-guzzler Honest Bob Jenrick who's been trying his hand at a bit if the old racism. Bob has forn for this, of course  You will recall his performative cruelty when he ordered cartoon murals for children at migrant detention centres painted over. You will furthermore recall his most recent thought being loudly thunk that saying "Gid is Great" should, um, be a criminal offence. In case we hadn't already established this, the man's an arse. He's now making a bid for the sclerotic hearts and gin-soaked minds of what's left of the Conservative Party by claiming that "English identity is being erased", the unspoken subtext, of course, being that En...

For reasons I don't entirely understand myself, I ran ten miles this morning. Well, I say "ran", there were probably a few points were "shuffled" would be more the mot juste, but nevertheless, I put one foot in front of the other for ten sodding miles without stopping and walking. Walking would possibly have been quicker, but that, for reasons that again I don't understand, but obscurely feel to be God's honest truth, wasn't the point  And Lord, isn't my body aware of it now. Most of the left side has checked out for the day, and obscure shooting pains and spasms occur when I least expect them. I am very much favouring my right side as I type this. I should explain somewhat, this wasn't a spur of the moment decision. I didn't just get up and decide to run ten miles. I've always been a runner, of sorts, but realised earlier this year that I was deteriorating quite badly in terms of form, physique and motivation. A mile was a struggle. ...

Not to make this sound like some portentous announcement, like a celebrity couple imagining that the wider world gives a fig for their marital status, but I have consciously uncoupled from Twitter. It's been on the cards for a while. Ever since the world's strangest man, Elon Musk, bought it in what was the  Worst Banking Decision since 2008 , the entire place has been on the slide, his model of buying blue ticks and monetising clicks meaning that the most extreme, the most controversial voices were aggressively promoted, and normal discourse was largely drowned. I'd watched in dismay as my feed grew ever more right wing, obsessed with small boats and trans issues, race and gender, and it seemed that no matter how carefully I blocked and curated, more screeching, permanently enraged right wingers were placed in front of me. As a strategy for driving engagement, it's superficially clever. The instinct is to engage, to argue and refute, even the reasonable people I follow...

I don't know if you've watched The Bear. If you haven't, I can recommend it. The story of a chef used to working at the pinnacle of three-star perfection taking over his dead brother's sandwich shop, it's really compelling TV. Really good dialogue, characters you get emotionally invested in, a shifting timeline, interesting, clearly well thought out set piece episodes. There's clearly a lot of thought and effort gone into it, it's very good. What it isn't, however, is in any way representative of what working in a professional kitchen is actually like. Okay, I can't speak for the three-stars, but I've worked with a few that can, and they, too, smile at the lack of realism. It falls into the same trap that nearly all kitchen-set films and TV programmes do, of imagining that a kitchen is a place of constant stress and yelling, where there are at least three disasters a shift each of which, in real life, would see me stopping service and phoning for...

Christ. I suppose that I should have seen this coming, the warning signs were all there. I've had staff off ill regularly this year, and the frequency was increasing. Even the ones who don't get ill, or, at least, don't tend to phone in sick. Likewise the amount of late cancellations, someone phoning up apologetically to say someone was ill, had risen sharply over the last couple of months. But I am by nature an optimist, and also, as a general rule, rarely ill.  I am also a bloke, and therefore possessed of a pig-headed inability to stare the bleeding obvious in the face. But it got us in the end. It could have been anyone, we'd spent a weekend in Manchester generally living it up, a friend's wedding an excuse for a couple of days bacchanalia, could have been there, could have been the restaurant, might have been the very chatty Irish woman with zero concept of personal space, though on reflection the likeliest culprit is Mrs Coastalblog's journey back (I'd...

It was while sat on bench in Westward Ho! that I had one of those moments where you you question all of your life choices to date. Where ground in which just a few moments ago you stood, sure-footed, has become uncertain, shifting quicksand. I realised that I was bored of fish and chips. Not these particular ones, even if they were by no means the finest exemplar of the genre (I shan't name the chippy in question, but if you do find yourself in EX38, it's the posh one). The fish was decent, the chips sub-par to my way of thinking, bit too small, and definitely too pale, but not offensive as such, and, having just come out from an extensive swim in the sea, I was ravenous, and primed for quite literally all the carbs. Half-way through I realised I was bored out of my skull. Chips, chips and more chips. It became a chore. This was a slightly disturbing realisation for me, in my professional life I've got a pretty decent rep for my fish and chips, to suddenly realise that I...

I am, despite the intemperate nature of a lot of these posts, a fairly live and let live sort of a bloke/chap (haven't quite decided the register of this yet so I'll delete later, or not, it's not like it matters, you get the gist). While I undoubtedly have a spectacular array of personal grievances/hobbyhorses/probably untenable opinions, I am, at least, self-aware enough to realise that most of them don't bear public scrutiny. Also, as a general rule, I don't care. But we're among friends here, right? it's a safe-ish space? Okay because, and I don't want to assault anyone here, I need to talk about Lidl/Aldi Etiquette.  When the German discounters came to our shores twenty odd years ago, they were, at first, ignored. That peculiar English snobbery which is terrified of seeming in any way different to one's peers, coupled with good old fashioned inertia meant that everyone kept stopping at Tesco's and Sainsbury's, despite them being, by any ...

That's all it said, and I spent a while frowning at the screen. What wasn't great? Part and parcel of working in hospitality is you get complaints. It's very much the law of averages, you serve enough people, sooner or later someone's going to be unhappy about something. You can mitigate this as much as possible, be on your game at all times, have robust checking procedures and do your best to rectify errors, this will help, but sooner or later you'll get a complaint  That's just people . Some of these complaints are legitimate, mistakes can be made, you apologise, you offer to compensate in some form, some people are fine, some can never be mollified. Again, that's just people. Most of them are as a result of a perception gap between you and the customer. As a pub, one of our most regular types of complainer is the Person That's Come To The Wrong Pub And Is A Bit Out Of Their Depth And This Is Somehow Your Fault, a prime example of this being a five top...

Oh Rishi. Lad.  You have, by now, almost certainly become aware of the Prime Minister(for the time being)'s latest gaffe, as he returned home early from D-Day commemoration events in France, in order to "concentrate on an interview" which, as it turns out was already pre-recorded. There's been a fair bit of outrage, the word "disrespectful" is being bandied about a lot.  The word I'd use is "stupid". It is often said of the Brits that we have no religion but that the NHS is the closest thing we have to one. This, I think, is incorrect, because the fetishisation of WWII is to my mind, far closer to being our object of national veneration.  I understand why, last time we were relevant, fairly straightforwardly evil oppo, quite nice to be the good guys for a change, I absolutely get why the British public worship at the altar of a conflict which, I note, was a very long time ago. I think it's a bit daft, personally, but I understand it. So you...

A Tuesday night a couple of weeks ago bore witness to one of the stranger games of football I've seen.m (thus was a slightly more contemporary piece when I started writing it, but life gets in the way). It wasn't so much the match itself, a hard-fought but ultimately fairly predictable 2-0 loss for my team, Tottenham Hotspur, to the oil-money fuelled soccertainment edifice that is Manchester City, but the discourse that collected around it. Nothing attracts hyperbole quite like football, a rolling, roiling 24/7/365 soap opera of speculation, outrage , analysis and, if all else fails, pure speculation, so the set-up for this game, where a decent result for Spurs would have handed hated local rivals Arsenal a sizeable advantage in the title race, was catnip for the various pundits, columnists, youtube channels and podcasts that cling like barnacles to the vast hulk of the Premier League. Most of the noise centred around the sizeable contingent of Spurs fans that actively wanted t...

And so to Warrington, possibly with a little less vim than the occasion demands.  Truth to tell, the prospect of a trip to IKEA doesn't make my heart sing with joy. It's not the ships themselves, ruthlessly calculated flowcharts of attainable lifestyle that they are, its more where they're located. Ask me sometime and I will happily bore you to tears with my theories about retail parks being a key symptom of the atomisation of post-industrial society, thickets of giant soulless sheds which can only be driven to, cause and excuse for people to withdraw further from other people as they exist solely as consumers in an increasingly automated retail experience.  But I'll leave going on about that too much right now, as I haven't even had breakfast yet, so portents of the collapse of civilisation are perhaps too much too handle. I've also been up all night dealing with a faulty burglar alarm and am also perhaps a touch hungover, so my view of this experience, jaundic...

It is something of a truism that the behaviour of the general public has worsened since the pandemic. One of those tropes which, when mentioned, is largely uncontroversial. That period we spent confined, the reasoning goes, was enough to strip us of the veneer of manners that prevents a polite society from giving in to its base, primal selfishness, one taste of panic-buying toilet roll was enough to awaken the beast within. People nod sagely, of course, we are only ever a few unsocialised days from complete anarchy at any given moment. People, eh? For the most part, I'm disinclined to agree. I don't think behaviour has become significantly worse since the pandemic. And even if it has, I'm not sure it was lockdown that did it. As a hospitality veteran who has seen, broken up, thrown out and shouted at more than his fair share of malfeasance down the years I tend towards the view that people have always been poorly behaved, at least some people. I don't buy that behaviour...

 I very much only have myself to blame. One of the less heralded aspects of running a business is that one is, regrettably, obliged to maintain a social media presence, it's just expected. And, if I have to do it, I'm going to do it very much in my own voice, as I don't tend to have time to stop and think when I'm bunging something on Insta. It seems to have worked okay so far. But, as a man better versed on the online world than he would prefer, I should have known better than to stick up a picture of our bread rolls, fresh out of the oven. In my defence, I did preface said picture by saying "one of the most tedious debates on the internet is what these are called...". Doubtless you've seen the argument somewhere, it's one of the workaday tropes that shithouse FB pages use to drive engagement. Need a few thousand clicks to raise the profile of your godawful local radio station/page about how everything was better in the past/shelter for confused cats?...

It's been silly season in British politics for a while now, but as this lame, mortally wounded administration stumbles blindly on, praying for miracles, it's only getting weirder.  A particularly baffling symptom which, unless you're as terminally addicted to politics twitter as I am, has probably blissfully passed you by is the campaigning by the Conservative MP for Uxbridge, Steve Tuckwell, he of the mildly successful anti-ULEZ hold in Johnson's old seat which prompted Sunak to go all-in on "driver's rights". Upon what pressing issue has Tuckwell chosen to nail his colours to the mast? Is he back on ULEZ? Trying to wring a bit more political capital from the world's most divorced men taking angle grinders to traffic lights? Is he perhaps pulling the regular Conservative Parliamentary hopeful trick of focusing on the woefulness of local services and blaming the council, while quietly avoiding mentioning that said council has had its budget slashed to ...

There are a few days in the calendar which Hospitality staff would prefer to avoid if at all possible. The days when the people who don't really know how to behave in restaurants come out to play, the overbooked days, the days when people walk in and are frankly astonished,  nay,  outraged that no table is available for them. New Year's Eve? Yes, to an extent, though that's generally mitigated by high prices, the Christmas season in general is a cockpit for terrible behaviour on the part of the general public, so NYE doesn't really stand out so much as you'd think. Valentine's Day is always a shithouse, not only because all of your tables becomes tables of 2, so the amount of people you do is generally quite disappointing, but because it's normally booked by blokes, so doesn't fill up until the last second (yes, yes, a terrible generalisation, I know, also true). But it does have the upside of there generally being a spectacular break-up to gawp at, plus...

 I'm always surprised that people are surprised. Yes, I know, that makes me the idiot. Unless you've been very sensibly ignoring all broadcast and print media over the last week, you'll doubtless be aware that the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain are having a normal one. It all started when Suella Braverman, like a garden gnome made of spite, decided to start opining about how "Islamists" are in "in charge of Britain" (Community notes added context that some readers may find useful: they are not). So far, so unsurprising, Braverman's rhetoric has often tended towards the wilfully oppositional, and she's clearly on manoeuvres to be the leadership candidate of choice when the Tories are immolated at the next election. The intensity of the charge, and the spouting of the conspiracy theory that Sharia law is incoming in the UK (where a grand total of 11% of the population identify as Muslim, reality fans) were slightly eyebrow raising...

I haven't seen Saltburn. And that's okay. I don't say this to seem in any sense superior, contrary to some impressions I may give, I don't set a great deal of store by the cultural cachet of what media people consume. I haven't seen The Traitors either, not because I sneer at that sort of thing, more because I just haven't. Judging from some of the discourse surrounding it, it seems I'm missing out. Ah well. In fact, of all the big things that everyone simply has to see of the last year I managed just the one ( Barbie , since you ask  It was okay). This blog isn't really about not seeing Saltburn, well, it is, in part, but only in that not seeing it is a necessary function of the wider observation, which is that discourse is now so pervasive that one simply doesn't need  to see these big cultural events. I've spent the first few weeks of the year on jury service, not really a barrel of laughs, and I am very much not allowed to talk about it, well...