Coastalblog

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...