Coastalblog

I haven't watched Netflix's drama "Adolescence", and in this, it seems, I am somewhat out of step with the Great British Public. I mean, I suppose I probably should, I keep getting told how good it is. The reviews have been universally panegyric, praising the acting, the relevance, the cultural timeliness, the technical brilliance. There have been a few dissenting voices (in particular the author Joanne Harris who notes that it's still all about the boys) but the overall impression I get, having not watched it is that I should. Even some of the criticism I've seen reinforces that, as the only place I've seen a lot of grumbling was a Facebook comments thread where many respondents found it slow or boring, and if the age of social media has taught me anything, it's that Facebook comment threads and I are generally diametrically opposed. Then there is its status as being part of the national conversation. Much like that one where that nice Toby Jones gets...

To Gloucester services, then. A place about which I am ambivalent. If you're unfamiliar with Gloucester, or it's sister services the (to my mind marginally superior) Cumbrian Tebay, it's somewhat different from your standard motorway services. You know the ones, a KFC, a WH Smiths, two of those massage chairs and, mystifyingly, a shop selling phone cases. Where hope goes to die and an acrid coffee will set you back a fiver. Where, if you're lucky, there'll be an M&S so you can at least get something that resembles food, even if you have to remortgage to do so. Gloucester is different to these. A food hall and farm shop in a rather lovely building, all wood, glass, stone and clean lines, it's pleasing to the eye and a significantly more pleasant experience than, say Lymm, at least aesthetically. It's also possibly the most middle-class place on the planet, lots of mums with sunglasses pushed up over their hair (which is inevitably in a ponytail) and dad...

I quite like the Internet, on the whole. Slightly too big a subject to get into within the confines of a blog post perhaps, "the Internet: how about that?" but heigh ho.  On balance, I'm pro. Or at least, not too virulent anti, I am, admittedly, less pro than I was a few years ago, what with the enabling of fascism and the poisoning of millions of minds with lies and bigotry, but I have a suspicion that that would probably have happened one way or another. The Daily Mail predates the World Wide Web after  all. And I wouldn't be able to escape people's terrible ill-informed opinions either, I run a pub, listening to half-baked theorising and spectacularly wrong-headed nonsense is very much part of the deal. No, my beef with the internet in this particular instance is more the legitimisation of said dreadful opinions, and I'm sorry, Amir from Cardiff, but you're the example that I'm picking. A few weeks ago, a football club lost a game of football. This ...

It's all too easy to feel a bit down at the moment. As events across the pond roll the cause of truth, decency and not-all-dying-in-a-catastrophic-climate-event back a few decades, it's all too easy for the shoulders to drop, to think fucking hell, they've won. The grifters and chances, the con artists and thieves, the liars, the haters, the celebrators of all the worst traits in human nature not only won, they did so convincingly. And now all the things they said they'd do, they're doing. It's also hard to have faith in any future shaped by the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, men rich enough to fix all poverty and hunger on Earth, but who instead prefer to get ever richer by making others ever poorer, and morality be damned. Harder still to believe in a world where truth is valued, when it becomes increasingly impossible to believe the evidence of one's own eyes, when tech bros high on money force their shitty AI on you whether you want it or not, but ...

Ironic, I suppose, that I'm attempting brevity in the service of defending floral speech, but needs must. No one wants to hear me wang on, after all. This has been a recurrent theme of my life. I make no great claims for my intellect, and my exam results would bear that out, but I've always had a fondness for words, which comes out when I write, sometimes when I speak, and it's often been regarded with suspicion. I suspect it's one of the things about me that winds a lot of people up. As with so many insecurities and minor worries, it started at school; I remember sitting SATs in yr 7, and being marked down for using the word "ululation" which, according to my teachers, didn't exist, but which anyone with access to a copy of Chambers would know means a hiring or screeching sound. The same thing happened at A-level (!) when a teacher regarded me with deep suspicion over the word "verderer" (basically a medieval park ranger). In my professional lif...