Coastalblog

So I managed to take a couple of days off to swing by the south east and give poor old grandparents (who for various reasons have been unable to thus far) a taste of The Boy. Jolly pleasant it was too, he sat and cooed and gurgled obligingly thus cheering grandparents up no end. Familial duties discharged it was warm glows all round. However, with no disrespect intended to the relloes (who it was, as ever, a pleasure to see) it was with no small relief that I headed back north. There's something about the home counties which never fails to get on my nerves. Note, this is not intended as a swipe at the south east in general, I'm reliably informed some parts are quite nice, but never do I ever feel as though I'm intruding on Hallmark card as when ploughing through darkest Bucks. It took me a while to realise why. Normally I'm a sucker for the picture perfect, glorious villages of old england, village greens, bell-towers, all that jazz. Show me a thatched roof and I'll...

I've been thinking a lot about ownership recently. I work in two spheres where originality is a nebulous concept. In writing we talk of all influences having a direct bearing on one's personal style, an unconscious script. If you've read Creeley then some Creeley ineivitably creeps in; if you've read Berrigan then some wanders up without you realising; if you've read Andrew Motion then you'll make fucking sure that none gets anywhere near you whatsoever. In cooking we damn well know about influences having a direct bearing on one's personal style. All those of us cooking at some point owe a debt to Careme, to Elizabeth David, to Escoffier, to Mrs Beeton, to an unnamed army of cooks down the centuries. I've been thinking about this because I think I've found the line. A grauniad review of some overpriced london eaterie made reference to a deep fried jam sandwich, a dish which I fucking well KNOW to be a creation of the talented bunch in the kitchen a...

Here at Coastal Towers it is rapidly approaching what everyones favourite beetroot-fizogged professional Scot Sir Alex Ferguson once memorably described as squeaky bum time (though I suspect he may have nicked the line off everyones favourite wheely-bin Ashley Giles). Yes, the coffers are empty, the credit card's maxed out and it's time to see if the business can actually stand me taking a wage out of it. Probably it can, hopefully. You see, whilst starting your own business is an exceedingly entertaining experience, it does come lightly seasoned with a smidgeon of stress. And whilst you may think you've planned everything to the last possible iota, you've invariably missed a few things, and these few things invariably cost money, which, as we have already established, I don't have any of any more. So whilst the whole thing is going swimmingly now, thanks very much, busier and busier all the time, we're still feeling the effects of the costs of the start-up. So ...

Look, I'm aware that I'm talking to myself here. Two months is an unconscionably long time in Internetland, where the hours waiting for the next reply to your witty comment on someone elses blog attenuate beyond the capability of mere temporal nomenclature to contain them. Here in the actual living, breathing, husbanding, fathering, cooking world, however, it shoots by like a very fast thing. Possibly a cheetah. They're quite rapid, I'm reliably informed. So yes, the blog lay fallow. Purely and simply cos I was too damn busy to do anything with it. Too busy to do a lot of things I'd like to. But heigh ho. Such is the exciting and glamorous world of coastalblog. Why only yesterday I was scrubbing out an extractor fan canopy. Don't you wish you were me? But yet, but yet..I can't let go of dear old coastalblog. I toyed with the idea of making this a one final post and saying cheerio to the zero people still checking in, but couldn't quite bring myself to do...

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is, of course one of those oh, bugger, moments when you can see all manner of shit hitting a cornucopia of fans. All politicking aside, it behooves us to recall that someone has been murdered. Any response other than feeling appalled is inappropriate in the extreme. So a silver medal of twatdom for Miliband's shrugging "well, she knew the risks", but the gold, as ever, to Dubya for jumping merrily onto the freedom bandwagon and wittering on about her "bravely giving her life" possibly in pursuit of some ersatz notion of "freedom" She didn't bravely give her life. She was murdered. Please to remember this simple dictum: killing people is wrong. To cheer us all up, then, a quick visit to longtime perpetual mockarena Have Your Say, and thanks to the marvellous Speak your Branes for flagging it up, a response to teddygate (remember that?) from some random gorm deploring those crazy muslims: "Thank God we live in...

Look, I'm not going into it. The paint, the constant sore throat, the hammers and walls and tiles oh my. But we managed to open. So your humble correspondent has been an upstanding pillar of the community, one of Bonaparte's famed nation of shopkeepers for a whole three weeks though, most of which has been spent in a state of blind panic staring at the door and willing it to open. Things seem to be taking a turn for the cautiously optimistic though, and I have been knocking out some seriously decent grub and yes, it is a relief to be my own boss and yes, it is a relief to get to cook with decent ingredients rather than worry about some distant owners unit cost percentage, indeed it's a relief to never hear the words unit cost percentage. It's nice to work my way slowly though the beer list (should you ever come across anything by the Marble brewery of Manchester, buy it, better yet, come to Ormskirk and buy it from me). It's nice to actually HAVE to taste a variety ...

Post about end of an earhole and leaving my stove will follow shortly. In the meantime, remember how I bang on about the frankly terrifying nature of the BBC's Have your Say feature? These collate it far better than I ever could

Shop-fitting continues apace, and I spend my days coated in a faint sheen of plasterboard. There's been all sorts of posts I wanted to write but, frankly, I barely have the energy to play facebook scrabble. I get home with enough time to shower and then head out for an evening shift in the kitchen. All worth it in the long run then, but you don't want to read a lengthy missive about how knackered and filthy I am, I just thought it's be polite to show my face. And if anyone fancies coming down and helping build some shelves/ do some tiling/ paint a shopfront you're more than welcome.

The ominous disappearance of the shopfitter guy boded correctly. Despite telling us that he's go in the day we signed the lease he NOW says he can't go in for four (count 'em) weeks. Now this is bad news for a variety of reasons. We didn't want to be opening this late in the year as it was, but consoled ourselves that we'd at least have a little bit of bedding in time before Christmas. It's still doable, but only if we ourselves go in and do as much as we can before the professionals move in. Which is what we'll do. So, will Source be open in time for Christmas? Will my wife leave me due to being left with the boy all the time? Will my son recognise me when I get home of a night? Watch this space.

Hoo-fucking-ray. Sixteen months ago a friend and I were playing squash, as the game wore on we were gassing more than playing, and bitching about our jobs. Wouldn't it be nice, we thought, to work for ourselves. So we went and did something about it. Tomorrow we sign the lease and then, fingers crossed, tge shopfitters can get to work and so, hopefully, with good luck and a following wind, our deli/cafe, Source, will be open by mid November. I'm putting all these qualifiers in because it's been a long hard trek so far, and I won't believe it's happening until we actually open for business. First up we had an incompetent estate agent (we first looked at our sire over a year ago), then when we finally secured the premises subject to planning persmission the council's planning department got it all entirely arse about face, setting us back another two months. Now, very close to the finishing line, the man in charge of our shopfit has disappeared ominously (well, he...

After some sad news, some good. Quieter than usual round these parts recently. This is not for lack of things to mention, I fully intended pouring scorn on York council's foie gras ban, telling you breathlessly of my actual encounter with an honest to goodness member of the Ormskirk and West Lancs Model Boating society (The president no less), extolling the soaring success of the mighty Fort, pointing out the amusing irony that the smug fuck who brought that case against An Inconvenient Truth is himself a vested interest, what with his legal costs being backed by a mining company and all. All these things and more. I have, however been a trifle busy. The cause of such industry and monomania, is, as a reasonable proportion of you are doubtless already aware, my boy, Ethan, currently two hours shy of beng a whole three days old. I'm not going to gush. The parents amongst you will know what I'm feeling, the rest of you, presumably,will find out, and the last thing you need is ...

it is with a great degree of sadness that I recently got news of the death of poet, academic and all round good egg Bill Griffiths. A long time hero of mine (a link to his website, now broken, has been in the sidebar since day one) it was reading his vital, playful and above all engaging poems which first nudged me off the somewhat formulaic path I'd been treading into the more fruitful areas I've been exploring ever since. I have a lot to thank him for. Every poem I've written since 2000 owes him, in some part, a debt. I was fortunate enough to meet him, too. One of the rare poets I'd confidently take a non-poet to see read he entertained the Rose theatre richly before, to my delight, terrifying the bejaysus out of my students the next morning at a highly stimulating which I was saddened to note the students in question seemed too hungover / tired / confused by the experiene of a man with love and hate tattooed on his knuckles barking Shelley at them to fully get into....

I was vaguely amused last night by a slew of facebook status updates featuring people moaning about monday being imminent. I couldn't concur, for the last few weeks it's been my only day off. Sometimes not even then (witness intemperate outburst of rage at bank hoidays not so long ago). I'm inclined to like them as a result. Should you work in the catering industry and you're lucky enough to get two days off at the same time they tend to be Sunday/Monday or Wednesday/Thursday (Mon/Tue if your employer is an absolute swine). This is why, as Anthony Bourdain points out, your best bet for going to a restaurant is midweek, the chefs are rested, the horrors of the weekend are at the back of our minds, we're refreshed, we're eager to send you out a nice meal. Saturday, as I may well have noted elsewhere, is amateur night. But this is all grossly off topic, the point of this post is to eulogise Monday, the day of rest, when half the chefs in the country have their feet...

That's BBC Entertainment reporter Mark Savage. Now, this being the intenet and all, you're doubtless well aware of Ms Britney Spears distressing appearance at some telly do or other. (I'll have to pause here in wonderment that I'm actually writing a blog post [in part] about Britney Spears). You've all seen it, it was unedifying, the girl was blitzed out of her skull. Now, whether or not she's brought it on herself I don't care. She's a grown woman, she makes her own decisions. Generally bad ones, it would seem. What I object to is Savage's descrition of her as "out-of-shape." I saw the footage, and thought Ms Spears looked a damn sight healthier (if you can ignore the blank, zombie eyes) than she has for some time. Referring to someone who looks a normal, healthy weight as being "out of shape" is callous, irresponsible and in itself a cause of the celebrity disease of which Ms Spears is so distressingly obvious a symptom. So, I r...

Bill Bailey has this entertaining song written from the perspective of a teenager with excellent parents who "pickme up from school / you attended all my sporting functions", the payoff of course being his rage at the very fact of their good parenting "How can I feel pain / when you're being so supportive?". It is a fact that teenagers are feeble-minded (sorry chaps, but it just goes with the turf, I was too, you won't always be, chin up), and furthermore it is a fact that the feebleminded are only capable of defining themselves in opposition to something. And this was the first thought that popped into my head this morning to discover that Britain gets to carry on using ounces, pints and miles, as well as retaining the right to rise at 5 a.m to genuflect before a photo of the Queen Muvva gawd love 'er . Sure it will be hailed as a victory for (cough) common sense. Sure the Sun and Mail will doubtless splash pictures of punters enjoying a pint, or buying...

I've been lounging it up in a hotel in darkest Bucks, celebrating my grandparents frankly astonishing feat of reaching a fiftieth wedding anniversary. All well and good, nice to see family, even nicer to have a weekend away with Mrs Coastaltown. Less nice to pay southern hotel drinks prices (A tenner for two drinks? Thank christ I'm back in the north) but the hotel was paid for us so win some, lose some. I did, however, get slightly exercised about the breakfast. Now, I am a man who is fond of the british breakfast, one of this sceptered isle's most laudable contributions to world cuisine. Done well, it is a things of joy (remind me to bang on at length about the quality of scran avbailable at Lancaster's estimable Sun Hotel one of these days). On those rare occasions that I have enough time to cook one before dragging my sorry carcass back into work I will endeavour to do so. Sausages, bacon, beans and black pudding are all dear friends of mine, devilled kidneys, roast...

Ormskirk hero and sometime bit part coastalblog subject Jeff, the ever-legendary rollerblading guy comes under fire from the police and council, according to a breathless report in Your super soaraway Ormskirk Champion . Pissibly he and his skates will be parted by Asbo forevermore. Needless to say the consequences of this mean-spirited and bloodless action would be disastrous, both for those inspired by his idiosyncracy and for the sheer entertainment level of yer average ormskirk evening. For the record, your correspondent has never seen Jeff in anything but complete control of his actions, and there seems to me to be something of the twitching net curtain about: Ormskirk resident, D4v1d T4yl0r, 51, who recently had a spine operation, said: “He has knocked me over a few times and then just carried on. He is a nuisance and should be banned from the town.” Exile? Banishment? The language of totalitarianism. I sense a personal grudge, I sense a witchhunt. It's the seed pods all over...

We who work under the pitiless aegis of the harsh mistress of the catering industry are, en masse, particularly unhappy today. You see, bank holiday weekends are a particular rubbing-in of the fact that we are not as you are, gentle readers. Normally, monday is a day off for me, to rest up after the painful rigours of a weekend on the stoves, possibly catch up on a little sleep. It is not a day when I should be dragging my sorry arse into work again, just to cater to you happy, blithe, souls who take these TOTALLY RANDOM BONUS DAYS OFF WHICH WE DON'T GET TO HAVE entirely for granted. And because we don't have these TOTALLY RANDOM BONUS DAYS OFF we've had to turn down the offers of late night pints and mischief which people have been indulging in all weekend, because we know that it's a long week, and we know that being hungover once is fine, twice is cumulative, and far too much like hard work. And we fun-loving (read: dipsomaniac) Brits celebrate bank holiday weekends...

As a society it is my contention that we have to a certain extent become divorced from the concept of protest (The march against the iraq war being a noble exception, for all that it accomplished very little). It's just a little outre, a little too earnest, to feel strongly enough about a subject to get off your arse and do something about it. Unless of course, it's something to do with our fucking cars. Speed cameras, fuel prices, nothing gets the lumpen englishman quite as het up as an impingement on his freedom to do exactly what he likes with his four-wheeled deathbox. It is his "right" to have cheap fuel, his "right" to speed", his "right" to make entirely fucking unnecessary journeys. It is also his "right" to drive a dirty great bypass right through the middle of ancient farmlan just so he has the "right" not to spend another couple of minutes sat at the traffic lights outside Morrisons. I've been thinking a lot ...

The magic of search engines means, of course, that any old conflation of words has a reasonable chance of casting some people into the wilder reaches of the internet, so, continuing an infrequent series (I think I might have done this once before a few years ago, I'm sure that the estimable Forest Pines does it also, so it must be a good idea), recent searches which have brought people to the sunny uplands of Coastalblog: sixth form honeys leave aside the blatant imbecility of anyone who actually uses the word "honey" to denote a member of the distaff side, leave aside the somewhat, so, make that exceedingly creepy nature of the search itself, the most entertaining thing about this is that it was an AOL search. Goon. philippa forrester, 2007, pics words fail me "david lee cameron" Ha! I'm quite pleased that someone thought of this gag, searched for this gag , and got to me. I looked at the post it threw up, and am saddened to note that I don't seem to do...