Coastalblog

The problem I have with poetry is that there's just too bloody much of it. I am guilty of exacerbating this problem, I know, but to the best of my knowledge, no-one has yet died from an excess of verse, so it's probably pretty low down on my personal charge sheet. What I mean by there being too much is more that there's too much to keep track of. It's the sheer quantity being churned out at the minute which, in this age of print on demand and online publication making it easier than ever before to be published, also makes it easier than ever before to disappear into the white noise of millions of words. The sane response to this dizzying volume is to work out what you like early doors and just read round that area, because Lord knows it's hard enough to keep track just of that. Fairly early on in my writing career (Should probably have put 'career' in inverted commas) I came to realise that I enjoyed the stuff which could loosely be termed linguistically...

So "Tech Giant" (C all news outlets) Google have decided to do the right thing and pay back 130 million quid in backdated tax owing. they have also agreed to pay more in future. They got a bit huffy about the idea they'd been avoiding tax, simply saying that they were following the laws applicable at the time, in order to trouser the cash HMRC and HMG agreed not to laugh their heads off at this and everyone gets to save face all round. The depressing thing is that this is indeed, as a spoksamn for HMRC said "a result". It shouldn't be. That 130 million quid stretches over the last ten years, in 2013 alone Google generated 3.4 BILLION in sales. It's buttons. But it sounds like a nice number and everone can slap thheir backs and hopefully everyone will stop banging on about big companies not paying any sodding tax for a bit. It's a useful fig-leaf, HMG can point and say look! Google! Google csan go look! us! HMRC can go check us out with the fearless...

I was reminded earlier this week of the title of this post, a line issued from the despairing lips of my wife a few years ago. There we were, idly leafing through the local paper when we saw some coverage of Ladies' Day at Aintree races, I recognised a couple of the girls. There was a tipsy quote from one of them: "we just want have fun and find some rich men to buy us champagne!" said (redacted). My wife shook her head sadly and uttered the immortsal phrase "See, you're ust making the rest of us look like dicks". And the reason I was reminded of this was the debate in parliament over whether or not we should allow Donald Trump into the country. Now, you can probably guess I'm not the world's biggest fan of The Donald. But nor am I a fan of taxpayer's money being wasted on a pointless debate the outcome of which will be completely ignored. And I'm even less of a fan that this complete and utter waste of everybody's time was occurring be...

As you may have noticed, this Monday just gone saw the death of David Bowie. I believe it was mentioned in the news. Now, I'm not about to write a "What Bowie meant to me" piece. There have been rather a few too many of those clogging up the place of late, but his death did get me thinking. I was genuinely surprised (though I shouldn't have been, the man had form for keeping things under wraps), and briefly,well, not upset. That's too strong a word. Regretful, maybe. What a shame, I thought, the last couple of records were corkers, he probably had a lot left to give That sort of thing. And, being not entirely unacquainted with death myself I had a brief jolt of sympathy for his family, friends and loved ones. The sort you do when you hear anyone's died. Ah, that's a shame. I was less surprised by the wave of very public grieving that followed, and I'm afraid it mystifies me. I kind of expected it from 6 Music, and it was handy timing that Lauren La...

Ha, well, yes, it's New year's day, clearly. A day so heavily larded with truisms and expectation around fresh starts and resolution that it seems to me to be a cliche to be writing a blog post. "oh, New Year is it? writing a blog post are we? Resolution, is it?" No, a resolution it is most assuredly not. I've never been much of a believer in resolutions, designed as they are to be broadcast and shared with the world, saying loudly this is what I'm going to do, one becomes a hostage to fortune, particularly in these social media-saturated days, I tend towards the bleief tht if you're giong to do something, just go and do it. telling people afterwards is understandable, but telling people before you've actually done it? Only works when you're trying to get sponsorship money. So this isn't a resolution. But it is a blog post. Happy New Year.

I am doing something I have not done for a bit. This is not to imply something racy or transgressive, more a confluence of events that have lead, in their inscrutable way, to me doing this, that is to say, being sat up pottering about with coastalblog, as opposed to being in bed. Normally, yes, I'd be well away by now. This is one of the more surprising turns of life, over the last few years, I have become a morning person. After a good whack of time of being a night person, this came as something of a shock. But hey, business, kids, all of that, I became at first inured to, and then accustomed to, and then addicted to, early starts. Concomitantly, early finishes, obv. The fallout, the, uh, collateral damage, to borrow a phrase from our various glorious leaders' various disastrous misadventures was stuff like this, the late night blogging ramble. But, as it happens, this evening I had a private party in at work after hours. I cooked for them, they left full and happy. I got...

Whilst I would prefer to imagine that I'm the captain of my destiny and all such other affirmatory guff. I'm amused to note that this morning I did something nigh on ten years ago. That is to say, realised I needed an onlione place purely for the writing dtuff so I csan leavE Coastalblog free to roam wheresoe'er my pointless brain will take it. Which is, often, nowehere. Luckily this time I already had one up and running. And so the armschair dissident is, as of this morning, once more a going concern. As, hopefully, is the writing. And who knows? Hopefully, freed from the indecision of wondering what a blog's actually for, I may got back on here a bit more, you never know your luck.

I alluded to this before, so to prove that for one sunlit second I wasn't actually talking out of my arse.. In the sunlit days of the turn of the millennium a young man was mulling over the idea of doing an MA in Creative Writing. That’s the sort of thing people did back then. Everyone told this young man what a talent he was, and how he was going places, he believed them, he had no reason not to. As he mulled, and mulled some more (though fairly certain that it was a done deal, and that said MA was naturally the gateway to bigger and better things, a large advance for a novel before his second year was out seemed probable, might have to wait a few years before he landed one of the bigger prizes) he wandered down a library corridor and, entirely by chance pulled down a book, large letters down the spine named it “OULIPO COMPENDIEUM”. Dear reader, that young man was me. And that tortuous opening, and my usage of the address “Dear reader” may have (correctly) informed the more...

I turned 38 yesterday. In the grand scheme of things this, of course, matters not one jot. It doesn't end in a 5 or a 0, the arbitrary benchmarks we set for ourselves. But the one thing I always find about birthdays (and new year) is they do cause you to have a bit of a think. It's ludicrous I know, there is no pressing reason to be like this any more than on any other given day, but it's as though the brain goes "Right, birthday, stock-take time" and before you know it you're going all ruminative. And one of the things I got ruminative about was the nature of birthday greetings on t'internet. Now it's a grand thing to receive cards, and I got a pretty good haul (some of them very pretty indeed, top work from both parents on card-picking) but, realistically it's far easier to pop something on facebook. I'm not decrying that at all. I wouldn't expect to receive a card from any of the people on there, in fact i think it's one of the nic...

In which your correspondent writes a fully-annotated hard-hitting analysis of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to conference... Well, no, I’m not. I’ve got the kids’ tea to cook and a pile of work-related paperwork to do, so I’ve frankly not the time. What I would say I took from it was rather what I take from Corbyn itself. I’m slightly unconvinced but it makes a refreshing change. It had compassion and emotion, and in that it differed from pretty much all other Leader’s speeches since I started taking an interest *coughcough* years ago. It was refreshing to hear the word “kindness” being used. I struggle to imagine Cambo using it. The delivery was a pleasant change also, halting and unpolished, it convinced. It seemed genuine. One of the biggest mistakes Ed Miliband made was trying to be smooth and polished when it seems likelier that he’s a bit of a berk. Cambo CAN do smooth and polished, but it comes off as oily and smug. So hats off to Jez for apparently shunning any sort of image coachi...

Oh I talk a good game, sure. But as to actually getting anything done? Weeeell, not so much. In my entire time writing I’ve managed a couple of chapbooks of poetry. The odd story or poem here and there and, famously, the drnken zombie haiku incident. It’s a fairly paltry return from eighteen years of thinking yourself a writer. There is, of course, dear old Coastalblog, which pretty much sums the whole thing up. Random, slapdash, and prone to go quiet for months at a time. However one of the interesting side-effects of viewing oneself as a writer, despite never actually getting any writing done, is that you have a whole bunch of half-baked ideas knocking around the place, some of them quite fleshed out, some even half-written, most just a single line like “fat bloke goes running”. And I’ve got a LOT. I mean, I’ve written nigh on constantly for eighteen years, without ever actually finishing a thing. So I’m doing something with them. Not actually finishing them, god no, that would r...

Too complex a subject for a quick blog post, but bear with me. Writing breeds writing, a subject which I’ve discussed in these electronic pages before now. And this knowledge is what lay behind my ultimately doomed attempt to blog more regularly last year (yes, I know, didn’t work out too well). I say doomed, but, brief though it was, it reinforced a personal belief which is: writing begets writing. The process of sitting down to actually put pen to paper kicks things off, it’s important to actually engage with the act, even if what you’re coming out with is utter garbage. You never know what may come from it. One of my mini-essays from last year found new life in a poem by the excellent Andrew Taylor. I’ve parlayed my various abandoned ideas of the past into a new and potentially interesting project. I’ve attempted this year to keep a diary (I say attempted, succeeded, there is an entry of sorts for each day thus far), though, in the interests of full disclosure, I feel it incumben...

As the labour leadership contest winds (thankfully) towards its conclusion, it is reasonably safe to say that you’d have had long odds on a Corbyn win at the start (They were 200-1 to be precise, fact fans). I mention the odds as some bookies have already started paying out. The Cooper and Burnham camps are privately conceding defeat. The Kendall camp freely admits they never had a cat in hell’s chance in the first place, and Jez glides serenely on. All of which begs the question, if this is goignto be such a landslide, if this is overwhelmingly the voice of the labour membership, why is it as disastrous as all the commentariat make out? You have to go a long way to find a pro-Corbyn media voice (with the exception of Owen Jones). Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I don’t count myself a Corbynista. I like quite a lot of what he has to say, but I find a lot infuriatingly vague. That said, I certainly don’t endorse the witch-hunt, even the usually rati...

The problem, for me, with news on the internet is one of mirroring, of repetition. It manifests in a couple of ways. Firstly, there is the serious story which, as a result of its analysis from every conceivable angle from every site one can accidentally click on a link to quickly loses all meaning. The brain stats to fixate onthe reporting of the event, rather than the event in and of itself. For example, the media clusterfuck des nos jours is, natch, the whole Ted Heath imbroglio. Now here’s a perfect media shitstorm, right here, because hey, it’s a bit similar to a whole bunch of other cases of recent memory so yes, we have a toolkit to respond to this, and, woohoo, bonus points, there’s shagging. We can all get behind that (that’s what HE said, fnarr, fnarr), plus it’s all a bit vague so there’s some glorious grey areas in which theories can put down some roots and turn their pretty faces to the nourishing who cares about facts sun. Glorious. The column inches will pour forth. ...

I was sorry to hear of death of Lee Harwood, one of the country’s finest poets. A copy of his collected is never far from my bedside table, and it is a joy to revel in the light, space and air of his poems. Their warmth, their wit, their deceptive simplicity, their intelligence lightly worn. He’s one of the many poets for whom I owe my MA a debt of gratitude, would probably have found him in the end, but it saved a lot of time to be shoved in the right direction. Robert Sheppard’s description of his writing as “at once distanced and intimate” is a better summation than I can manage I often dislike to read tributes to poets by poets. So often an egotistical tone creeps in: “here’s how he influenced me” as if the tributee existed purely to provide grist to the poet’s mill. I’d be lying of I said he didn’t, but it seems unbecoming to bang on about it, so I’ll just let Lee speak for himself. RIP Brooklyn Lee Harwood The city isn’t necessary to our elegance It’s not a matter of ...

I’ve been giving a bit of thought to trolls of late. Luckily for me, I’m not a celebrity. And nor am I prone to sweeping public statements which I can’t actually back up with facts, furthermore I make a point of staying the hell away from comments threads on newspaper stories. I am disinclined to engage with idiots and long ago realised that the net is a prism for all that is grubby and disagreeable in the human psyche, so my limits of internet disagreement are defined by arguing with Australians on cricinfo comments threads, and most of them are fairly reasonable. So when I see vile comments and slurs thrown around on twitter or wherever I shake my head sadly for the vapidity of man and go about my day. I long since ceased wondering why people feel the need. But feel the need they do, and it really is time something was done about it. Because whilst it’s easy for me to say, I’m not a celebrity. More pertinently I’m not female, or homosexual. Unlike, for example, the marvellous Jack...

If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago what the focus of the Westminster media would have been now, I’d have had to run through a lengthy list of possibilities before I wound up at fox-hunting. Likewise, if you’d asked me immediately after the election what one of the incoming majority governments first actions would be, I’d have run through an even longer list before I wound up at fox-hunting. I mean fox-hunting? Really? This is a hot button issue for you? Have you not noticed anything, um, else? Like, oh, I dunno, the potential destruction of the EU? Or the economy running out of steam? Or people getting shot by terrorists? Really? Huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’? Really? It’s almost as if the Tories, shocked at their sudden elevation to single party government have cast about floundering for something to do before gushing, with sudden relief “Foxes! That’ll do! Legalise ripping the blighters up again!” It’s an odd choice of policy to hang your hat on, at best. At worst, it’s a t...

I took a decision on Friday which may well have some profound implications (tonue on half in cheek as I type). I chose to take a step back, draw a deep breath and...not go on facebook. I know, I know, I have effectively cut myself off from the wellspring of the digital age. I have also severed the only half-arsed connection I have with the vast majority of people in my life. It’s not a permanent thing, it’s just that me and facebook, well, we just need some space, okay? Well, to be more precise it’s more that I dimly realised that the time I was supposed to be spending writing was being spent aimlessly clicking through links which started off interesting, but quickly became black holes of nonsense. This is not the fault of my various facebook friends. I’m too old to have random ‘friends’ to whom I have no connection. There are either actual friends, family or connected in some way to one of my interests. As a result when I see news stories or links posted up, there’s often int...

The results are in, and the Nation has voted. And our favourite bird (and now our national one) is, apparently, the Robin. Now, I’ve nothing against Robins. Enterprising, entertaining bird, and I suspect its fearlessness and tolerance of humans close proximity is the clincher in its victory. It’s a bird most people will see, and in this Springwatch era of anthropomorphization it does have personality. It’s an easy bird to construct a narrative around. It’s also a chippy, aggressive and highly territorial bastard, so in that sense it chimes perfectly with the national psyche. Of the shortlist provided I went for Blackbird, in honour of the pair who are resident in my garden. Plus gratitude for their song. The temptation of course is to go for something majestic and rare, golden eagle or osprey (neither of which made the shortlist). Somewhat surprisingly Hen Harrier and Red Kite did quite well. But the robin is probably a more apt choice. There’s something too cool about apex predators...

Enough with the moping. I’ve not blogged post election, which is just as well, really. It was all getting a bit much, and once the Great British Public (TM) turned in their frankly mystifying result I felt, after the shock had subsided, and the futile rage had washed from my system, an odd sense of relief. The other shoe had dropped. The worst had happened, and now I might as well just get on with it. Which is what I’ve been doing. I’ve just not been telling the internet about it, but the last month has seen a variety of grips being got on various aspects of my existence which are all far too mundane to go into here. Suffice it to say that when the fundamentals are going well everything else clicks into place (hence finding the time for this post, which, now I read it back, seems infuriatingly cryptic, but frankly, you’re just going to have to get over it). So chin up, so there’s five more years of the rapacious money-grubbing bastards to cope with, that’s no reason to go and hide ...