Coastalblog

Sometimes, there is a particular sort of stillness before things start becoming lively. The hackneyed phrase would, I suppose, be "the calm before the storm" but I'm not overly sure that that's the right one. Like most overworked drudges of phrases it has lost something of its original meaning and become universally applicable. In my case, I had such a moment of stillness yesterday, and it's hopefully not a storm that's coming. I should explain. I've spent the last couple of weeks of my personal lockdown pottering about getting ready to open up a pub. This was not something I expected to be doing at the start of lockdown. Another overused phrase, though one of more recent vintage, is "life comes at you fast", grammatical pedantry aside it's a reasonable enough way of describing my recent change of circumstances. I've moved from employee to employer with bewildering speed. Owning a business again wasn't remotely part of my thinking a f...

First up, I'm going to stick my hand up and admit to rank hypocrisy. In my last post, I was somewhat unkind about Ashford, in Kent. A heavily Leave-voting place that is now aghast to find a dirty great lorry park planned for it. Chuckle, chortle, chuckle, you reap what you sow etc. In my defence, I did at the time say it was a touch churlish. I'm now going to argue against precisely that view-point. If you wish to cast this blog aside in disgust, I shall quite understand, but I'd urge you not to do so, I don't want to be responsible for a broken phone. The reason for this is that today Twitter is awash with people giggling at Cornwall asking  for 700 million quid  to replace the EU funding which is disappearing. Ha ha they cry, you won, you voted Leave, ho ho, now you want money. We told you this would happen. And we did, but hang on a second before condemning poor old Kernow. While schadenfreude is undoubtedly a lot of fun, it's not necessarily a good look when you...

I can't keep up with the culture war, it's completely exhausting. There we were arguing about statues, and before you know it we're arguing about defunding the police, and then we're arguing about precisely what Marxism means. Then, last week, we started arguing about  cancel culture , and that argument was still rumbling on as of yesterday so I thought brilliant, a chance to draw breath. Except no. The multi-faceted, multi-generational brouhaha in which our commentariat are lucratively engaged has opened up a new front, and it's not one that I saw coming (no job as a super-forecaster working for Dominic Cummings for me, which is just as well, I'm already doing French and Gaelic on Duolingo, I don't want to have to do Russian as well), though I suppose, in hindsight, I should have done. Wearing masks. I mean, really . As with so much else down the years, the Culture War is a US import. And as we in the UK always do when we anglicise something that we've...

One for the teenagers, that reference. Yes, seems like everybody these days is getting cancelled, which is to say, getting massively piled on on the internet to the extent that it effects their ability to function, and lots of people are angry about it. Though precisely what it is they're angry about is, as yet, ill-defined and hazy. You may have seen that rather self-satisfied and vague letter that a bunch of people sent to Harper's Bazaar (Mic Wright does a rather excellent deconstruction of it  here ). Then things kicked off yet further when it turned out that JK Rowling was a signatory, and a bunch of people are upset with her due to her views on trans rights. Then people got upset with the people who got upset, and lots of people whose very job is to be paid to say things complained that you can't say anything any more, despite them actually saying things. I started to tune out slightly at this point, to be honest. I've long been a big fan of the robust exchange of...

It's been a funny few days for the seasoned Brexit watcher. The whole soap opera had become a bit moribund over the last few months, as the gripping Coronavirus plotline continued to preoccupy the writers. But now that everyone's pretending that everything's fine, even those who are aware that it isn't are finding their levels of background terror subsiding enough to start to worry about other things. Top of the list, of course, is that the deadline for extending talks slipped by just yesterday. True to their word, the Government haven't asked to extend. Not only that, but they've decided that they can probably do without their chief negotiator, shunted back to Whitehall to fill the brogues of the recently defenestrated Sir Mark Sedwill. It's not as if we have to get a deal done before the end of the year or anything. As to the purpose of this half-arsing of the negotiations, that's anybody's guess. The wilder shores of internet opinion are convinced...

It's been a rum old few weeks for what we used to laughingly call the alt-right in this country. First The Beeb's go-to "balance" for rationality, Nigel Farage, quite rightly got the boot from his LBC show, and lo there was much chortling. Then, even more entertainingly, Twitter finally decided it had had enough of the tedious Katie Hopkins, an unpleasant rentagob who'd been monetising her appalling opinions for far too long already. This gradual realisation on the part of broadcast and social media that the opinions held by the likes of Mr Farage and Ms Hopkins is welcome, albeit overdue (It's interesting to note that this period has also seen Twitter flexing its muscles over the American President's somewhat elastic relationship with the truth, even the usually supine Facebook has pulled some ads from The Donald). A mainstream media presence gives the gloss of respectability to even the most objectionable opinions, and Lord knows they've plenty of th...

Aside from a few gentle explanations on facebook about why parping "All Lives Matter!" and then expecting a biscuit is idiotic*, I've largely kept quiet on the BLM issue. This is due to a number of reasons, but chief amongst these was I thought that the last thing the situation needed was the opinions of yet another middle aged white man. I may well be wrong about this, and I've seen plenty of arguments that suggest that if you're not vocally pro, then you're tacitly accepting the status quo. This has some merit, but I still rather felt that getting blogging about it would be jumping on the bandwagon to an extent (I also though that it would make for a fairly short blog. Black Lives Matter. Tearing down statues of racists and slavers is fine. Don't @ me). Official inquiries into racism though? Now that's bang up my alley. Particularly when we've just had two in the last two years. There's little I enjoy more than the sight of a spot of brazen p...

There was a joke doing the rounds during the early part of the Covid crisis. At least, everyone said, we've stopped talking about Brexit. Ha ha. Then, as the crisis rolled on longer than we'd feared, a few thoughtful souls pointed out that this was no time to be negotiating a trade deal. Perhaps, they said, it might be wise to postpone things a few months. Absolutely not, said the Government. This seemed odd. After all, even the more rabid elements of the Brexiteers saw the sense in this. We all had a lot on our plates. Nope, said HMG, we're out by the end of the year, come what may. Now, this may strike you as a little odd. They had, after all, spent years harping on about the importance of a deal. The details of said deal had already brought down one Prime Minister, and forced two elections. Insisting that we're out by the end of December brings the dreadful prospect of no deal a lot closer. Unless, of course, no deal was the goal all along. Cards on the table, I vote...

Well, you can't say I didn't warn you. I threatened vaguely in the last cooking related piece that when I ran out of ideas I'd probably return to this one. Well, here I am again, and whilst it's not that I'm out of ideas as such, it's more that the things worth commenting on at the moment are so rage-inducing that I doubt I'd manage anything coherent. And so I retreat back to the safety of my kitchen, to give you a few more nuggets of how I manage to navigate my professional day. I spoke last time of the building blocks: stock, butter, garlic, fat, onions. So I suppose now it behoves me to add a couple of frills to the structure. Chefs talk a lot about "elevating the dish". A fairly poncy phrase which you would be well within your rights to mock to within an inch of its life. At its worst (anyone on MasterChef: the Professionals) this can come to mean "Taking a perfectly decent dish and fucking about with it to the extent that you can justify...

Watching the ongoing Dominic Cummings car-crash unfold has been an extended exercise in watching norms be subverted in real time. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so worrying. From the initial blush-free rebuttals of "fake news" right up to the flimsy excuses about test drives it has, from start to finish, been one of the least edifying displays of political re-positioning since the Iraq War and the dodgy dossier. Worse, perhaps, in that this is lying without shame, with a smile on its lips, with a nudge and a wink. Denial becomes admission becomes it doesn't matter though in the blink of an eye. Johnson produces glasses at a Press Conference, claiming that sight loss is a COVID-19 symptom. It's theatre, it's easily proven that he's long needed them, it doesn't matter. Cummings demonstrably breaks guidelines, he admits to it, it doesn't matter. It is clear that Government strategy is the age old line-drawn-lets-move-on. And even if Cummings hasn...

Exciting times at Westminster, as the current crop of people who we, for form's sake, must loosely term the cabinet have been wheeled out to spectacularly poor effect to defend the actions of Kooky Misfit Genius Dom Cummings.  A quick recap, fore those who have been doing something constructive with their day. The story broke this morning that the PM's chief adviser and third place winner at Butlin's Minehead Skeletor Lookylikey 1997, Dominic Cummings had, in contravention of all Gov guidelines, done a bunk to his parents on the off-chance he and his wife had coronavirus (they did, as it turns out, but that's not really the point). This, it doesn't need spelling out, was pretty terrible news for HMG. During a time when the PM was saying "If you're thinking of visiting your Mother this Mother's Day - don't" DC was doing precisely that. At a time when people were not even allowed to say goodbye to their dying relatives, the DomMeister was pootlin...

Cor, the media, eh? What a bunch of bastards. You may have seen the posts doing the rounds. Someone's probably shared a status, copied from somewhere else. Someone's commented on re-tweet. You know the ones. The faux reasonable ones telling the media to lay off the government. Saying that we need to pull together at a time like this and criticism isn't helpful. Saying that "they" got it worng about Brexit and "they" are wrong this time. You may have seen stuff that goers a bit further. The stuff that calls the media liars, says they're all the same. You may, Lord help you, even know someone who uses the term "fake news" or, even worse "MSM" with a straight face without asking themselves why they're cribbing the playbook of a creature who suggested just a few weeks ago that the way to combat coronavirus was to drink bleach. To which the only reasonable response is: what on Earth have you been reading? I'm not here t...

(My apologies in advance to the late great Anthony Bourdain, who I have in part ripped off for this blog, the idea of breaking down a pro's mise en place was his, he did it in the excellent "Les Halles Cookbook" which, if you don't have, you should; but it seemed pretty apt for the time, and I can assure you that the words are very much mine) One of the common archetypes of a certain sort of fiction is the person who can't help but bring their work home with them, the workaholic who can't switch off. There's generally a moment of clarity about half way to two thirds through when their child or significant other yells some damning imprecation at them, and they learn the error of their ways. They loosen up, make more time for family, realise that there's more to life than work. Then, because you can't have a life lesson in this sort of fiction and then just get on with things, the person that taught them the life lesson dies in the penultimate chap...

It will come as no surprise to you to learn that I'm generally some way behind the curve when it comes to cultural talking points, so I didn't get round to Sally Rooney's Normal People until long after everyone had stopped raving about it, about two months ago in point of fact. There was also a degree of freight attached in that it was "not the sort of thing I'd usually read" which is, of course, a ridiculous reason not to read a book, but it is fair to say that books that are notionally about relationships aren't generally that high on my to-read list. So I approached it with a degree of trepidation, it's a terrible thing to approach a book with preconceptions, but sometimes it's unavoidable, and such had been the unanimous chorus of approval, the feverish pitch of the praise (apart, of course, from the murky depths of the Goodreads reviews pages, and those are always best avoided) that I didn't think it could possibly live up to the hype. ...

I don't know quite what I expected from this situation, I went into it unsure of how long it would last (in my case, a bloody long time by the sounds of it), how it would affect the people I love, what I'd miss. A few of the absences are fairly obvious, work, trips out, meals out at our local Turkish barbecue place (meals out in general, but particularly those), but one of the things I realise I miss most is book-shops. To paraphrase Borges, I've always thought that Heaven would be a second-hand book-shop. You know the sort, the ones over several floors, full of sudden rooms and surprising geometries, the ones where the stairways switch-back on themselves and there's generally a two-bar heater going regardless of the time of year. The sort of book-shop where, you feel, pretty much anything might be unearthed. The kind of bookshop where the owner doesn't raise an eyebrow when you're in there for half a day, the kind where when you emerge, blinking at the gloo...

In a surprising, but gratifying turn of events, I'm pleased to announce that I am, as of this morning, a qualified heavy goods vehicle driver. My certificate arrived this morning. There are only two problems with this, my new career. The first being that I can't legally drive so much as a moped, let alone an HGV, and nor do I have any intention of doing so (as Coastalblog passim readers will be aware ),the second being that the Matthew Fallaize who is, I imagine, currently wondering where on earth his certificate is lives in Queensland, Australia, Where he has doubtless studied diligently for the qualification of which I am, currently, the possessor. (I should point out that this juncture that I've already let them know their mistake, can't have my Aussie namesake going without now, can I?) This sort of thing happens to me surprisingly regularly. You'd have thought that, being possessed of a relatively unusual surname, cases of mistaken identity are fairly th...

A caveat before I get going on this week's blog: this isn't about politics, it's about language. It goes without saying that I want Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to recover from his current debilitation, any reaction other than "get well soon" is the wrong one, but the way it's being reported, both by the press and by his party, reveals a lot of what's wrong with the language of how we talk about these things, as well as respond to illness. The way we talk about "fight" and how people are "laughing and joking". It's unhelpful at best, and counterproductive at worst. I'll start with a shameful confession, I used to use these terms, too, and it took a while before I worked out what was wrong with them. Ten years ago, I was on the phone to my soon-to-be-dead brother, who was informing me in no uncertain terms of his soon-to-be-deadness, shocked and confused (because, of course, these sorts of thing never happen to your neare...