Coastalblog

I think we've now hit the point where we can safely say that this whole flag business is getting out of hand. Yesterday's brouhaha over the size of Robert Jenrick's flag is merely the latest example of increasingly hysterical cloth-based discourse, it's been rumbling for a while, and I find it all a little baffling. It's caught me  quite off-guard. Growing up in the seventies, eighties and nineties,the flag wasn't something you thought about very much. It was a fact of life,but you didn't wrap yourself in it. Overt patriotism was nothing to be proud of, in fact, it was a touch embarrassing. We used to mock Americans for their loudly proclaimed allegiance to their country, it's just not the sort of thing that's done, dear boy. The only time you saw flags being waved was the last night of the Proms, or news footage of some perfectly pleasant European town being comprehensively smashed up by football hooligans. Even when there was a Britpop led revival,...

 Uh-oh. Solipsism alert. This one, I warn you in advance, is likely to be be a trifle disparate, disassociated and rambling.* I'm putting it down in part to lockdown fatigue; as I wrote  recently , when the end's in sight, the tight grip that you've had on yourself can start to loosen, and it seems reasonable to assume that that's a factor here. Also in the mix is the looming re-opening of the pub, at times like this, there's so much to sort out that it can, at times, seem impossible to know where to start. Lists help. Another reason for my head being in bits, without wishing to get too far into it, is my horror at the events of the last week or so: the disappearance and murder of Sarah Everard casting a harsh glare on the inalienable fact of male violence, the aftermath and the Met's crushing response at the vigil. But they are worthy of blogs in themselves, which I'll probably get round to when I can concentrate on anything for more than minutes at a stret...

 So farewell then, Nigel Farage. With the fishing industry in ruins, the Union at its shakiest in 300 years  and the country an international joke there are no more worlds left to conquer, the golf club bar bore ne plus ultra is, for the eighty-fifth time this century, retiring. No longer for Nige the thrill of talking bollocks to aggrieved old men, instead he'll be concentrating on his side gig, hawking "investment advice" to the sort of people who think that shouting "Gordon Brown sold our gold" is an argument-clincher on Twitter. And, to be completely honest, good luck to him. A spiv who's spent his entire life fleecing the gullible, it's only fitting that that's how he continues. Anyone whose grasp of economics is so shaky that they're prepared to take advice from a man who deliberately tanked an entire economy for the sake of his own enrichment pretty much deserves what's coming to them. His legacy is only really worth covering in passin...

 Without wishing to make myself a hostage to fortune (and, as I write, cases are rising in part of the North West) but it's possible to detect a little optimism in the air.  How much of this is natural sap rising as it always does at this time of year, how much is wishful thinking after the most exhausting year of most of our lives and how much is hard headed, genuine, vaccine-watching practicality it's impossible to say. But I've been wandering around whistling under my brerath a bit this week. Part of it, of course, is the end being in sight of home learning (not home-schooling, that is when you take charge of your child's education entirely. We are merely conduits for the schools). Just one more week to go (three days for me, as Mrs Coastalblog does Monday and Tuesday while I'm off doing things to the pub, and I do Wednesday to Friday while she's off fighting fires at school). There is a lot of garbage discourse surrounding home learning. A lot of shaming, a ...

Oh Christ, we're "saving summer" now are we? Even the most cursory interaction with this morning's media would have left the casual observer with the general impression that summer is in imminent danger of being cancelled, after Grant Shapps suggested yesterday that maybe booking your summer holiday now might be jumping the gun a touch. No-one, sadly, had told Health Minister Matt Hancock, a man memorably described by Charlie Brooker as "your sister's first boyfriend with a car", who, giddy with the success of the vaccine roll-out (and, let's be fair, this part is going well) has rushed off and metaphorically stuck his towel on a Cornish beach,in anticipation of what he is hoping we'll all call "A Great British Summer." We won't,by the by, because it sounds like a 3 for £10 barbecue meat promotion at Tesco. This lack of clarity as to whether or not summer holidays are a thing this year has spooked the media classes, to the extent th...

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the internet will have noticed its tendency to get a bit het up about the slightest of things. The ability to broadcast and respond instantly isn't really conducive to reasoned debate, but it is handy to glean an idea of how people really think and feel. By its very instant nature it can lend itself to moments where someone says what they really think, perhaps being unaware what that reveals about them. Take, for example, climate change. That's pretty much a done deal, right? Nobody reputable's questioning that any more, right? I mean, plenty of people are questioning it, but nobody, you know, bright. Only the terminally dense or those with financial skin in the game are truly, publicly doubting the veracity of the Anthropocene. And so, it follows, that it's a subject which generates a reasonable deal of consensus. Now, the heart-warming, eye-popping, awe-inspiring, this-is-what-you-pay-your-licence-fee-for-and-don't-you-...

 It comes to something when you're being trolled by Barry Manilow.* A question from the BBCs Jon Sopel at yesterday's White House press briefing aroused the derision of the diminutive 70s lounge singer, who was then moved to describe the entire country as "embarrassing". This, bear in mind, from a man who brought the world "Copacabana." And while I yield to no man in my admiration for Manilow's up-tempo Latin stylings, it came as a bit of a shock to realise that he possesses an instinctive analysis of the geopolitical power shift which occurred when Joe Biden moved into the White House, and the bust of Winston Churchill had moved out. Sopel, for the record, asked the question about its removal with his tongue fairly firmly in his cheek, but, as with Liam Byrne's much-lamented note about there being no money left, it's probably a joke that was better left un-made. Because there are a surprisingly large number of people in the upper echelons of Bri...

 I have recently, embraced as all middle aged men should, a refreshing change of career. Alternatively, I have recently, as all middle-aged men invariably do, suddenly regressed to acting like a teen-aged boy. Both of these statements are technically true, and both of these statements have a sizable element of contestable opinion. As such, they're pretty much perfect for summing up the subject of today's blog, which is: newspapers, and what I've learned from helping my boy out with his paper round. It was a perfect lock-down storm which drove me to it. In the teeth of a bitter winter cold, in the dank darkness of a January morning, I stood in my kitchen dubiously eyeing two large piles of newspaper. Eldest son had returned, with a defeated and haunted look in his eyes. One of the other paper-boys hadn't showed up, poor old eldest was lumbered with two rounds for the foreseeable, and the absolute state of the roads and pavements, covered as they were with sheet ice, prec...

 Probably a bit late for one of those Year-in-Review bits that have been clogging everything up over the last couple of weeks, but I move very much to my own rhythms here at at Coastalblog Towers, plus I've been too busy eating cheese the last couple of weeks, and so now, as we emerge blinking into the dazzling frosy light of 2021, I suppose I'd better do something to rectify that. The problem is that there's very little left that's original to say about what was, by any standards, a pretty extraordinary year, and also, if it's relevant to me, I've probably already said it, as the hitherto unimaginable amounts of down-time afforded to me meant I actually did keep up with things, for once. There were no fewer than 41 Coastalblogs in 2020, still a fairly paltry effort, but more than I managed in 2010-2015 combined. Looking back through them, I'm struck by a few things. Unsurprisingly, I've spent quite a lot of the year angry at the Government. I still am. ...

Some crimes are so commonplace that no one considers them to be so. Some crimes are committed by so many people that the line between criminal act and normal behaviour is obscured. In the eighties everyone taped albums for their mates, in the noughties no one thought anything of illegally downloading. Dodging tax is a national sport, paying your builder cash in hand, working for a few notes on the golf club bar to help out. It's all fine, isn't it? It's not like anyone gets hurt, as such. No one's going to get arrested over an eighth of weed, these days even a bit of cocaine can be overlooked. When everyone's doing it, is it even a crime any more? (Before I can be accused of climbing on my moral high horse, I should point out that I have committed all these acts, and far worse, I'm not judging here, more illustrating a point) I point this out because this week, something else commonplace, something nearly everyone does, crossed the line into criminal act. Not as...

 In an unusual experience for me, I turn out to have been  fairly accurate  in my predictions of what was going to happen this December. I sit here tapping away at my keyboard in the fathomless depths of Tier 3, a position to which I have largely reconciled myself (because there's not a lot of point doing anything else). This isn't going to be a post bemoaning the fate of the hospitality industry this December, there's no point to it. The Government made their choice, and they chose retail, and no amount of reasoned argument will change that. So, as my kitchen lies silent, I find myself in the highly unusual position of not having much to do in December. A spot of pottering to keep the place ticking over, but not much else. Bad news for me, even worse news for you, reader, as I have free time to bang out my ill-informed opinions and foist them upon a quite reasonably uncaring public. As already somewhat smugly noted, I got a fair bit about what was likely to happen this m...

 I don't know about you, but I tell myself quite a lot of lies. It's a habit so deeply ingrained in me that I have no idea when it started, but for as long as I can recall I have told myself three absolute whoppers on a more or less daily basis.  1)There's plenty of time for that. 2) It'll probably work out okay because it's me. 3) Yes, yes, I'll definitely get that done today. Probably, unless you're a spectacularly together individual, you tell yourself something similar (or maybe none of you do, and my idea of "spectacularly together" is humanity's benchmark for "normal" but, given the conduct of various people in public life, I deduce that's probably not the case), in many cases it's sensible. If you didn't lie to yourself in this manner then you'd be in a permanent state of panic at not getting things done, and a bottomless well of despair at your own failure to act in a manner befitting a functioning human. I, de...

 I'm sorry. I apologise. I was wrong. Now, that's not so hard to do, is it? Lord knows, as a man quick to anger, and quite frequently spectacularly wrong about things, I've had plenty of cause to utter those words over the course of a lifetime attempting (and quite often failing) to be on the right side of the argument (even as I type that I realise that seeing the world in those terms is, in itself, part of the problem). This is a post which is, in part, about politics, but it's also about football. I'm sure most have you have by now cottoned on to the fact that Priti Patel's mealy-mouthed non-apology for having been found to be in breach of the Ministerial code is the inspiration for this short piece. Despite an unequivocal report that found her to be a bully, and to have treated her staff to all manner of verbal abuse, the woman now immortalised by Boris Johnson's WhatsApp messages as "The Pritster" issued the standard defence of people who are ...

Well, it's finally happening. The argument about Christmas has arrived. Not the confected culture war one about whether or not people get to bellow the word "faggot" in the Pogues' Fairytale of New York, though that one seems to come round earlier every year, doesn't it? No, the slightly more fraught one about whther we get to have a "normal" Christmas, whatever that is. Following Chekhov's dictum  of the gun on the wall in act one being used in act three, this little row's been coming down the pipe for a while; since July, in fact, when part-time Prime Minister impersonator, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson uttered the fateful words that it would "all be over by Christmas", and any keen student of dramatic cliche immediately felt their hearts sink. Clang, went the plot point. The young airman who's going to fly this mission and then go back and marry his girl? Dead. The cop one week from retirement? About to have a really shit da...

He lost! The moment that most sane humans have been fervently praying for for the last four years has finally arrived. After an interminable period of watching numbers fail to move, more "Key Race alerts than I've had hot dinners, and much marvelling at the seemingly iron constitutions of all at CNN, the news was finally confirmed. And lo there was much rejoicing across the land. You'll have your own favourite bit, no doubt, Personally for me it's a toss-up between Nigel Farage losing a ten grand bet and the hilariously shambolic, bathetic ending, where a confused Rudy Giuliani, thinking he'd booked the Four Seasons Hotel for a press conference, stood blinking in the car-park of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, between a crematorium and a shop selling dildoes.  I am not by any stretch much of a US politics nerd. I know that most UK politics fans have a slightly dorky obsession over the US process which probably stems from watching too much West Wing , but it's s...

 The weather, suitably, is dreich. The sky's filled in, the drizzle is unrelenting, all the better, were I a glib columnist dealing in clunking metaphor, to reflect the mood of nation, as we collectively enter Lockdown 2: This Time it's Personal. As with all sequels, this Lockdown comes freighted with prior knowledge of the original. We should, arguably, know what to expect and so, in that sense, it should be easier. With a more clearly defined end point than the original, it should, in theory, be easier to bear. Only four short weeks of seeing whether or not the sourdough bread-baking skills survived the months back in work, and then off we go. Viewed this way, Lockdown 2: Lockdown Harder should be negotiated fairly easily. A pain in the arse, yes, but at least we know what we're dealing with now. That's the Panglossian version of events, of course. A bit of time at home, recharge the batteries, maybe we'll get it right this time, get that pesky R rate down, we can...

In among the various examples of David Cameron being a pillock in her hugely entertaining diaries , which caused a minor furore a few weeks back, the otherwise spectacularly un self-aware Sasha Swire made one hugely telling and perceptive point, described here in Rachel Cooke's excellent Guardian  interview  Following a Downing Street Christmas party in 2011, for instance, she notes that the closeness of Cameron’s circle is “unprecedented… a very particular, narrow tribe of Britain and their hangers-on”. It’s “enough to repulse the ordinary man" This sense of Government by chumocracy was one of the less edifying aspects of the already pretty ropy Cameron years. An idea of a few good pals lording it up at each other's houses and doing a spot of Governing when it suited them haunted the back of a fag packet policies of that intellectually threadbare period (in the book, Dave boasts of "winning a war" in Libya, conflating it with the great day he's just had on t...

As you're doubtless aware, HMG scored a fairly spectacular own-goal this week, with the decision not to extend free school meals (FSM) over the half-term holiday. The idea, advanced to tremendous effect by Marcus Rashford, was to ensure that no children go hungry when they're not in school. No one could argue with that, right? If we can all agree on one thing, it's that we're pretty anti-starving kids, right? And at a cost of a mere 20 million quid, which is chump change to a government which has wasted billions on Track and Trace that doesn't work, and hundreds of millions in contracts to their mates for PPE that doesn't work, it was a pretty cheap bit of good publicity. Well, as it turns out, there's a sizable element of the Tory party (and the wider populace, we'll get to them in a minute) which is pretty pro-starving kids. You may have seen the speech by Brendan Clarke-Smith, the Conservative member for Bassetlaw, in which he spoke about not wanting ...