Coastalblog

I have bow, I think, entered the arena of Not Understanding The Kids. This is a profound relief. As a father of three, it is my role to be baffled by slang, wrong-footed by culture and perplexed by concerns. I am not supposed to understand what they're on about. It is my job to frown slightly from over the top of a newspaper and be amiably run rings round. But, until fairly recently, I was relatively on top of the whole thing, through no fault of my own. I work in a job where the average worker is quite young, I'm certainly the only one over forty, and there's only one other 30+. This, whilst undoubtedly annoying, has the effect of meaning you do keep relatively up to date, simply by failing to tune out the chatter around you. (You also get to laugh quietly to yourself as each new cohort imagines they're the first ones ever to try to phone in sick with a hangover, or the first ones to ever take drugs). I was also, until quite recently, Very Online. I do not mean Faceboo

 There is an idea, much beloved if a certain type of politician, that you can get away with any old cobblers if you wrap it in a flag. This week, seeking to jostle his way clear of the roiling mass of mediocrity that is the Conservative Party leadership contest, it is previously fond-of-a-pie, now 24hr-Ozempic-guzzler Honest Bob Jenrick who's been trying his hand at a bit if the old racism. Bob has forn for this, of course  You will recall his performative cruelty when he ordered cartoon murals for children at migrant detention centres painted over. You will furthermore recall his most recent thought being loudly thunk that saying "Gid is Great" should, um, be a criminal offence. In case we hadn't already established this, the man's an arse. He's now making a bid for the sclerotic hearts and gin-soaked minds of what's left of the Conservative Party by claiming that "English identity is being erased", the unspoken subtext, of course, being that En

For reasons I don't entirely understand myself, I ran ten miles this morning. Well, I say "ran", there were probably a few points were "shuffled" would be more the mot juste, but nevertheless, I put one foot in front of the other for ten sodding miles without stopping and walking. Walking would possibly have been quicker, but that, for reasons that again I don't understand, but obscurely feel to be God's honest truth, wasn't the point  And Lord, isn't my body aware of it now. Most of the left side has checked out for the day, and obscure shooting pains and spasms occur when I least expect them. I am very much favouring my right side as I type this. I should explain somewhat, this wasn't a spur of the moment decision. I didn't just get up and decide to run ten miles. I've always been a runner, of sorts, but realised earlier this year that I was deteriorating quite badly in terms of form, physique and motivation. A mile was a struggle.

Not to make this sound like some portentous announcement, like a celebrity couple imagining that the wider world gives a fig for their marital status, but I have consciously uncoupled from Twitter. It's been on the cards for a while. Ever since the world's strangest man, Elon Musk, bought it in what was the  Worst Banking Decision since 2008 , the entire place has been on the slide, his model of buying blue ticks and monetising clicks meaning that the most extreme, the most controversial voices were aggressively promoted, and normal discourse was largely drowned. I'd watched in dismay as my feed grew ever more right wing, obsessed with small boats and trans issues, race and gender, and it seemed that no matter how carefully I blocked and curated, more screeching, permanently enraged right wingers were placed in front of me. As a strategy for driving engagement, it's superficially clever. The instinct is to engage, to argue and refute, even the reasonable people I follow

I don't know if you've watched The Bear. If you haven't, I can recommend it. The story of a chef used to working at the pinnacle of three-star perfection taking over his dead brother's sandwich shop, it's really compelling TV. Really good dialogue, characters you get emotionally invested in, a shifting timeline, interesting, clearly well thought out set piece episodes. There's clearly a lot of thought and effort gone into it, it's very good. What it isn't, however, is in any way representative of what working in a professional kitchen is actually like. Okay, I can't speak for the three-stars, but I've worked with a few that can, and they, too, smile at the lack of realism. It falls into the same trap that nearly all kitchen-set films and TV programmes do, of imagining that a kitchen is a place of constant stress and yelling, where there are at least three disasters a shift each of which, in real life, would see me stopping service and phoning for

Christ. I suppose that I should have seen this coming, the warning signs were all there. I've had staff off ill regularly this year, and the frequency was increasing. Even the ones who don't get ill, or, at least, don't tend to phone in sick. Likewise the amount of late cancellations, someone phoning up apologetically to say someone was ill, had risen sharply over the last couple of months. But I am by nature an optimist, and also, as a general rule, rarely ill.  I am also a bloke, and therefore possessed of a pig-headed inability to stare the bleeding obvious in the face. But it got us in the end. It could have been anyone, we'd spent a weekend in Manchester generally living it up, a friend's wedding an excuse for a couple of days bacchanalia, could have been there, could have been the restaurant, might have been the very chatty Irish woman with zero concept of personal space, though on reflection the likeliest culprit is Mrs Coastalblog's journey back (I'd