Skip to main content

Getting back to business

First day back in the kitchen today. First day back of trying to cook ten things at once rather than just the one. First day of remembering that yes, when you're doing it for money you have to chop fast. First burn from hot saute pan. I enjoyed it all. Particularly inscribing "Matt is Ace" in the top of the apple crumble I made, hungover, first thing this morning before hurling it into the bowels of the oven. Cute newish waitress B3cky is unable to meet my eye after our contretemps at the start of yesterday's lunch shift when I'd been attempting to observe the three minute's silence for the tsunami victims (why, I don't rightly know, it salves my scarred conscience for some reason. And yes, I did donate some money, so now I can join in the national orgy of self-congratulation at us "big-hearted Brits" a clusterfuck of national compassion of a nauseating cast. By all means give some money, but there's no need to join the fucking Rotarians, and put down that loudhailer for the love of God). She had been unable to understand my silence, despite all my doubtless utterly lucid eye-rolling and pointing at the clock and kept talking, talking, talking, about her boyfriend, her other job, how drunk she'd got the night before. With only a few seconds of the silence to go I lost my temper and snapped at her to shut up as it was supposed to be silent period of fucking reflection and I really didn't give a rooster's scrotum as to how drunk her Dad has to get before he hits her mum, and if she was that worried about losing her boyfriend why didn't she simply cheat on him first in a pre-emptive strike?

We've not really been on speaking terms since, which is a blessed relief.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A whole new world.

I appear to have moved into the pub. Now, I don't wish to give the impression that this has come as a complete surprise to me, we'be been planning to do so since shortly after I bought it, but still, it's sort of snuck up on me and now I'm waking up and thinking what happened? How come I'm here? The reason for this discombobulation is that this move was initially a temporary measure. Mrs Coastalblog had some relatives coming to stay, and it made sense to put them up in our house while we decamped to the flat. It's still a work in progress, but a mad week of cleaning and carting stuff around made it habitable. I had a suspicion that once we were in we'd be back and forth for a few weeks. As with many of my hunches, I was completely and utterly wrong. As it turned out, once we were here, we were here. Things moved at pace and, now our kitchen appliances have been installed, there's no going back, the old house is unusable. It's left me with slightly mi

Mad Dogs and Immigration Ministers

It is with no small degree of distress that I'm afraid to say I've been thinking about Robert Jenrick. I know, I know, in this beautiful world with its myriad of wonders, thetre are many other things about which I could think, the play of sunlight upon dappled water, the laughter of my children, the song thrush calling from the sycamore tree a few yards away from where I type this. Yet the shiny, faintly porcine features of the Minister for Immigration keep bubbling up into my consciousness. It's a pain in the arse, I tell you. A few years ago on here I wrote a piece entitled The cruelty is the point in which I argued that some policies are cruelty simply for the sake of it, pour decourager les autres . I was reminded of that recently when I listened to Jenrick defending his unpleasant, petty decision to order murals at a migrant children's centre to be painted over. You've probably heard the story already; deeming pictures of cartoon characters "too welcoming&

20

Huh. It turns out that this blog is, as of, well, roughly about now-ish, 20 years old. 20. I've been doing this (very intermittently) for twenty bloody years. And, I cannot help but note, still am, for some reason. I've done posts in the past, when this whole thing was comparatively blemish free and dewy-skinned looking back on its history and how it's changed down the years, there's not really a lot of point in doing that again. It's reflected what concerns me at the time, is, I think, the most charitable way of phrasing it (a  polite way of saying that it's been self-absorbed and solipsistic, but then, it's a blog, this should not come as a shock), it's interesting for me to look back over the lists of posts, but not so much for you, I imagine. Likewise, pondering how I've changed in the intervening years is also fairly pointless. It's painfully obvious that I was a very different person at 25 to 45, my experience of jobs and kids and marriage