Skip to main content

The importance of keeping your gob shut on the internet

Ah teh internets. Home of more pictures of fluffy kittens than one could shake an email inviting me to "make your manhood amaze" at. Repository of news, opinion and information. And also a home for self indulgent whiners to bang on about how nobody understands them omg, or possibly share a few details which they may, in time, come to regret.

I've always held an uneasy line on this. Mrs Coastalblog is avowedly anti dispersal of personal information online, so naturally I respect her wishes and refer to her only occasionally, and in the vaguest of terms. Looking back through the archives I note that as time has worn on and your humble correspondent has had a few more of the corners knocked off him coastalblog also has veered more towards the impersonal, ad hominen attacks on ashley cole and a general background level of snark notwithstanding. This in part is due to the fact that back in the good old days(holy shit, 2003!) this organ was read by only a few close friends, whereas as now it's consumed by literally five or six other people, and also due to a growing unease at the growing acceptability of leading your entire life in public. Twitter was the final straw for me, 'm aware that, same as the rest of the internet it's a tool, use responibly etc, but the simple fact of the matter is that people's exhibitionist tendencies are only encouraged by the thought that others may be reading them, and as a terribly, terribly english person I find the whole concept just too awful for words. So yes, things occur, but I don't think here's a suitable place to bring them up.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To all intents and purposes, a bloody great weed.

I absolutely love trees, and I get quite irate when they get cut down. One of the aspects of life with which I most often find myself most at odds with my fellow man is that I'm not really a fan of the tidy garden. I like to see a bit of biodiversity knocking about the gaff, and to that end I welcome the somewhat overgrown hedge, am pro the bit of lawn left to run riot, and, most of all, very anti cutting down trees. I love the things, habitat, provider of shade, easy on the eye, home to the songbirds that delight the ear at dawn, the best alarm clock of all. To me, cutting a naturally growing tree down is an act of errant vandalism, as well as monumental entitlement, it's been around longer than you. So, this being the case, let me say this. The public outcry over the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap is sentimental, overblown nonsense, and the fact that the two men found guilty of it have been given a custodial sentence is completely insane. Prison? For cutting down a Sycam...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oh! Are you on the jabs?

I have never been a slender man. No one has ever looked at me and thought "oh, he needs feeding up". It's a good job for me that I was already in a relationship by the early noughties as I was never going to carry off the wasted rock star in skinny jeans look. No one has ever mistaken me for Noel Fielding. This is not to say that I'm entirely a corpulent mess. I have, at various times in my life, been in pretty good shape, but it takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of vigilance, particularly in my line of work, where temptation is never far away. Also, I reason, I have only one life to live, so have the cheese, ffs. I have often wondered what it would be like to be effortlessly in good nick, to not have to stop and think how much I really want that pie (quite a lot, obviously, pie is great), but I've long since come to terms with the fact that my default form is "lived-in". I do try to keep things under control, but I also put weight on at the mere menti...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inedible

"He says it's inedible" said my front of house manager, as she laid the half-eaten fish and chips in front of me, and instantly I relaxed.  Clearly, I observed, it was edible to some degree. I comped it, because I can't be arsed arguing the toss, and I want to make my front of house's lives as simple as possible. The haddock had been delivered that morning. The fryers had been cleaned that morning. The batter had been made that morning (and it's very good batter, ask me nicely and I'll give you the recipe some time). The fish and chips was identical to the other 27 portions I'd sent out on that lunch service, all of which had come back more or less hoovered up, we have have a (justified, if I do say so myself) very good reputation for our chips. But it was, apparently, "inedible". When it comes to complaints, less is more. If you use a hyperbolic word like that, I'll switch off, you've marked yourself as a rube, a chump, I'm not g...
Post a Comment
Read more