Coastalblog

A brief blog this week, because the temptation to rant is too strong. I'm only posting this because the story it concerns, the  abduction  of children by criminal gangs from hotels run by the Home Office, seems to have bewilderingly little traction in the mainstream press. I'm not qualifying the word children with the term asylum seeker. Because that's the point of this blog. The second you do that, you are othering them, you are trying to lessen the impact of this horror which is taking place on British soil at this present time. When the odious Jonathan Gullis roared idiotically that "they shoudn't have come here", when Nick Robinson on the Today  programme leaned heavily on the racist's bogeyman du jour, Albania, when they paid some scant attention to this story, they were trying to distract from the fundamental point. That children are being abducted by criminal gangs, and Suella Braverman is somehow still in a job, even though this is happening on her

Blearrgh It is a truth universally acknowledged in hospitality circles that everyone gets ill in January. You've been wound up tight in December, surviving on not enough sleep and probably too much to drink, your immune system isn't in the best of shape, the moment you relax your body goes right, you bastard, now you're for it. So I was expecting it, happens every year. What I hadn't factored into account was that this was the Winter of The Multiple Lurgies, where everyone's immune systems are in ruins from two years of covid and various diseases stalk the land in unhappy conjunction, so when the chef flu got me, I wasn't as ready as I should be. After a busy New Year's Day in the pub (following a frankly unhinged New Year's Eve in the pub) I wasn't well rested, my defences weren't high, but still, I felt okay on the Monday morning. Indeed, we took a little trip to Martin Mere, so I could get the year's birding off to a flier (because that