Coastalblog

I note, somewhat wearily, that creepy old men are back in the news, being creepy. Creepy old men, and their apologists and enablers, who argue that their creepiness is somehow the natural order of things. Old men would have you believe that it is difficult to not be a creepy old man. That it is a task of epic proportions. It is not that difficult. It is a matter of intention. As yet more of the grimness of Epstein unfolds, creepy old men are, sadly, a flaccid topic once again. Whether it be pursuing students thirty years their junior, or simply not asking too many questions about the background of the probably legal young woman who you've just been introduced to by your good pal Jeff. To be clear, I am not referring to criminal creepy old men, the ones who actually committed statutory rape, the ones who fucked trafficked hirls. That is not something which is allowed to get away merely with the contempt of the observer.  That deserves prison.  No , I'm referring to the hinterla...

I was completely ignorant of the fuss over the edited Trump speech in an edition of Panorama until, one moment later, I wasn't. And the reasons for my ignorance are instructive. I had no idea that the story was even brewing until the surprise Sunday night news of the resignations of Tom Davie and Deborah Turness. As I'm sure you are by now aware, this was occasioned by a clumsy edit in an old edition of Panorama, which has already been on the iplayer for a year. It's a non-story. Except people decided to make it a story. The reason I'd heard nothing of it until the resignations was that I'm not on X, where, apparently, it was all the media classes had been talking about for a week. It was an obsession of the unholy right-wing trifecta of the Mail, Telegraph and Times (who, given that they sent a bloke just last week to interview the wrong Bill di Blasio, you'd think would wind their necks in over factual inacccuracy). It was big news on GB news, all self-contain...

Ah, we're back to calling humanities degrees rip-offs, are we? What a semi regular treat that is. There is a persistent strain of thought in British public life which runs thus: things are shit, blame clever people. When a politician needs a convenient punchbag, higher education is always a quick and easy mark. Everyone hates students, right? And those lecturers, bit up themselves, aren't they? And so Kemi Badenoch, bereft of ideas, takes up the cudgels once more, because why not? It's not like she's got anything else sensible to say. Might as well try and score a few populist points. Cuh, English degrees eh? What use are they?  Yes, this week, the erstwhile leader of His Majesty's Opposition decided to wander down a tired and well-trodden path and try to score a few points off the back of the much maligned Arts and Humanities. She's not the first, I highly doubt she'll be the last. She set out plans to a somewhat sparsely attended Conservative Party Confere...

An unpleasant, but in the grand scheme of things quite minor, incident occurred at a local school yesterday. Two lads entered the premises looking for another kid they wanted to assault. The school followed protocols and was locked down until the situation was resolved. Grim enough in and of itself, but not exactly a massive piece of news. Except, of course, on local Facebook pages, where a cast of many hang around visibly thirsting for events like this. This isn't a post about them, however. There is something desperately sad about a million posts on the same subject, everyone breathlessly recycling the same story without checking whether it might have already been covered. It speaks to an unfulfilled existence. Nor is this a post about Facebook and it's local pages, though they are a weird and interesting ecosystem. Were it not for running the pub, my Meta presence would be minimal, I need to be on there for work, and stuff like this is a necessary accoutrement. No, what depr...

I am, occasionally, asked what sort of food I cook.  I'll normally answer vaguely with "Modern English" as though that were a phrase that actually means anything. It's a kiss-off answer, like answering "Goodfellas" when someone asks you what your favourite film is, as if anyone can narrow their preferred films down to one. "Oh, Modern English" I'll say, waving my arms around for emphasis, though what I'm emphasising is not explained. Normally by the time my interlocutor has worked this one out I've gone and hidden in the walk-in. It's a bit of a vexed question, what do I cook? Allsorts, really, I've never really drilled down to define it. The truth is that, in my patchwork, self-taught career I've jumbled together a bunch of influences into a style which resembles, from a distance, something that's my own. I've never approached cheffing from a chef's perspective, I've generally looked at my job as being one o...

It is the end of a particularly punishing Saturday service, and my body is reminding me, once again, that I am pretty old for a line cook. Okay, that's a slight bit of faux modesty, done for the effect of the sentence. I'm a head chef, not a commis or a prep drone, but I do still work the line. I don't have to, I have other chefs, all of whom are perfectly competent (the maladroit get found out pretty quickly in our line of work, and so do the wankers, it's one of the reasons I enjoy it, there's no test of character quite like a busy Saturday service, and no test of consistency under pressure like Christmas) but for some reason that I have yet to fully fathom, I'm still there. I haven't even moved to expo, the traditional head's spot, standing at the pass plating and telling everyone what to do, I still work saute and grill, the grunt work, the actual hands-on stuff. I make sauces in the pan a la minute, fillet and portion to order, I don't prep garn...

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...

A bit of a spectacular soft-shoe shuffle from the collected UK media this week as HMG backed down in the face of wide back-bench unrest from planned cuts in the Welfare Bill. It has long been an article of faith in these quarters that language is important, and it has been both interesting  and instructive to see the language used around Keir Starmer's maneuvering in the face of concerted opposition from a wide swathe of the PLP. What has also been somewhat telling is how the story has been framed, and how the framing has changed, but I'll come onto that in a moment The language around the change has been hyperbolic. He has "caved in" it's a "humiliating climbdown", he's "lost all credibility". The story is of a weak and craven man, humbled by a wee bit of opposition, feeble, falling at the first fence. All talk is of "U-turns", as if there coukd be nothing worse.  Let's reframe the story another way: "after listening to ...

"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...

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...

It's possible that I'm losing my mind, it's possible that my memories are not my own, it's possible that everything I regard as my personal history is malleable, not to be trusted, but I'm fairly sure my school didn't mark VE day when I was a kid. I don't think yours did, either. I mention this because Youngest Child's school is doing a VE Day picnic. Next week, I might add, so the date's completely wrong, but let's not let that detain us. A VE day picnic? No big deal, I know, just a picnic. I'm not debating the rights and wrongs of it, more taken aback slightly. Why? When did this start happening? Or am I misremembering things entirely? I appreciate that WWII is the building block of our foundation myth as a post-Imperial country, what with it being unequivocally goodies and baddies, and we get to wear the white hats, but throughout my childhood I feel this was just something that was taken as read. One never felt the need to bang on about i...

 To my mild surprise, I now find myself living under a Reform County Council. Mild surprise only, as only the most deluded tribalsts approached this week's local elections imagining that it would be anything other than a bloodbath for the two main parties, safe to say, though, I didn't see them taking Lancashire. It's too grand to say historically, as the history's pretty recent, but the pattern over the last few years has tended to eastern counties being the most susceptible to the anti-immigrant rancor of the various incarnations of Faragism, be it UKIP, the Brexit party or this current iteration. Lincolnshire and Kent? Yes, I could see that, Lincolnshire's the epitome of left behind, and Kent, deeply Tory Kent, is very much the front line in the emotive small boats story. But Lancashire? Pragmatic, hard-headed Lancashire? Apparently so. Party fealty normally runs quite deep around here, so it was a surprise that areas dyed-in-the-wool red and blue turned overnigh...

I haven't watched Netflix's drama "Adolescence", and in this, it seems, I am somewhat out of step with the Great British Public. I mean, I suppose I probably should, I keep getting told how good it is. The reviews have been universally panegyric, praising the acting, the relevance, the cultural timeliness, the technical brilliance. There have been a few dissenting voices (in particular the author Joanne Harris who notes that it's still all about the boys) but the overall impression I get, having not watched it is that I should. Even some of the criticism I've seen reinforces that, as the only place I've seen a lot of grumbling was a Facebook comments thread where many respondents found it slow or boring, and if the age of social media has taught me anything, it's that Facebook comment threads and I are generally diametrically opposed. Then there is its status as being part of the national conversation. Much like that one where that nice Toby Jones gets...

To Gloucester services, then. A place about which I am ambivalent. If you're unfamiliar with Gloucester, or it's sister services the (to my mind marginally superior) Cumbrian Tebay, it's somewhat different from your standard motorway services. You know the ones, a KFC, a WH Smiths, two of those massage chairs and, mystifyingly, a shop selling phone cases. Where hope goes to die and an acrid coffee will set you back a fiver. Where, if you're lucky, there'll be an M&S so you can at least get something that resembles food, even if you have to remortgage to do so. Gloucester is different to these. A food hall and farm shop in a rather lovely building, all wood, glass, stone and clean lines, it's pleasing to the eye and a significantly more pleasant experience than, say Lymm, at least aesthetically. It's also possibly the most middle-class place on the planet, lots of mums with sunglasses pushed up over their hair (which is inevitably in a ponytail) and dad...

I quite like the Internet, on the whole. Slightly too big a subject to get into within the confines of a blog post perhaps, "the Internet: how about that?" but heigh ho.  On balance, I'm pro. Or at least, not too virulent anti, I am, admittedly, less pro than I was a few years ago, what with the enabling of fascism and the poisoning of millions of minds with lies and bigotry, but I have a suspicion that that would probably have happened one way or another. The Daily Mail predates the World Wide Web after  all. And I wouldn't be able to escape people's terrible ill-informed opinions either, I run a pub, listening to half-baked theorising and spectacularly wrong-headed nonsense is very much part of the deal. No, my beef with the internet in this particular instance is more the legitimisation of said dreadful opinions, and I'm sorry, Amir from Cardiff, but you're the example that I'm picking. A few weeks ago, a football club lost a game of football. This ...

It's all too easy to feel a bit down at the moment. As events across the pond roll the cause of truth, decency and not-all-dying-in-a-catastrophic-climate-event back a few decades, it's all too easy for the shoulders to drop, to think fucking hell, they've won. The grifters and chances, the con artists and thieves, the liars, the haters, the celebrators of all the worst traits in human nature not only won, they did so convincingly. And now all the things they said they'd do, they're doing. It's also hard to have faith in any future shaped by the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, men rich enough to fix all poverty and hunger on Earth, but who instead prefer to get ever richer by making others ever poorer, and morality be damned. Harder still to believe in a world where truth is valued, when it becomes increasingly impossible to believe the evidence of one's own eyes, when tech bros high on money force their shitty AI on you whether you want it or not, but ...

Ironic, I suppose, that I'm attempting brevity in the service of defending floral speech, but needs must. No one wants to hear me wang on, after all. This has been a recurrent theme of my life. I make no great claims for my intellect, and my exam results would bear that out, but I've always had a fondness for words, which comes out when I write, sometimes when I speak, and it's often been regarded with suspicion. I suspect it's one of the things about me that winds a lot of people up. As with so many insecurities and minor worries, it started at school; I remember sitting SATs in yr 7, and being marked down for using the word "ululation" which, according to my teachers, didn't exist, but which anyone with access to a copy of Chambers would know means a hiring or screeching sound. The same thing happened at A-level (!) when a teacher regarded me with deep suspicion over the word "verderer" (basically a medieval park ranger). In my professional lif...