Coastalblog

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...