Coastalblog

So this weekend was Mrs Coastaltowns birthday. We went to York, it was nice. We went to Grimsby, it wasn't, but her family live there, for some reason.

apologies for infrequency of blogging. NaNoWriMo is eating my life. 18,000 down, 32,000 to go. Luckily I'm within striking distance of twenty thou, the point at which it becomes harder to give up, and waste all that effort, than keep going. I'm learning a lot about novel-writing as well. So it's a positive experience. A lot about the nuts and bolts of pacing, structure, characterisation. all the stuff us poets never bother with. And no, you can't read it. It's fucking terrible.

God help me, it's November so it must be NaNoWriMo, my annual exercise in novel-writing masochism. I am, in fact, off to a flier this year and already well ahead of word count, which is pretty good. The great thing about NaNo is the purpose it serves at blasting away writer's block (which, with about three different deadlines currently hanging over my head, is no bad thing), the terrible thing about it is the fact that I will, for the rest of this month, have to find time every day to write a thousand odd words. This in the month that I take Roe away for a couple of days for her birthday. This in the month that I can't write at night (my usual M.O.) as the computer is in our bedroom. This in the month that my days off see me deep in the bowels of a restaurant's kitchen, roasting bones for stock, making desserts by the hundredweight, filleting seabass by the dozen and generally learning my trade as a humble prep chef. Clearly I have gone nuts. Crikey. Still, needs...

Roe has moved in now, I am now officially part of a co-habiting couple, which is a strange sensation. I have, I'm afraid, always been a bit of a recluse. I have friends whom I love dearly, but I prefer to keep the numbver small and select. I am very fond of my own company, and working in the business that I do leaves me generally all our of bonhomie and goodwill come the end of a shift. And now, into my loosely ordered and vaguely sordid bachelory lifestyle a force for control and change has impacted like a meteor. I rather like it, as it happens. Only time will tell whether or not it'll work this time (we've attempted it before, and it all went very, very wrong). I suspect it will. I hope so.

I am not by nature a lazy man. I am not by nature a man inclined to let his life slide out of control, either. However I am a man who simply hates dealing with certain things, namely banking employees at the other end of a phone line. It's just the entire rigmarole of being shuffled from one bored and harrassed school-leaver to another until my simple request is granted. I get round this problem by avoiding it. Now, I am relatively prudent, I have credit cards, but the sums on them are dealable with (though moderately hefty when totalled up), one of my credit cards dates from my student days, and still bears the scars of a slightly more carefree me, the other is a recent acquisition. I decided to do something adult and sensible, and get a credt card with a low rate to tranfer ruinously high interest rate store cards onto (and I'm boring myself). I steeled myself to the task, completed the necessary forms, made the necessary phone calls through gritted teeth (why the hell did...

Is today. Tomorrow the troops will be rallied (our numbers somewhat depleted these days)and pints will be drunk, but today...today I shall be concentrating mostly on feeling as twenty six as humanly possible. Though the big two seven isn't too irksome, as birthdays go. The Shiel turns thirty on friday, which is cheering. Not just yet...

Holiday soon, good job. I'm getting a little too oblique with customers. "Excuse me, you've forgotten our chips" "Yes sir, I've also forgotten about Dre" Puzzling.

So I've had my first couple of kitchen shifts, and have to say that I found them very enjoyable. Obviously it's way, way too early to be making any decisions, but I am convinced that the decision to give it a go was the right one, so that's okay. I think the satisfaction in part derives from the sensation of actually making something rather than serving it. This is in no way to devalue my job, I derive a great deal of joy from sending customers home happy; but conversely I have recently started losing patience with the sort of customers who in the past I would just have laughed off. You see the thing is, I'm just doing a job to the best of my ability, and I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I simply don't need a lot of our customers in my life. I don't know if this is a peculiarly English thing (when I was working in cornwall, and a far higher proportion of the customers were foreign) but we've had a lot of people in recently who have cause...

Ah well, this is the logical apotheosis of coastalblog. Inspired largely by Cel and Porl's air-clearing post on Porl's blog, and tapping into things I may have alluded to in other posts. There's no other way to say it, I am deeply unhappy. I'm unhappy about being unhappy, I am unhappy about people perceiving me as being unhappy. I'm just plain fucked off about pretty much everything. So I'm seriously considering retraining as a chef, as alluded to below. In order to take it up professionally would require a wage cut of about fifteeen grand, which I can't afford, to be honest, but I'm doing the training on my days off, if it looks like I might be good at it then it's cheerio comfy wage, cheerio meandering, hello again to the greatest feeling on earth; the feeling where it's you, on your arse facing the world down. I fear I may be addicted to pulling myself out of the gutter but I just LOVE planning day to day, shifting the odd quid to where ...

God I love Autumn when it's like this. It's something to do with the taste of the air, I think, that freh crispness which one forgets about over summer and which, when it catches your nostris for the first time makes you think oh yeah jumpers! Walks! Drifts of leaves!. it also heralds the incipient arrival of the hell on stilts that is Christmas, but more of such things later. So what am I doing at the mo? Weeeeell, there's one thing occurring which may prove to be of pivotal importance in my life, but I'm reluctant to blog about it just yet, from some strange puritan hangover about not tempting fate. Also I'm having fun editing last year's Nanowrimo piece, having left it for nearly a year, in the hope that I'll rustle up a few ideas for this year's piece. I'm getting lots of reading and writing done, largely as a result of having knackered my knee (again) which kind of precludes any exercise except swimming, and I get VERY bored swimming a...

Is the short answer to the question "So what've you been up to?" I've been on an extended binge of which this is my first night of sobriety. Water is so lovely, isn't it? Highlights included me and the manager, in an outraged drunken state pulling the ovens apart one night and then leaving them out to demonstrate how mucky they were. The chefs were not happy. Also a wine tasting last monday which ended with me and The Shiel getting blind drunk in Chorley by about two o clock in the afternoon, trying to get home and the next thing we knew we were drinking Guinness in The Temple. We'd got lost (on a train for fuck's sake), ended up in Manchester, and promptly decided to go out on the lash, obviously, but neither of us can recall this occurring. Ruin (he wrote off his car the next day, I learned this evening). The best bit, however, was visiting Paul and Cel at their stately pile in the country. It was nice to see with my own two eyes that Stalybridge looks...

yes, yes, I know it was days ago, but c'mon, this was five years coming. England beat Australia on Tuesday, it's now Friday and I'm still grinning. Now I'm aware that this post is of limited interest to most of you, I can think of only three coastalblog readers who are cricket fans, so this one's for them. So some thoughts. What was pleasing (despite the title, you try getting Marcus Trescothick to scan) about England's win was how little of it was down to that man Flintoff, one wicket and one steepling six aside there was little for the crowd's folk hero to do, which seems fair enough, he's done quite a bit already this summer. Before the game I had a feeling that the damage would be done by someone the aussies knew little about, and so (in part) it proved to be. That man Strauss played a delightful innings. Even more pleasing though was that the real damage was done by two men Australia know all about. How many times has McGrath had Trescothick out...

It's a sad fact but my personal sense of wellbeing is linked, as is that of millions of other men, in some (small, but palpable) way. So habitually unsuccessful are the teams I follow that I have, of necessity developed a personal voodoo of failure, feeling oddly comforted when I see that they've folded again. Over the past few days, however, there has been a bounce in my step, partially the signals of autumn in the air, but also partly due to an unaccustomed amount of success. Somerset and Spurs, I thank you. The England cricket team, I thank you even more. Sad really, but what are you gonna do?

Natasha Bedingfield. She has huge teeth. Also, they are not worthy of trust. To sum up, I fear Bedingfield. I think she wants me killed.

These are interesting times here at coastalblog towers. Due to a frankly wonky lighting circuit the house is plunged into darkness of an evening (all attempts to fix it have led to small, but exciting, explosions), our landlord is elusive and Jim and I despair, like an overly sarcastic Vladimir and Estragon of the arrival of the mythical electrician who will somehow make everything better. To compound this we then endured three days (three!) without internet. No internet and no source of light leaves one, sadly, with only the television for company (romantic image it may be, but reading by candlelight gives me the most phenomenal headaches). Ah, television, I am reminded now of why I never watch it. No, this is not entirely fair, there was a programme on last night with a jolly enthusiastic silver haired chap yomping up and down the highlands waving maps about. Now that's the sort of programme I like, I hope one day to become a jolly enthusiastic silver haired chap who yomps ...

Okay, there haven't been a great deal of posts recently (how many times has that sentence been typed throughout blogland - always with the same layer of minor guilt?). Too busy, too tired, too libidinous, too besieged by demon monkeys - pick your own excuse. So nevertheless, conforming to actualite coastalblog needs to take a minute or to to cry into it's pint at the departure from Ormskirk's sunny climes of Porl and Cel. They're both aware of how much I love them, so further eulogies are unnecessary. Nevertheless huge hole in life, and what have you. Confining myself to actual news would prove depressing in the extreme, so some inchoate thoughts from the last few days, as ever, make of them what you will: sometimes you will encounter someone who you just plain don't like, often without good reason, don't feel guilty about this, just accept it and you'll save yourself a lot of worrying. Don't feel guilty about plotting their downfall either, th...

Okay, distinct paucity of blog action recently, for which I am sorry. In mitigation the manager at work is off on his jollies and I am left holding the fort (with no little aplomb, if I can be allowed a brief moment of self-aggrandisement), I'm currently five days into an eleven day stint. Some thoughts: managers are liars, learn this and learn it well. Management consists entirely of doing no work and just checking that everything's fine. My predecessors lied to me for years, it's really not that hard. I'm quite angry with them for pretending that it was. When you manage you don't have to do any cleaning, ergo it's easier. You can't please everyone, this is a concept which anyone who works in service industries should clasp to their knackered breast as a shining torch of hope, my god but the general public will happily whine about anything, just repeat the mantra of "It's really not that important" to yourself the ENTIRE TIME and there is...

Now I've seen the highlights in full. Repeat after me. Kelly Holmes Kelly Holmes Kelly fucking Holmes No one has ever deserved this so much.

So it appears that whilst I was at work the GB track and field side answered all of my wildest dreams. I've only just checked the news. I'm absurdly happy. In your face EVERYBODY.

Okay, a lie.. But whilst I had an okay evening I missed out on the single most life-affirming thing in the history of sport which, obviously, is a shame.