Coastalblog

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...

It's the most magical time of the year again. Yes, the liminal, soft-edged space between Christmas and New Year is here once more. It's almost as if calendars were a thing. And, once more, we get to see the wonders of the season, a million columnists writing the same column that they do every year: "how does any one know what day it is?" they chorus, ho ho "how can anyone one tell what time it is? I've had too much chocolate ha ha". It seems that over-consumption of food has a direct effect on one's ability to, I don't know, look at that supercomputer in your pocket which devotes an infinitesimal fraction of its power to displaying the date and the time at all times. No, I don't have a lot of time for that particular trope, I understand it, I spent a pleasantly fuzzy day yesterday not doing a great deal, but, y'know, as an observation I feel it's somewhat run its course, even the Today programme was at it today (which, I appreciate, i...

Well, I sort of had to, try as one might, it's been impossible to escape the fucker. Turn on the news, Gregg Wallace, look at your phone, Gregg Wallace, strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, Gregg Wallace. I'm pretty sure he just served me this frankly mediocre tea I'm currently drinking, sat in Starbucks (look, it's the only place open that's not booze, alright) while I while away the time that my youngest is at tutoring, thinking about Gregg sodding Wallace. I am, fairly obviously, not going to go into the details of the story. You, presumably, already know all about it, because it's been nigh on impossible to escape it. That is more what concerns me regarding this whole sorry farrago. That a middle aged man has spoken inappropriately throughout his career is, to my mind, not exactly news. I do not wish to downplay the importance of this story, to be clear, I find his actions deplorable, and his defence even more so. But I am somewhat nonplussed a...

Been a bit quiet here of late, I know. There are reasons (not, I hasten to add, particularly bad ones, merely reasons) beyond the usual ennui, and, for once, I've decided to write about them. As for once I genuinely was being kept away by circumstance, as opposed to my own laziness  I'm normally reluctant to reflect too much on my own life and the meaning I derived from it or, God forbid, the lessons I've learned . It's the most tedious sort of solipsism,and, to my mind, requires one to think one is the centre of the known Universe. Which, thankfully, despite my manifold other faults, I don't. It's why I've never got a job as a columnist. But it is probably worth blogging about the reasons I've been quiet on here, and *spit* what I've learned from it, if only as an exercise in driving the truth into my own thick skull. I see that my last post here was the 30th of September, that tracks, because, I had  quite the October and, to my surprise (this is t...

 Look, I never claimed to be cool. As a a cliched middle aged male, I have a number of interests which, if not exactly niche, are perhaps not freighted with glamour. Not exactly ones to set the heart racing. I yearn not for wakeboarding, my cocaine with minor celebrities days are well and truly behind me, you are unlikely to catch me writing graffiti under a motorway bridge. I do cycle, but only as a way of getting from point A to point B, you are unlikely, you will be relieved to hear, to see me purchasing lycra and or/doing triathlons. I like going for a nice walk. I'm fond of a good book. I have a deep attachment to county cricket. Yes, that's right, county, not even the international stuff which briefly captures the nation's fleeting attention once in a blue moon. County cricket. Somerset CCC to be precise, though I'll watch / listen to any of it. The unpopular part of an unpopular sport. Well, that's the public perception, the much maligned two men and a dog. N...

I have now, I think, entered the arena of Not Understanding The Kids. This is a profound relief. As a father of three, it is my role to be baffled by slang, wrong-footed by culture and perplexed by concerns. I am not supposed to understand what they're on about. It is my job to frown slightly from over the top of a newspaper and be amiably run rings round. But, until fairly recently, I was relatively on top of the whole thing, through no fault of my own. I work in a job where the average worker is quite young, I'm certainly the only one over forty, and there's only one other 30+. This, whilst undoubtedly annoying, has the effect of meaning you do keep relatively up to date, simply by failing to tune out the chatter around you. (You also get to laugh quietly to yourself as each new cohort imagines they're the first ones ever to try to phone in sick with a hangover, or the first ones to ever take drugs). I was also, until quite recently, Very Online. I do not mean Faceboo...

 There is an idea, much beloved if a certain type of politician, that you can get away with any old cobblers if you wrap it in a flag. This week, seeking to jostle his way clear of the roiling mass of mediocrity that is the Conservative Party leadership contest, it is previously fond-of-a-pie, now 24hr-Ozempic-guzzler Honest Bob Jenrick who's been trying his hand at a bit if the old racism. Bob has forn for this, of course  You will recall his performative cruelty when he ordered cartoon murals for children at migrant detention centres painted over. You will furthermore recall his most recent thought being loudly thunk that saying "Gid is Great" should, um, be a criminal offence. In case we hadn't already established this, the man's an arse. He's now making a bid for the sclerotic hearts and gin-soaked minds of what's left of the Conservative Party by claiming that "English identity is being erased", the unspoken subtext, of course, being that En...

For reasons I don't entirely understand myself, I ran ten miles this morning. Well, I say "ran", there were probably a few points were "shuffled" would be more the mot juste, but nevertheless, I put one foot in front of the other for ten sodding miles without stopping and walking. Walking would possibly have been quicker, but that, for reasons that again I don't understand, but obscurely feel to be God's honest truth, wasn't the point  And Lord, isn't my body aware of it now. Most of the left side has checked out for the day, and obscure shooting pains and spasms occur when I least expect them. I am very much favouring my right side as I type this. I should explain somewhat, this wasn't a spur of the moment decision. I didn't just get up and decide to run ten miles. I've always been a runner, of sorts, but realised earlier this year that I was deteriorating quite badly in terms of form, physique and motivation. A mile was a struggle. ...

Not to make this sound like some portentous announcement, like a celebrity couple imagining that the wider world gives a fig for their marital status, but I have consciously uncoupled from Twitter. It's been on the cards for a while. Ever since the world's strangest man, Elon Musk, bought it in what was the  Worst Banking Decision since 2008 , the entire place has been on the slide, his model of buying blue ticks and monetising clicks meaning that the most extreme, the most controversial voices were aggressively promoted, and normal discourse was largely drowned. I'd watched in dismay as my feed grew ever more right wing, obsessed with small boats and trans issues, race and gender, and it seemed that no matter how carefully I blocked and curated, more screeching, permanently enraged right wingers were placed in front of me. As a strategy for driving engagement, it's superficially clever. The instinct is to engage, to argue and refute, even the reasonable people I follow...