Coastalblog

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...