UPPER TIERS EXCLUSIVE: THE MISSING POST...

HELL YEAH! I got my laptop back. This is the third screen this MacBook has had in six weeks. Let's see if this one survives.

Best of all, the Patreon post I was in the middle of when it died is still open (see below), and I now no longer have to struggle with Sanja's MacBook to finish editing this week's video.

It's turning out to be a bumper one - the assembly cut was three hours, but the finished product will be about 45 mins. Just rendering it now.

Anyway. Here's that post I was writing last week when the awful thing happened (started writing it, and was enjoying myself, so just carried on):

Evening, all.

Given the ridiculous heatwave, plus the fact I’ve got a foul cold and a lingering bad back, we decided to bump our Digi filming to next week (BIFFO'S NOTE: and we did), when it’ll be a lot cooler (BIFFO'S NOTE: it was slightly cooler, albeit not in The Coat), and I’ll be feeling better (BIFFO'S NOTE: Getting there). Hopefully (BIFFO'S NOTE: video is processing as I type, and it'll be with you tonight... it's a GOOD ONE...).

Apart from Covid itself, I wasn’t ill for the whole of the lockdown-era, but this year I seem to have been barrelling from one cold to another, like some hacking, spluttering, dervish. 

Rubbish.

Instead, we’re going to record another episode of BYAMPOD, and another Writer’s Club tomorrow. So, you’ll all get something from us before the weekend (BIFFO'S NOTE: We did record them, but due to laptop badness, I didn't get them edited yet).

BYAMPOD will be a particularly juicy one, I think (BIFFO'S NOTE: Too juicy, which is why we're recording), and I’ve some interesting news to share on Writer’s Club.

We might also do a live stream in the next week or two, though, given we’ve got stuff from the PO Box to take a look at (BIFFO'S NOTE: Probably next week!).

Anyhoo. That’s it! That’s all the Digi news!

FASCINATING TRAVEL BLOG

Apropos nothing, we went to Cleethorpes last week. We were looking after our grandson Bruce for the weekend, and the beach is only 30 minutes from my daughter's alarmingly pretty village. It was the first time I'd been there, and I confess that I sort of un-ironically loved it.

Seemingly stuck in the past, barring the inevitable vape shops, claw machines full of Prime energy drinks, and pay-by-phone parking, it was exactly the kind of seaside resort we went to when I was a kid; places with names like Dimchurch and Scarborough and Stabwold and Rancidpool and Sewageport.

Another of my daughters lives in Brighton, and while I genuinely adore the place, it hasn't got that comforting, if slightly depressing, family holiday vibe that I grew up with.

Brighton is great, but it's also sometimes a bit too-cool-for-school. Yes, it has arcades and fish and chip shops, but it also has that alternative, arty, thing going on; all bars and fancy restaurants with crazy crap on the walls and burgers served on lumps of driftwood, with drinks in IV bags. Hipster-on-sea, basically, with an overbearing sense of its own importance, trying to find a balance between being a resort that plays host to families and hen weekends, while retaining its own countercultural uniqueness.

Brighton's Sealife Centre and i360 viewing platform feel almost like aberrations, concessions to populism, as if Paddy McGuinness turned up in an episode of Twin Peaks.

Cleethorpes, though, is about as far away from pretentious as you can get. You could drop a bomb on it, and culturally nothing would be lost. 

That isn't even a criticism. It's a time capsule of a Britain that is all but ignored these days - our equivalent of the USA's 'flyover' states, removed from the rest of the country, and its metropolitan hubs, by geography and distance. 

I mean, I wouldn't want all of the UK to turn back the clock 50 years - I voted against Brexit for a reason - but I also find the fact that places like Cleethorpes still exist, swept under the rug though they are, oddly comforting. Especially when so much about getting older is the struggle to keep pace with progress, and feeling irrelevant. 

Cleethorpes had everything from whelk stalls, to donkey rides, to an on-the-beach funfair that was one strong gust away from collapsing in on itself in a cloud of rust. 

Last time we went to Brighton, we wandered along the seafront one night and there were some topless, gym-sculpted, men, in those baggy, tie-dye, loon pants, spinning flaming orbs around their heads. Yes, alright, it was cool - especially when one of them bollocked himself in the face with a flaming orb - but also kind of annoying. If you want to spin a flaming orb, do it in your own back garden. And put your shirt back on. 

But no. Brighton is very much a city of show-offs and attention-seekers, and while I love people expressing their individuality and all that - and my daughter very much fits in, scrawled as she is with tattoos and punctured with piercings - I nevertheless feel I blend in a bit more amid Cleethorpe's "Naughty But Nice" rock shops, and lewdly-branded pubs.

Or maybe I don't. I'm sure the locals would dismiss me as a stuck-up metropolitan elite.

What was especially lovely was to go somewhere like this with my grandson. My grandparents were often with us on those family holidays, and I was very close to my mum's dad in particular. He was kind and sweet, and always had time for me; the sort of grandparent I aspire to be. 

In Cleethorpes, I  ticked off a major Being-A-Grandad bucket list moment when I played on the penny falls with little Brucie. Going to the arcades and playing on the penny falls with my own lovely grandad are among my happiest memories, so it had significance for me. Even if Bruce didn't really have a clue what he was doing. 

When we had a bit more money than we do these days, and could afford to go abroad, I think we sort got into the mindset that a break wasn't a break unless you went to another country. Which is weird because - apart from a trip to visit my sister in California when I was 13, and a couple of work trips - I never went abroad until I was in my 30s. It was always, always, caravan parks. The most exotic it ever got was The Isle of Man. 

Yet Cleethorpes - which, incidentally, I keep spelling 'Cleethorpse'... as in 'corpse' - was, in its own way, exotic; a Disneyland themed around my own childhood holidays, and an opportunity to introduce my childhood to my grandson's. 

He can say "grandad" now by the way.

Paul

PS. If you do ever go to Cleethorpes, try the fish and chip place on the pier. Amazing food, and they give you a free t-shirt if you get their obscenely extra-large portion of fish and chips. I forgot to collect mine, annoyingly.