A few words from Rob Mansfield

So Giles Coren has been exposed for being the complete and utter arse that he always appears when on TV.

Disappointingly, the Guardian chose to allow Lucy Mangan to get away with championing the writer and not putting in a good word for subs.

As someone who has been on both sides of the fence, I have sympathy for writers and subs, but I find myself siding with the unsung workhorses of any publication.

While the, often semi-illiterate, writers take all the plaudits, the general public are often unaware that many a scribe’s turgid prose has been cleaned up and made publishable by a sub.

Sadly their trade is being undermined by being the first ‘group’ of journalists to be thinned out when budgets get tight - a big shame.

As for Coren himself, if his ‘joke’ was so abstruse that he really felt the need to explain it, then it clearly can’t have been a very good one.

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The above beach is the view 5 metres from my front door while on holiday. Nice, eh?

Anyway, the point about this post is that Cornwall seems to be a law unto itself, when it comes to produce.

One of the advantages of coming somewhere like Cornwall is that the fish in all the restaurants is all local and caught that day.

What’s a bigger surprise is that a lot of the produce in the supermarkets - and I even mean the likes of Tesco - is also Cornish.

They make great play on selling Cornish potatoes, Cornish strawberries, Cornish milk… the list goes on.

Living in London, you’re hard pushed to find anything from within the M25 on the supermarket shelves.

Chef Oliver Rowe managed to open a restaurant, Konstam, based on just such a principle for all his ingredients, but he found it pretty tough.

Now clearly London is an exception, but C’s mum lives near Shrewsbury, a mere spit from the Welsh border, but can she ever find Welsh lamb in the shops? Of course not!

More power to food miles and metres (as one shop in St Ives boasts) - I just wish it applied to places other than Cornwall sometimes.

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Last night my wonderful other half, C, got to have a night out on her own and went up to the ‘cool’ part of town to see a gig with a friend of hers.

But this wasn’t any ordinary gig. Oh no, it was The Peth. For those of you not quite up-to-date with their rock trivia, The Peth is a new outfit fronted by none other than Rhys Ifans and also including Super Furry Animals Dafydd Ieuan.

Ifans used to be in an early incarnation of the SFA with Ieuan, so this isn’t exactly a complete change of direction, but they’re now doing a mini tour and played an intimate little gig last night at the Hoxton Bar & Grill in Hoxton Square.

Apparently they came on at about 10pm and, according to C, Rhys Ifans is a pretty convincing front man who’s “really working the whole Mick Jagger thing”.

It would have been nice to go myself, but sadly babysitting duties meant I stayed at home. The evening took a slightly surreal turn for me, though, when I got a couple of texts at about 11.30m from C.

- Just been dancing next to Kate Moss and Sadie Frost

My reply was: ‘I don’t know what to say to that’, to which C replied:

- Just been for wee with Samantha Morton

You can’t really top that, can you?

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