Booze

Individuals bear at least 80% of the responsibility for their ill health in old age, according to a report aimed at challenging the belief that physical decline is either inevitable or primarily the responsibility of the state.

The report, launched at the Smart Ageing Summit in Oxford last week, argues that individuals have far greater control over their longevity than is commonly understood. The authors call on the government to take legislative action on alcohol comparable to restrictions on smoking.

Still, at least that will differentiate us from hte Americans. Here you’ll *only* be allowed to drink in the street.

By keeping everything on a small scale, most micropubs do not make more than £90,000 profit in a year, which keeps them below the VAT registration threshold.

The Tele needs to get with the program. It’s sales, not profits, of under £90k that leaves out VAT.

But, you know journos and numbers. Acshully, journos and knowledge…..they don’t even get booze right these days, O Tempora, O Mores…..

Binge drinking rates among gen Z have risen sharply since their teenage years, according to research that challenges their reputation as “generation sensible”.

Almost seven in 10 (68%) 23-year-olds reported binge drinking in the past year, while nearly a third (29%) said they did so at least monthly, up from 10% at age 17.

While drug use is relatively limited in the teenage years, by their 20s almost half (49%) have used cannabis and a third (32%) have tried harder drugs such as cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy, analysis by University College London (UCL) found.

Bit late, but better than never.

Social media companies are using tobacco giants’ playbook in refusing to admit they are harming children, Lord Puttnam has said.
In an exclusive interview and article for The Telegraph, the renowned film producer says social media firms are acting in the same way as tobacco manufacturers, who sought to “wilfully deny” the damage their products caused when they faced tougher regulation in the 1990s.

And so are the UPF companies, and the vaping, and the booze, and the fossil fuel and….well, everyone who doesn’t bow down to hte current left liberal consensus. Which, if we’re honest about it, might be the linking thread there. Not the tactics, but the left libeals squeeing that someone disagrees with them.

Although he is as surprised as anyone to find himself an industry figurehead, a position he says is a “privilege”, Kerridge is a natural spokesman. At 52, he has an unassailable position in English cooking, with a gift for taking things Britons actually like to eat (steaks, fish and chips, pies) and honing them to compete with haute cuisine. Above all, he has a gift for pubs. The Hand & Flowers, Kerridge’s pub-with-ideas in Marlow, is the only pub to hold two Michelin stars; the Coach, down the road, has one.

No, that’s a gift for restaurants, not pubs.

That the two are thought to be the same thing these days is one of those proofs of the decline of society.

Labour is considering banning the sale of zero-alcohol drinks to under-18s over fears they are a “gateway” to drinking.

The Government is considering making the sale of alcohol-free drinks, such as 0 per cent beers, to children including 16- and 17-year-olds illegal.

Critics have branded the move “utterly bonkers”

White, also British, was one of six tourists who died in the 2024 Laos poisoning, after consuming drinks contaminated with methanol – a cheap, deadly relative to ethanol. In places where spirits are easily available on the black market, poorly regulated, expensive relative to income, or inaccessible because of legal and cultural taboos, it is increasingly finding its way into the alcohol supply chain – with catastrophic consequences. A lethal dose is 30ml. As little as 10ml can cause irreversible blindness.

Don’t put the tax up – not “too much” – on booze. Not that the prohibitionists quite get this. I’ve been told that during the American Experiment some government officials deliberately poisoned black market supplies – just to teach people a lesson, see?

More than a third of whisky drinkers are female. Time for the industry to wake up to women

Seems odd. If you’re already successfully selling to women then why do you need to wake up to anything?

The top 100 British pubs? There are ten in the list that I’d really recommend
The Good Food Guide has unveiled its inaugural list of the nation’s best watering holes.

It’s the good food guide. To pubs.

This is what the list is all about, says the guide’s owner and publisher, Adam Hyman. “It’s a guide for how normal people use a pub to eat and drink.

That pubs are now restaurants is xactly what’s gone wrong with hte country.

Bah. Humbug. Boozers, that’s what the place needs, boozers.

This would not only seal the fate of many more pubs and restaurants across the UK but also further unravel the country’s social fabric.

The pub was once a place to enjoy each other’s company. A hub where people of all backgrounds could come to congregate, socialise and get out of the house.

But tax rises have ripped that apart, as hard-up households choose the cheaper option of staying at home instead of popping out for a drink and a chat. Whatever we do to attract customers, visits keep falling – as people just aren’t using the pub in the same way as old.

As someone who has lived a lot in foreign. A “pub culture” is distinctly different from a non-pub one. And Britain’s – OK, with Ireland’s – was distinct. And it is being changed. Not for the better either.

But then the prodnoses never were going to allow independent organisation of good cheer to continue now, were they?

A female employee of French champagne maker Moët Hennessy has claimed she was told she needed “anti-seduction” training as she was “gagging for it”.

Maria Gasparovic, a former employee of Moët Hennessy, is suing the company at an employment tribunal for €1.3m (£1.1m) in damages and compensation. It follows claims that she was sacked following alleged misconduct by her colleagues.

According to the Financial Times, Ms Gasparovic has claimed that she was the subject of “unfounded and sexist rumours” and “acts of denigration” within the drinks company.

She has alleged that a senior employee told her she needed “anti-seduction” coaching if she wanted a promotion. According to the filings, seen by the FT, her boss told her she had been described by a client as “gagging for it”.

So, a possible background story here. Looker of a salesgirl decides that a Wonderbra and a button undone might aid in gaining the signature on a contract. This is not – not wholly and entirely – unknown conduct. Client misinterprets – he’s supposed to think it might, maybe, be possible, not to assume it is – and so company says you might to have a rethink on that.

Any bids on other explanations?

Under previous rules, wines between 11.5pc and 14.5pc ABV (alcohol by volume) attracted the same tax rate.

Under the new system, the tax due on them is calculated based on their individual strength, making some wines much more expensive and creating a mountain of extra paperwork for retailers.
…
Mr Colley said: “If you’ve got something that just doesn’t make sense because the volumes are so small and the cost of administration [has risen], there’s an impact. You just can’t make any money from doing it.

“We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on systems just to manage it, it’s that complex.”

But there’s always that little thing, isn’t there? That the cost of bureaucracy itself is claimed at nothing. And yet the cost of bureaucracy itself is not nothing….

Six of the finest best bitters (or amber ales, if you insist)

Ale is, by definition, non-hopped. The thing that makes bitter bitter is hops.

Taxpayers are footing a £130m-a-year bill for disability benefit claims linked to alcohol and drug abuse, official statistics show.

What’s a civilisation for if we can’t divert 0.005% of everything to supporting boozers, topers and souses?

Canada has begun stripping US alcohol from its shelves in retaliation against Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

Retail outlets under the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), Canada’s largest province, will take US products off its shelves from Tuesday as the fight-back against the president’s 25pc levy begins.

The LCBO, which sells almost $1 billion ($688 million) worth of American wine, beer, spirits and seltzers annually, will also remove US products from its catalogue, according to Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario.

Presumably the state run, state owned (OK, Province for pendants) has already paid for this booze. Or at least contracted to pay for it. So the taxpayers of Ontario now have to cover the costs of this political gesture.

Well done there, well done there.

BTW, anyone got a phone number? There might be a stock of booze going cheap, so I hear……

Every cigarette smoked cuts 20 minutes off a person’s life, a study has claimed.

An analysis by scientists at University College London (UCL), commissioned by the Government, found that the harm caused by smoking shaved an average of 22 minutes per cigarette off the lifespan of a woman, with a loss of 17 minutes for a man.

The findings are up to twice as much as previous estimates which claimed that an individual cigarette costs 11 minutes of a person’s life.

Researchers said that the harm caused by smoking was cumulative and that the sooner a person stopped smoking, and the more cigarettes they avoided smoking, the longer they lived.

No, not whether this is true, but if they believed it was?

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill would also

It wouldn’t regulate vapes, would it?

It does regulate vapes therefore they don’t believe it.

But it’s no coincidence so many beers are reducing their ABV and that so many are settling on 3.4pc.

The real reason they are watering down your pint to this level, experts say, is because it allows them to save tens of millions of pounds in alcohol duty each year, thanks to reforms made under the previous Conservative government.

In August last year, the Tories expanded the duty discount for lower-strength beers from 2.8pc ABV up to 3.4pc ABV.

Under the new system, draught beers with a strength between 1.3pc and 3.4pc pay £8.42 in duty per litre of pure alcohol. Any beer from 3.5pc to 8.4pc pay significantly more, at £19.08 per litre of pure alcohol.

In practical terms, for every pint Carlsberg sells on tap, it is saving 25p in alcohol duty by lowering its ABV from 3.8pc to 3.4pc. We drink 7.8 billion pints each year in Britain, so these savings quickly add up.

Kim Verberckmoes, of accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg, says she expects “more and more brewers will be looking to lower their ABV to fall into the lower duty bracket”.

Never quite sure whether this was true or not. But the story is that Watney’s Starlight was so weak that it didn’t classify as a beer at all. Not that they dropped the price to match it not paying duty at all.

The former King Edward’s school, a grand Georgian building in Bath that Samuel Smith purchased in the 1980s, has experienced a similar fate. Plans to convert it from a school to a licensed premises were submitted and withdrawn twice, before being submitted again and approved in 2009. Despite planning permission, the work has never commenced. The building, which has sat empty for nearly four decades, is on the English Heritage register of significant historic buildings “at risk” of irreversible decay.

It’s a lovely building. Almost, sorta, a Georgian manor right in the heart of town. Sadly, wouldn’t make a grand house – it’s on a steep hill that cars and lorries have to crash through gears to get up. But only a couple of months back I walked past it and thought, hmm, why’s that just empty and rotting then?

(Just for funsies, it’s the building Bill Bailey went to school in. And, for those who like voice actors in games, Toby Longworth).

Is this real? It’s absurdly real. A team of researchers from Harvard University spent time in three Boston pubs, watching 160 groups of customers. The behaviour was so uniform that they could eventually predict it. If a group had more men than women, a man would race to the bar within seconds to get drinks for everyone. But if it had more women than men, it would take significantly longer to get a round in.

And when did the women get the first drinks in? Never. They never did.

Why do men do this? The same reason all male animals do – to show that they are the best possible partner for females. Deers rut, koalas shout, peacocks show off, men hop on the Wetherspoon’s app and get a tray of Jägerbombs in. It’s a tale as old as time.

Yes, obviously, etc.

But the one group who should read this, even do the work to stuggle to understand it – look, sorry, but certain social activities really are buried way down in that lizard brain – is the one group that will never bother. I mean the female columnists for The Guardian of course.

The Russian security council deputy head, Dmitry Medvedev, has described the editors of the Times newspaper in Britain as “legitimate military targets” in response to the newspaper’s coverage of the assassination of a Russian general.

I’ve seen – somewhere around – that Medvedev is in something like the Yeltsin cabinet years. Not a wholly and entirely sober view of the world shall we say.