Booze

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.

Today it is an annual five-day festival at Eastnor Deer Park for 20,000 people, a beloved Herefordshire fixture that has seen the likes of Tom Jones and Manic Street Preachers grace the main stage. Year on year, our audience comes to enjoy over 200 bands, down 50,000 pints of cold beer, eat 30,000 tonnes of food and flatten 50 acres of grass.

20k people eat 30k tonnes of food over 5 days?

Wha?

1.5 tonnes of food per head over 5 days, that’s 300 kg of food a day.

It’s a joyous weekend and a major cultural date for the West Country.

And since when in buggery has Herefordshire been part of the West Country? It’s the fields bit of the West Mindlands.

Not that I actually know the numbers here but:

At least 10,000 bar and door staff are to be trained to spot drink-spiking as part of plans to make it a specific offence punishable by prison.

The Home Office is to pay for the training from next month with 10,000 staff expected to complete it by the spring to tackle spiking. Polls show up to one in 10 women have been victims of the crime.

2.5 million women have had their drinks spiked? Just not one of those numbers I’m tempted to believe. I have actually seen someone spiked – there was a rash of this in Russia. But it makes you so falling down, flat out, dead drunk that it’s obvious.

So, anyone got an idea of how actually prevalent this is? Rather than how many exit in the minds of campaigners? Any NHS reports of people turning up with rohypnol in the system, that sort of things?

Researchers are conducting the UK’s first major scientific trials to establish whether giving homeless people cash is a more effective way of reducing poverty than traditional forms of help.

Poverty campaigners have long believed that cash transfers are the most cost-effective way of helping people, but most studies have examined schemes in developing countries.

The new study, funded by the government and carried out by King’s College London (KCL) and the homelessness charity Greater Change, will recruit 360 people in England and Wales. Half will continue to get help from frontline charities. The other half will get additional help from Greater Change, whose support workers will discuss their financial problems then pay for items such as rent deposits, outstanding debts, work equipment, white goods, furniture or new clothes. They do not make direct transfers to avoid benefits being stopped due to a cash influx.

If homelessness here is defined as rough sleeping then I don’t think this will work. For one set of rough sleepers – teeange runaways etc – there is already a large and very effective charity network. Which usually finds and sorts out within a couple of days of rough sleeping. Not entirely solves etc, but does distinctly help.

Then there’s the hard core of rough sleepers. And as we’ve discussed here many a time it’s not, in fact, either money or even housing which is the problem here. It’s the ability to stay in housing once its achieved – stay in the face of the significant addiction or mental health – or both – problems being suffered.

That is, there’s a portion – small, but it exists – of the population who cannot deal with this Care in the Community idea and who would be much better served by a looney bin. Which, of course, we don’t have any more, not for these halfway but not fully competent cases.

More money, aid into housing, it’s just not the solution for them. Of course, it is for the teen runaways. But they’re already being aided. So, no, I don’t think this is going to work. A claim might be made, after the experiment, that it has but I’ll still be v doubtful. Because – and here’s a prediction to be run against whatever result gets announced in time – they’ll count the teens as housed sa being success when they would already get there under the current dispensation. And I don;t think they’ll have – not long term – success with the dipsos that are the hard core of the problem.

British lawyer, 28, dies after suspected mass drink-spiking in Laos

“Spiking” means deliberately done.

A British lawyer has died and several other UK tourists are in hospital after apparently being poisoned by a drink laced with methanol in Laos.

Simone White, 28, is suspected to have unknowingly drunk methanol at a bar in Vang Vieng last week while on holiday.

Far more likely – to the point of near certainty – is cheaply made local hooch and not well made cheap local hooch.

Only got to get your condensation temperature a few degrees out and you’ll be collecting the methanol from your still, not the ethanol. With the above results.