Booze

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.

Pub bosses have been warned ministers could bring in minimum alcohol pricing as part of the Government’s public health drive, sources have told The Telegraph.

Industry insiders said they had been privately told the policy could be on the table if they do not take more action to tackle the harms of alcohol.

Yes, yes, OK, so it didn’t work in Scotland but it will here! But more than that. Booze in pucs is already massively more expensive than supermarkets for home consumption. Minimum pricing would – at any believable level only marginally but still – benefit pubs by closing that price gap. Why would you warn pubs that you might make them better off?

The Ryanair chief told The Telegraph: “The airports of course are opposed to it and say that their bars don’t serve drunken passengers. But they do serve the relatives of the drunken passenger.”

Flights from the UK are particularly prone to violence, especially on services to so-called “party destinations” such as Ibiza and some Greek islands from regional airports including Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Stereotypes are just a shorthand for repeated observation, right?

For the regular boozer it is a source of great comfort: the fat pile of studies that say a daily tipple is better for a longer life than avoiding alcohol completely.

But a new analysis challenges the thinking and blames the rosy message on flawed research that compares drinkers with people who are sick and sober.

Scientists in Canada delved into 107 published studies on people’s drinking habits and how long they lived. In most cases, they found that drinkers were compared with people who abstained or consumed very little alcohol, without taking into account that some had cut down or quit through ill health.

People have been adjusting for that for decades. It’s nonsense.

“It’s been a propaganda coup for the alcohol industry to propose that moderate use of their product lengthens people’s lives,” said Dr Tim Stockwell, first author on the study and a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria.

But then Stockwell is a loon.

Keep an eye open for Chris Snowdon’s rebuttal of this. He’s the expert on this sort of tosh.

An Italian former culture minister has defended a drunk tourist who simulated having sex with a Florence statue, describing her behaviour as “as an amorous exaltation”.

The blonde woman, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, provoked an outcry after she was photographed climbing onto the statue of Bacchus.

A replica of a 16th-century original by Giambologna, the statue sits in a niche on a street near the Ponte Vecchio bridge.

Images posted on the “Welcome to Florence” Facebook page show the young woman hugging and kissing the statue and then simulating sexual positions.

A statue of Bacchus, God of wine and fertility (which just goes to show that beer goggles are not a new invention).

Rock ‘ard he was, rock ‘ard – more than usually achieved by the bibulous.

JEREMY CLARKSON
The Clarkson Arms: yes, I’ve bought a pub (full of dead rats)

The difficulty with a pub is getting people to come to it. If you;ve got star power then you can do that. Clarkson hsa star power, people will come to hte new pub and he’ll make a fortune. QED.

City law firms have been urged to stop hosting work socials at the pub over fears they exclude Muslim staff.

A report by Rare, a UK graduate recruitment company specialising in diversity, said the legal profession’s “big drinking culture” is unfair to those who abstain from alcohol.

It suggested that law firms introduce more cooking, painting or pottery classes to boost team bonding, rather than hosting events centred on booze.

We’re in a society where a pint and a natter is a usual and normal method of social bonding. Apparently we’ve got to change this in order to incorporate the immigrants. Rather than they picking up our habits. Even if that does mean an OJ and a natter.

Sigh.

It added: “‘Fresh ale’ provides exciting new opportunities for pubs to serve ale, all while preserving the beloved handpull ritual that delivers the traditional theatre of serve that ale is famed for.”

Shoot them. Not particularly because of the beer thing, just that language and justification.

The “Chicken King” himself has said the price of a bird has now become too cheap.

“How can it be right that a whole chicken costs less than a pint of beer?,” Boparan said in 2021.

Reduce beer duty now!

As the dream of home ownership becomes further out of reach for many younger Britons, Generation Rent is facing an entirely new challenge.

For young professionals living in cities such as London, the economics of owning a car no longer make sense.

“It is getting harder and harder to own a car and it is becoming harder and harder to run,” says Andrew Smith, managing director of Sixt, the vehicle rental company.

So it’s PR blather, obviously. But more than that it’s blather anyway. Students and young professionals in London didn’t run a car there 4 decades back either. Why would you?

Sure, folk who do a real job with a toolbox, but office work? Pah, and fie.

Anyway, would interfere with the drinking too much.

British women are ‘worst binge drinkers in the developed world’
Research finds men and women in the UK report ‘heavy episodic drinking’ with a regularity above most other countries

Really?

Heavy episodic drinking was classed as at least eight units of alcohol, the equivalent of six drinks or more, on a single occasion in the previous month.

Yes, they mean “lunch”

French wine growers destroy gallons of Spanish cava in ‘economic war’

Gallons of cava? But that’s almost a whole press conference worth.

Thousands of gallons of rosé were emptied into the street and 10,000 bottles of sparkling Spanish wine were smashed.

Ah, no, that’s more serious. That’s a whole newspapers’ worth.

Rishi Sunak urged to ban disposable vapes amid fears his plans won’t go far enough
Calls for Government to go further and outright ban disposable vapes to protect children

This is the fanatics wanting to ban vapes and using any excuse they can grab hold of to do so.

#Ignore their reasons, it’s their desire that is dangerous. Because, of course, they won’t stop there.

North Korea has honoured a brewery it imported brick by brick from Trowbridge as one of the top 10 businesses in the secretive state.

The Taedonggang Beer Factory was praised for its contribution to “the five-year plan for national economic development” alongside other firms, including one that supplies feed to zoos and a pharmaceutical factory, state media reported.

Opened in the North Korean capital 21 years ago, the brewery had formerly been located in Wiltshire under the ownership of Ushers, a specialist in regional bitters.

It was purchased in 2000 for £1.5 million by North Korea’s government, which then dismantled the 175-year-old property and shipped it piece-by-piece to Pyongyang to be rebuilt, along with 20,000 kegs.

Ushers boys drinking was a perfectly acceptable West Country session beer. The rest of it, well not so much. Not exactly the brewery I would have bought myself….

Scots are to be forced to pay at least £6 for a bottle of wine after SNP ministers unveiled plans to dramatically increase their minimum alcohol price despite the cost-of-living crisis.

Elena Whitham, the SNP drugs and alcohol policy minister, published a consultation on increasing the minimum unit price (MUP) by 30 per cent, from 50p per unit to 65p.

This would mean a bottle of wine with 12.5 per cent alcohol content could not be sold for less than £6.09, a four-pack of beer in 440ml cans would cost at least £5.72 and a bottle of Scotch whisky a minimum of £18.20.

Ms Whitham said a recent rise in alcohol deaths showed the price needed to increase to 65p. But the consultation admitted that a lower level of 60p per unit would “uprate” the price in line with “the most commonly used measure of inflation”.

Their own policy of minimum unit pricing is killing people. So they’re going to do more of it and harder.

I recall one opponent of devolution insisting it would just mean rule by hte Glasgow Labour Party. I get that point now.

China Tontine Wines Group Limited

It’s a wine grower/distributor in China. No, don’t worry about the company. Just wondering whether they know the implications of the word tontine in English? “Last man standing” and all of that?

Drinking beer may be good for your gut health and boost the immune system, a review suggests.

A study looking at various animal and human experiments acknowledges that purported health benefits of alcohol “are controversial”, but says sensible consumption has a “positive effect on the regulation of human immune function”.

Researchers said drinking a pint boosts the body’s immune system because of a collection of healthy bacteria in your brew that benefits the gut.

The review claims three key ingredients in beer — polyphenols, fibre and ethanol — help control and supercharge the immune system.

So what’s the second course of breakfast going to be then?