Booze

A flagship SNP health policy failed to curb problem drinking but forced alcoholics to go without food, a major study has found.

Scotland became the first country in the world to introduce minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol in May 2018, currently fixed at 50p per unit.

But in a landmark report on the effectiveness of the policy, researchers from Sheffield and Newcastle universities found “no clear evidence” it dissuaded alcoholics from drinking.

In some cases, heavy drinkers spent up to 29 per cent less on food, utility bills and other items, according to data collected from 100,000 participants.

We could – and some did – predict this from the start using really very basic economic principles……

Older women who enjoy a regular tipple have a better quality of life than those who abstain, or drink at very low levels, research suggests.

The study of 628 patients undergoing elective surgery found that women who drink at least twice a week were happier with their lot than those who had little or no alcohol.

The research looked at quality of life of patients aged 60 and over before and after surgery, checking for mobility, anxiety and depression, and levels of comfort.

The study found little difference between men, regardless of their drinking habits, before surgery.

But afterwards, those who enjoyed a drink fared better for quality of life, compared with peers who avoided alcohol as they recovered from operations.

Or even, a little of what you fancy does you good.

One of life’s little amusements is observing how some will absolutely latch onto the folk cures of some other society and yet resolutely condemn those of their own. Some wizened hag promoting some jungle leaf is fawned over, our own society’s glass of sherry is dismissed.

Eighteen-year-old Americans can’t drink. Why can they buy assault rifles?
Ross Barkan

Lower the drinking age then.

Overweight people should be given lower drinking limits, scientists have said, after research found alcohol does them more harm.

Current government advice says men and women should not drink more than 14 units a week, the equivalent of about six pints of beer or standard glasses of wine.

But researchers said the findings, from a study of 400,000 adults in Britain, should be used to cut limits for the two in three adults who are overweight or obese.

The thought that any of us actually listen to these limits. That they’re actually something that is adhered to.

It’s entirely true that some don’t drink, some do, but the number who do or don’t because of the 14 unit advice is zero.

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You’d make more at Maccy D’s.

Citigroup is setting up an office for junior investment bankers in Málaga, where staff will work shorter hours, in an attempt to attract talent that might otherwise be deterred by the industry’s infamously poor work-life balance.

The American bank said that it had picked the southern Spanish city on the Costa del Sol because it presented “a unique and compelling lifestyle proposition”.

Also, if it offers a “unique and compelling lifestyle proposition” remind me not to consider moving there. What attracts young bankers isn’t quite what attracts me….

Cutting back on final drink of day ‘could improve brain health’
Study of UK adults shows negative effects of alcohol consumption grow stronger with each additional drink

Things happen at the margin, do they?

Blimey.

I think we’ve a local around here who can advise:

Talking to the Guardian under a pseudonym, Naamcial says he would like to operate a legal brewery, but Thailand’s laws around alcohol production make this ambition almost impossible for newcomers. Current laws restrict brewing licences to manufacturers that have capital of 10 million baht (£230,000), while brewpubs must produce at least 100,000 litres a year and only serve their beer on their premises. The legislation effectively blocks new, small breweries from opening, and tips the market firmly in favour of two powerful companies – Thai Beverage, which produces Chang beer, and Boon Rawd Brewery, which produces Singha and Leo.

So, you can’t start small and grow, you’ve got to leap to volume immediately. Which means there might – might – be that gap for someone who can leap to volume. 200,000 pints a year sold through one’s own premises. 550 pints a day, day in, day out. 250 folk coming in for a couple each. That’s a big pub you’ve got to have. But it’s possible, plenty of places in London (yes, I know, entirely different market etc) that do that.

So, when do we start?

It added: “The evidence is clear: any level of alcohol consumption can lead to loss of healthy life. Studies that claim otherwise are based on purely observational research, which fails to account for other factors, such as pre-existing conditions and a history of alcoholism in those considered to be ‘abstinent’.

Complete, utter and total bollocks.

There is a well known – and entirely obvious in the numbers – J Curve here. Moderate drinking is associated with – to put it as weakly as possible – longer lifespans than either teetotalism or heavy drinking. The only point that needs to be discussed is the definition of “moderate” which is, in fact, substantially higher than that 14 units a week nonsense.

Absolutely any other result is the result of prodnose tosspottery.

Mr. Snowdon will be along soon to give you the details.

Hopes that EU ‘hangover’ will be cured with pints of sparkling wine
Ministers are pushing for a return of the imperial measurement for fizz favoured by Winston Churchill and vintners alike

Champagne, as fizz, only exists because of English advances in glass and bottle making. So, righteously, should be pints all the way.

Indeed Martin, the “king of cool” for a generation of Americans, was putting on a act when he prowled the stage swigging whisky, smoking cigarettes and singing songs, He also sang Little Old Wine Drinker Me. Often, and unknown by fellow Rat Pack members Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr, his tumbler was full of nothing stronger than cider.

We can imagine how bad it would have been of the whole lot had been done on scrumpy…..

“Drinking — that was his gimmick”, his daughter Deana, who is also a singer, told the New York Post. “There’s no way he could have done that body of work [while drinking].” The “whisky” in the glass was actually apple cider, Martin’s Ocean’s 11 co-star Henry Silva said.

The thing being that to Americans “cider” is more a sorta non-alcoholic, curdled, apple juice. What we over here call cider is to them “hard cider”. And of course scrumpy doesn’t exist. As it doesn’t anyway out of that sacred and divine area roughly from Pilton to Priddy.

People who are very fit, healthy and active are more likely to be heavy drinkers because they feel their exercise habits entitle them to an alcoholic reward, a study suggests.

They find that people who are fit (able to run well on a treadmill it seems) are more likely to drink heavily than those who are not. More than 14 units is much more common among the fit than the sorta fit and the unfit.

The academics suggest that the correlation between alcohol intake and running ability might be due to the fact people who are exercising regularly are more inclined to give themselves a reward. However, it may also be down to the fittest people also having addictive personalities and exercise and drinking may both be symptoms of the same core personality trait.

Actually, the simplest explanation is that more than 14 units makes you healthy. Which, odd as it may sound to those steeped in modern medicine, is actually true. All causes risks of death etc are higher for teetotallers, lower for boozers and only go back to reaching teetotal levels at proper toper levels, 40 units a week and up sorta thing.

That is, the old wisdom of partaking moderately of grain and grape is good for you is true. All that’s changed is that the modern prodnoses are getting to define what “modestly” means.

Adieu gin, au revoir roast beef! How Hogarth became a proud European

Well, sorta. What the article actually points out is that Hogarth looked at what Johnny Foreigner was doing, nicked the good bits and rejected the rest of that Johnny Foreign stuff.

This being entirely different from the modern definition of becoming “European” which is to junk all the stuff we do well and copy only the idiocies of J Foreign. Roman law is not an advance upon Common but that’s what we were being forced into, just as the one example.

It’s also a bit difficult to claim as properly European someone who penned these lines:

Beer, happy Produce of our Isle

Can sinewy Strength impart,

And wearied with Fatigue and Toil

Can cheer each manly Heart.

Labour and Art upheld by Thee

Successfully advance,

We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee

And Water leave to France.

Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste

Rivals the Cup of Jove,

And warms each English generous Breast

With Liberty and Love!

Not in Turkey:

A Turkish man who was reported missing after he wandered off from his friends while drunk unwittingly joined his own search party.

According to Turkish media reports, relatives of the man, Beyhan Mutlu, raised the alarm about him going missing on Tuesday.

For several hours, Mr Mutlu’s friends and family had been unable to find him, prompting them to set up a search party in the forest where he had disappeared.

But Mr Mutlu, 50, eventually stumbled across one of the groups in the woods and joined their search. He was only discovered when someone called out his name and he replied “I am here.”

Just some little buzz at the back of the mind that this story has run before. Not this specific one, but someone joining the search party for him.

The survey of 2,000 adults for Churchill Motor Insurance showed that overall up to 34 per cent of motorists said they would have drinks containing between two and four units in the belief that they would not break the law.

You know, given that it’s largely true.

The fight to save one of America’s last lesbian bars: ‘We’re like an endangered species’

You don’t have to fight to save a bar. You go there, have a drink or three, give them the cash and they’re saved. Well, if enough people do that they do.

As to the deeper point. So, lesbian bars are in decline. This being excellent. Being lesbian is no longer something tucked away in one of society’s backstreets. It’s now just one of those variations of being human. At which point special places for specific outcasts aren’t required – because of not being those specific outcasts from the rest of society.

Sure, a lesbian bar makes chance lesbian hook ups easier but then the same would be true of a bar that caters to redheads making redhead hook ups easier.

It’s even possible to use this as predictive. When the specific social subgroup no longer does cluster in special places but is dispersed across the normal range of social outlets then that subgroup is being perceived, societally, as being simply part of the norm, right?

DEAR DOLLY: ‘MY GIRLFRIEND HAS GIVEN UP DRINKING AND NOW JUDGES ME WHENEVER I HAVE A BEER’

George knew the answer:

“Sobriety just ain’t my way o’ life, if you don’t start drinking I’m gonna leave…….”

The row over the origins of champagne is about who invented the method of making the French wine sparkling, and popularised the effervescent drink.

Dom Perignon, a French Benedictine monk, is credited with champagne production in 1697, although his story is shrouded in myth. The claim that he called to his fellow monks: “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!” was invented for a late-19th century marketing campaign.

Bolstering the English case, it has also been claimed that Christopher Merrett, a West Country scientist, invented the second fermentation technique required to produce champagne, and the bottles to contain it, documenting his discoveries in 1662.

It’s the bottle that’s the crucial invention, not the second fermentation. Anyone familiar even with beer would know about second fermentations. It’s having a bottle that’s sound enough to be used to store something under pressure that’s important. Further, being able to make that regularly – that is, mass production of the bottle strong enough to contain the pressure.

That’s definitely an English invention. And yes, the bottles used to be exported from England to be filled and then returned.

This is all well known. Well, well known enough that I’ve read about it in some popular history or other so it must be pretty well known.

It’s even entirely logical – you can’t have bottled fizz until you’ve a bottle that can withstand fizz now, can you? So it’s got to be the bottle that’s the crucial invention.

Oxfordshire has unveiled plans to become the first place in England to ban smoking outside restaurants and offices.

In a bid to become “smoke free” by 2025, the county hopes to create more spaces where people feel “empowered” not to smoke.

Mirror meets Keir Starmer in pub as Labour leader battles Tories on Red Wall front line

Somewhere in the country there’s a landlord that will let ‘im in.