Category Archives: drink

They’ve got a little list.

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Leg-Iron wrote yesterday about the fate of non-smoking drinkers. I can only echo his sentiments. Did you really think that smokers were the only ones on the list? They were always coming for you next.

The indicators have been there for a little while, exactly the same thing that happened to smoking is happening to drinking now, except faster, because now they have a template to follow.

Boris outlawed drinking on the tube (although even as a militant smoker, I accept that smoking on the underground isn’t perhaps the smartest thing someone can do), all the alcohol ads carry the ‘please drink responsibly’ tag line now, the advertising of alcohol is restricted and banned in some areas across Europe. The health warnings, in the shape of the little how many (completely arbitrary and totally made up) units are contained within are now commonplace. It won’t be long until pictures of diseased livers, wrecked cars and some bloke looking terrified having woken up in bed with an ugly bird start turning up on bottles. Oh, it won’t just be Asda own brand alcopops, it’ll have to be on that very expensive bottle of château bottled burgundy as well. We’ve already got stories of adults being refused sale of alcohol because they once met a child and could perhaps set up some sort of intravenous drip system for the little tyke. Similarly, pregnant women have been asked to leave pubs because they’ve had a sip of someone’s drink. Then there’s the tax. It’ll not be long until people will be forced to go and drink outside for fear that they give people alcoholism through passive drinking, and don’t even get me started on third hand booze, that’ll give you cirrhosis.

The restrictions will continue to be rolled out, and it will all be for our own good.

Don’t drink? Don’t think it matters to you? Feel happy because the filthy smokers and boorish drinkers are finally being brought to heel? Well, good for you. How about food, do you eat any of that? Because the screw is being turned there as well. Just think of the progression against smoking and drinking. Now look at this story:

Tougher action – including taxing junk food – is needed by all governments if the obesity crisis is going to be tackled, experts say.

‘Ah, but I don’t eat nasty junk food, carry on.’ OK. Just remember, they started on cigar and pipe smokers first. They targeted the niteklub set and their drinking promos before going on to all the other drinkers. Do you really think they’ll stop at the kebab eaters?

They said changes in society meant it was getting harder for people to live healthy lives.

You see, this is how they think we think. They honestly believe that we’re unable to pass a branch of McDonald’s without nipping in for a Big Mac, and fries, and a milkshake, and some chicken nuggets. And an apple pie.

And an ice-cream.

Really, because they are so intellectually superior to us, because they are incapable of making a mistake it obviously follows that as we are inferior, we are unable to make a good decision.

Who decides what is a good and a poor decision? Well, they do of course. You think we mere mortals have the ability to make a judgement like that?

I was watching Sky News this morning and had to rewind it and make a transcript of what the chilling authoritarian and utter (and I apologise, I’ve made a conscious effort to cut back on swearing in my posts, but sometimes there’s no alternative) waste of fucking skin, Klim McPherson had to say:

“People know that obesity is a real problem. People don’t know as individuals what to do about it. Governments do know, as governments, what do about it.”

 

(speechless)

 

 

No, prole. You don’t know how to stop getting fat. Only government and very clever people can tell you how to do it. Don’t believe for one moment that you belong to you. You are a chattel, a possession, a slave. It is your job to work and hand over the results of your toil without question. You MUST pay for your healthcare, but then when you need care, forget it, you’re costing money. The fact that you’ve paid for it is immaterial, that money doesn’t belong to you, you disgusting little peasant. How dare you not take care of yourself? If you’re ill, how are the clever people supposed to survive and pontificate? All the time you’re ill, you’re not producing the cash they need.

These fuckers will not rest until we are all eating and drinking in huge refectories, lining up with a plastic tray to collect the menu that has been approved for us all. Well, not for us all, some will be eating venison with potatoes roasted in goose fat, they’ll have a nice pot au chocolat for dessert and a selection of fine wines. But that’s fine, because they know what they’re doing. Who do you think ‘they’ will be?

First they came for the smokers, and I didn’t speak out for I didn’t smoke. Then they came for the drinkers, but I said nothing as I was teetotal. Then they came for the wobble bottoms. . .

What’s it going to be?

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Is it me, or is it a mere coincedence that just as the weather turns nice and people walk around with smiles on their faces, this comes out to make sure we’re all good and miserable?

Drinking more than two alcoholic drinks a day can significantly increase the risk of some cancers – with at least 13,000 cases a year in the UK linked to drinking.

Oh, really? Forgive my cynical response, it is just that if you take all these ‘studies’ at face value pretty much everything will give you cancer and result in an agonising premature death.

“Our data show that many cancer cases could have been avoided if alcohol consumption is limited to two alcoholic drinks per day in men and one alcoholic drink per day in women, which are the recommendations of many health organisations,” the report’s authors said.

*deep sigh* I notice a disturbing lack of hard numbers there. ‘Many cases could have been avoided’? Come back to me with a definite number that would have been avoided, and how much those people drank, and how often, and I might start to show an interest.

“And even more cancer cases would be prevented if people reduced their alcohol intake to below recommended guidelines or stopped drinking alcohol at all.”

Oh for crying out loud. Can you bunch of miserable, grey, nannying, hectoring, pouting, righteous puritans not just fuck off and leave us the hell alone for just one day? Just one day out of the year? No? Thought not.

But which is it going to be? I’m a little confused. You can’t pass one day without hearing how doing, eating or drinking, well, pretty much anything, will kill us stone dead quicker than jumping in front of a train, and yet, we’re constantly told that we’re living longer than ever before, and we’re slowly bankrupting ourselves in the process.

‘Ahhh yes’, the righteous say, ‘but you’ll die.’

I’ll let you in on the worst kept secret in human history. We’re all going to die. I will, you will, the President of Mali, the lad or girl who delivers the freebie local paper, the bloke who does the vision mixing on Coronation Street, all of them, each and every one of us will die. It is one of the things we will never have control over. I’m thankful of it, immortality would be a fate worse than. . . well, you get the idea.

‘OK, but you’ll die horribly.’

I’ll let you into another secret, death rarely comes in an airy bedroom with the sun streaming in through the windows on freshly pressed linen with a collection of loving relatives surrounding the almost deceased. How often do you hear of someone who goes to bed at night a healthy person and just doesn’t wake up?

We all die of something, and from where I’m standing one cause is just as good (or bad) as another. Mother Wolfers was a geriatric nurse in the public and private sectors for many years. I used to go in to her nursing homes on occasion, it used to cheer up the old girls to have a young friendly face from time to time. Believe me, living to an advanced age is not a blessing. Spending your last few years, and it can go on for years and years, mourning a long gone partner with little hope of replacing that loving companionship with even the flimsiest facsimilie must be utterly miserable. Spending your twighlight years in a home where you are out of sight and mind of your family, occasional visits where you have nothing to say, and they just want to go, that is if you get visits at all, can only be heartbreaking. You’ll make new friends and see them disappear one by one, in the chair one day, gone the next, knowing that your turn is coming. It is little more than a waiting room, up out of bed, breakfast from a blender, sit in a chair with little or nothing to do, lunch from a blender, back to the chair, dinner, time for bed, lights out. One day it’ll really be lights out. Am I to wait for that and be thankful for it?

If you’re lucky you’ll drop your marbles. It is often the way in geriatrics (or palliative care as it is now called by the PC), either the CPU goes or the motor goes. You want the former, I’ve spoken to an old lady who was convinced I was a sailor and that the nurses were her working girls. She’d been a madam in the 50′s. She was gloriously happy. If the motor goes you’re trapped in a body that can only be escaped by one means. I remember another lovely old lady, totally dependent on diamorphine, fading away before my very eyes, totally bedridden but with a mind as sharp as a razor. It is the manner of the life that is tragic, not the death.

No. Life is to be lived, not spent cowering in a corner fearful that it will be running away. Life is running away, it has done since the moment of your conception, take that time, I beg of you, spend it recklessly, there are no instalment repayment plans, when your account is called in, it is called in in full. Take every opportunity, your life is yours, it does not belong to the politicians, the doctors, the priests, rabbis or imams. The academics and scientists have no claim over it, it is yours and yours alone.

Have that third drink. Have that rare steak. Have that cigarette or cigar. The reaper will get you, he is inescapable. The only way you can be ready for him is to have a bloody great long list when he asks ‘What did you do with your life, brief mortal?’ Can you imagine answering that question with, ‘Well, nothing really’?

Pay up! Pay up! And pay up again!

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Just image the scene. It is Sunday morning and from your bed you hear the letterbox opening and then the floor cracking as the behemoth of a Sunday paper hits the ground and shakes the house to its very foundations. You take the publication upstairs and prepare to immerse yourself in the six colour magazines and countless niche supplements, or, if you’re anything like Mrs. Snowolf, to half complete the crossword and sit the whole pile of papers on the shelf of the coffee table where in contravention of pretty much every physical law it will increase in mass and surface area for the next seven days.

I deviate. As you are about to sit down and enjoy your paper, the doorbell goes. It is the little scamp of a paperboy who has delivered the paper to you this morning (but not before 7am, see below), he is now explaining that the £1.20, £2.00, £2.50 or whatever you’ve paid is just for the delivery. As you have now chosen to read said paper, you have to pay again.

What would you do? Well, one of the first things you’d probably do would be to change your newspaper supplier.

But what if you couldn’t change? What if you HAD to buy your newspaper from this shop? What would you do then? Oh, you’d be free to purchase another paper from another outlet, but that wouldn’t absolve you of your obligation to buy your newspaper from this shop.

It would be an intolerable situation.

Yet. . .

My attention has been drawn to this old chestnut which is being wheeled out for the umpteenth time today:

Drunk people should pay for the treatment they receive at accident and emergency units, a patients’ group has said.

But they already HAVE paid for the treatment. There is no such thing as free healthcare, these people are obliged to pay for the service. You want to charge them again?

‘Ah, but Wolfers, these people are drunk’, I hear you say.

Right then, define drunk.

What the patients’ group wants to conjure up in your mind is an image of young men, Ben Sherman shirts, black slip on shoes, shaven headed or heavily gelled hair, brawling in the gutter. Let’s just suppose you’ve been out for the evening with your friends to a nice restaurant. You’re on foot, miss your step and break your ankle. You’ve had too much to drink to drive legally, but you’re not drunk as you would see it. Are you drunk then? Whose definition of ‘drunk’ is important? What is the test? Incoherence? Evidential breath test? Blood test? Opinion of the triage nurse?

The Scotland Patients Association said nurses and doctors were often abused by those who had overindulged in alcohol, particularly at weekends.

So, prosecute them for common assault then. If they break that little bit of law, which has served us well for, oooh, about a thousand years, then prosecute them. Give the magistrate the power to hand out a proper sentence, it doesn’t have to be custodial, but it does have to teach that abusing those who are trying to help you is the act of a clot, and this is what happens to clots.

They said the time had now come for such people to pay for services.

They HAVE!

Ms Watt said: “Anyone who has been abusing alcohol and can’t stand on their feet and is admitted to hospital at the weekend should pay towards their treatment.

They HAVE!

Ms Watt said drunk people should be charged for using ambulances and for the time of staff who treated them.

Oh for crying out loud, HELLO? HELLO? THEY ALREADY HAVE PAID.

Hang on. . .

can’t stand on their feet and is admitted to hospital at the weekend 

At the weekend? Of course, the hardened drinker will out necking it every night, do they not end up in the hospital during the week, or are they members of some loyalty card club?

If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes truth, it doesn’t matter if it is based in fact or not. The fact seems to have been forgotten that we all pay for the NHS, it is not, and never has been free.

By perpetuating the myth that it is run on fairy dust and sunny mornings it makes it easy to demonise people, and drinkers and smokers and the fat are easy prey. What next? A pursed mouth saying ‘Well, you chose to grow old’? An NHS that will offer treatment as long as you promise to never be ill?

Because people are told that the NHS is free they feel as if their health becomes the property of the state, or other ‘well meaning’ people (read: ‘bloody nosy interfering busybodies’). It results in rubbish like this:

Burgers and sausages have been banned from being sold to fans at Forest Green Rovers football club.

The move was introduced for players at the Blue Square Bet Premier club a few weeks ago but now the policy has been extended to the whole stadium.

What? Eh? Why? How? *Boggle*

The Gloucestershire club is owned by Dale Vince who is a vegan who runs green electricity company Ecotricity.

Oh, right. There’s an old joke in catering about how do you know when a vegan enters your restaurant? Don’t worry, he’ll let everyone know, very loudly, every five minutes. It’s a joke I like because it plays on the level of having a little crack at the self importance of the Righteous, whilst also working on the level of a fart gag.

Free-range poultry and fish from sustainable stocks will continue to be served.

Great, the Devizies Tree Hugging Display Team will also be giving a half time demonstration.

“We appreciate some will miss their burgers and sausages, but our catering staff are working hard on a range of tasty and interesting products to replace those that are no longer available.

Oh, joy. Thank you very much, Dale.

“We’re a country now where apparently chicken tikka masala is the most popular national dish. I think the old sausage bap won’t be much lamented.”

I think you’re about to learn a valuable lesson about market demand. Oh, there are those who will follow the club whoever is running it, this is how football survives, but you WILL lose supporters over this, and you will certainly lose revenue in the tea bar, revenue which no doubt helps bankroll the playing staff.

“Anybody that really needs it can bring a ham sandwich or something if they wish – that’s no problem.”

Can they? That’s bloody good of you, old chap. No pat downs at the turnstiles for meat and dairy produce then? Does this mean you won’t be coming around to inspect the contents of my fridge with a disapproving look on your puss?

Forest Green Rovers, enjoy the mocking from opposition fans. You deserve it.

Jeez, what is wrong with these people that they think they have the right to decide what your money is spent on, what access you are permitted to have to services the money you provided paid for and what you should and shouldn’t be eating? 

Oh, won’t somebody think of the children?

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Dick Puddlecote and Leg Iron have been banging this drum for some time now, it isn’t entirely clear which vice will be next, will it be eating or drinking? Perhaps the eaters and the drinkers will be played off against each other to ensure mutual destruction.

One thing is for certain, now the smokers have been dealt with, it is time to paint at least one other group as the evil, murdering architects of society’s downfall. Today it is the drinkers.

Children as young as five are contacting a charity helpline to talk about their parents drinking or using drugs.

Note the weasel words in there. Not about their parent or parents alcohol abuse or alcoholism, but just the act of drinking.

Of course there are parents that are alcoholic. Of course there are parents who are alcoholic who become abusive towards their partner. Of course there are parents who are alcoholic who become abusive towards their children. To pretend otherwise is stupid, blinkered and short-sighted.

Just go and read Inspector Gadget or Bystander. You’ll see plenty of evidence that courts will accept a sob story of alcoholism as a mitigating factor. It’s been an interesting tactic, stab someone who has broken into your house and is threatening you and yours and that mitigation will not hold as much water as the mitigation of ‘it was the drink wot made me do it’. It would seem from the above that the tide is slowly turning, the victim is being turned into the perp.

I for one think that is a good thing, ‘was pissed’ is no defence. Alcohol cannot be a shield to hide behind. But, and here’s the very big but, how many people who have a drink at any one time end up in court because they’ve acted like a clot? Very few.

Slowly, slowly the creep towards the denormalisation of drinkers has changed, almost inperceptably the pace has picked up, we’re not in the final sprint towards the finish line yet, but the signs are there.

Notice how the act of drinking is up there with the use of drugs? Smokers were painted as drug users a long time ago. The same brush is being loaded with tar for the drinkers now.

How best to apply that tar? Well, getting the kids as soon they enter school and tell them how any act of drinking is something to be frowned upon. Next year’s intake will be told how an act of drinking is to be objected to. The year after will be told how an act of drinking is something to be reported to nanny. Nanny will keep you safe.

I remember Childline being set up, I was a child myself when Esther and her teeth launched it way back when, I can still remember the jingle that advertised the phone number. As I remember, Childline was an independent service giving the kids the opportunity to speak to advisors on a range of subjects from sexual abuse to bullying.

I wasn’t aware that one of the worst fake charities out there, the NSPCC, had taken it over. I suppose the Righteous have struck again, we can’t have people helping without their say so and their all seeing guidance. Those people might make the wrong decisions. The Righteous are incapable of making mistakes. The Righteous are never wrong, the fault lies entirely with you.

Give the kids a bogeyman. Give the kids a friendly uncle or aunt to tell on the bogeyman. Give the kids a free method of doing it.

Give the kids a uniform, perhaps a badge for doing the right thing.

1984, anyone?

The drinkers still think it won’t happen to them. They’re going to very disappointed and very, very angry. But it won’t matter, no one will listen to them. They are untermensch, after all.

UPDATE

I’ve just seen this over at Dick’s.

I’ll be Kevin Costner, you can be Sean Connery.

The One That Says ‘Really? Is That True?’. . .

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It isn’t just in this country where control freakery runs wild.

Turkey has today brought in a smoking ban in its bars, restaurants etc, etc. I’m glad to see that the problems of human rights abuses, censorship of the press etc, have been sorted out to make this such an important issue in the country.

In Italy, the northern city of Milan (a particular favourite of mine) has had a smoking ban for a few years now along with the rest of the country. The fines for breaking this ban are quite steep and it is adhered to. However, as we’ve seen in the UK, once one evil is removed, another great evil is selected for campaigning against. We must be saved, it is for our own good.

Nanny Beeb is reporting that:

Milan has banned the consumption and sale of alcohol to young teenagers in an effort to curb binge-drinking. Parents of children under the age of 16 caught drinking wine or spirits will be liable to heavy fines of up to 500 Euros ($700;£450).

And that is where the theory falls down. Under 16 and drinking wine or spirits? That’s a fine for your parents. End of story. Now if that were the case in this country, the police would be out in force on Sundays, undercover in churches, waiting for the communion.

When I was a teenager, around 15-16, the pub visiting started in earnest. A group of us started. In one particular pub. Not because the licencee had a rather laissez-faire attitude towards the laws regarding the sale of alcohol, although he did. Not because we knew we could get served alcohol in there with the minimum of hassle, although we could. But because we knew the rules surrounding drinking in this establishment. 1: He wouldn’t serve you spirits. Right out. Beer and cider only, it was his pub and if you didn’t like it, you could piss off outside into the cold and rain. 2: Bloody behave yourself. If you didn’t, you were out, never to return. 3: When he said you’d had sufficient, you’d had sufficient and you would say good evening and go home.

This landlord took the opinion that we’d be drinking anyway, and it was better to do it in an environment where there were boundaries and people looking out for each other, rather than a load of teenagers with no experience getting well and truly Flintoffed on the street. I was certainly looked well over 18 by the time I was 16, not an eyelid would have been batted had I walked into the off licence and picked up vodka and special brew, and then my friends and I could have sat on the recreation ground and got absolutely shitfaced. We didn’t, we went to this pub (now sadly no longer) instead. I even recall serving police officers amongst the Friday night crowd (and it was only Friday nights when this happened) the local old bill knew the score.

Of course these days the old sod would have lost his licence, a good deal of money and probably his liberty. Us kids would probably have found ourselves sat in front of social workers and attending alcohol counselling classes. The irony is of course, that we learned a good deal more about how to handle and respect alcohol when in that pub than we would ever have by being forced to attend some 2 day course with a hard-hitting video and *gulp* role-play.

The police knew that we were in there, they knew that we were drinking, they also knew they never got called out to a fight, to a case of vandalism, they never saw an ambulance outside, and never had to scoop some barely alive wreck off the pavement at closing time. They also knew that to close this place down, where there were no problems, would mean that next Friday night, there would be kids getting pissed up on the Rec.

If you’re going to prohibit the sale of alcohol to some groups, it makes much more sense to do it on the basis of attitude rather than age. But we can’t do that. So it is age. And still people don’t like it, they don’t like the sale of alcohol at all, getting rid of tobacco was so easy, surely we could do the same again, with drink? But how?

First we must think of the Children, have they done this in Milan? Check.

However the Children cannot be held responsible. Someone else will carry the can. Is this in place in Milan? Check.

Excellent. Now we need some astonishing, unqualified statistic to make everyone throw their hands in the air. Do we have one of those?

A third of 11-year-olds in the city have alcohol related problems.

What? A third? Right, a little guessing maths. Milan is a metropolitan area with a population of 7.4 million. According to the CIA Factbook, 0-14 year olds make up 13.5% of the national population of Italy. So we’ll assume that is a happy average for each commune, that means 999,000 kids below 14 in ‘Greater’ Milan. So to get a rough guess, let’s assume that the birth rate has been constant for the last 14 years, that means around 71,300 11 year olds.

So you’re telling us that 23,000 11 year olds have alcohol related problems? That is either bullshit, or the biggest collection of juvenile alcoholics in the world, ever. I doubt that a third of 11 year olds are piss heads in Milan. Or anywhere.

But the authorities are deeply concerned about the increase in consumption of alcohol by children as young as 11 in the country’s industrial and financial capital.

Ahhhh, so the mere consumption counts as a ‘problem’, does it? What even in their own home? With their parents? Are the Carabineri to kick down doors and cart parents off for introducing alcohol to their kids in a responsible and measured fashion?

A national law banning the sale of alcohol to under-16s is only loosely enforced, as Italian families are used to sometimes giving young children a teaspoon of wine as a family party treat.

A teaspoon? Oh, how wonderfully twee.

In past centuries, Italian children would sometimes even be given wine to drink in preference to water which was often polluted.

No shit. Not just in Italy, shit for brains. We did it with beer and cider. On account of the fact that the climate has not often been warm enough to grow decent enough grapes for wine.

And here’s the social engineering kicker. The one that tells you that all has, is and will be changing.

There has been a storm of protest by bar owners who refuse to act as alcohol police for young people.

But changing social customs mean that old easy-going attitudes towards consumption of alcohol in Italy will have to change. (Trans: But increasing political willy waving means we have to do something to justify our huge salaries, so we’re changing this, and you’d better play ball, or else.)

It’s not just us.