The Boss

I saw Bruce Springsteen play the first ever show at Arsenal's Emirates on Friday night, and a fine show it was.

I'd meant to pack my hip flask so I could thumb my nose at Boris Johnson and his Tube booze ban on the way like these civil rights activists did yesterday. I didn't make it home to get changed and pick it up before I headed North however, as I was stuck in the office dealing with the fallout of SQL injection attacks. They are far more insidious and anti-social than a crafty snifter on public transport.

Whatever happened to the Bullingdon Club spirit, old man?

Scoldilocks

Millions of middle-class drinkers putting health at risk with evening tipple

This suggests they do not believe they are drinking too much and that simply having a large glass or two of wine each evening is an acceptable way to unwind after a stressful day at work.

I bet history will prove the millions right and the Cassandras wrong.

I also drink to Obama who - I wager - might agree over a ciggie and a sharpener at the end of a hard day.

Prodnose: Tobacco, booze and now gambling?
Myself: I may be drunk but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.

Catch the Wind

Trevor Bayliss came over to the mills yesterday to launch the Quiet Revolution wind turbine that now powers the Colour House Theatre.

Mark Marlowe was playing piano, and Bob Brunning bass in the quartet that jammed on "The Windmills of Your Mind" to celebrate the happy event.

It can be fun working here.

They had already set out the free booze when The Profit Burglar and I went over to check out proceedings at 11:30. The sun being over the yardarm, we indulged.

SUN IS OVER THE YARDARM - "(time for happy hour to begin). This expression is thought to have its origins in an officers' custom aboard ships sailing in the north Atlantic. In those latitudes, the sun would rise above the upper yards - the horizontal spars mounted on the masts, from which squaresails were hung - around 11 a.m. Since this coincided with the forenoon 'stand easy,' officers would take advantage of the break to go below for their first tot of spirits for the day.

There was a hush of expectation as the admiral adjusted his spectacles, produced a sheaf of papers from an attaché case, and began to read the following:

'By the might of the Navy our Empire was built up. By the might of the Navy it must be protected. Britannia did not rise from out the azure merely to sink back into it again. The salt is in our blood, and -'

By this time the court was filled with wild cheering, and several ladies waved small Union jacks.

MR JUSTICE COCKLECARROT. Yes, yes, Sir Ewart, but what has this to do with the case?

COCKLECARROT. Really, I shall have to clear the court if this goes on.

MR SNAPDRIVER. I beg leave to enter a residuum, with jaggidge.

COCKLECARROT. Don't talk rubbish.

MR SNAPDRIVER. Now., Sir Ewart, do you know these dwarfs?

SIR EWART. Dwarfs or no dwarfs, Britannia's bulwarks are her great ships. [Cheers.]

See how they churn the farthest seas, their enormous prows cleaving-

MR SNAPDRIVER. Please, please Sir Ewart, try to confine your remarks to the matter in hand. Do you or do you not know these dwarfs?

SIR EWART. I should be sorry to allow my acquaintanceship with dwarfs, giants, or anyone else to distract my attention from Britain's, needs today, a stronger Fleet [Cheers.] Britannia, Mother of Ships, Queen of the Deep, and-

COCKLECARROT. Mr Snapdriver, why was this witness ever called?

MR SNAPDRIVER. It was a subpoena.

When a man is tired of London

 Tooting Market with Rebecca's Steve last night for what is becoming (passim) a semi-regular, once a month or so, sundowner.

As I was walking up from the 'Wood I noticed a place called "Smoke & Salt" that I don't remember seeing before so I had a gander at the menu in the window. The £50 a head Six-Course Sharing Menu, looks like one for the to-do list some time when my brother John is up on a visit.

Arriving at the Broadway five or ten early, I decided to take a detour around the Broadway Market. That is no slouch in the restaurant and bar stakes either (herewith) for all that its web developers are slouches in both the SSL certificate and giving different parts of the site different URLs departments.

This time at the distinct Tooting Market,  rather than at the Secret Bar I met Steve in essentially communal seating in the belly of the beast from where we could strike out to an assortment of liquor vendors.

After about 45 minutes of that we went and did the same at Broadway Market. He dined on Greek food at Pittagoras. I stayed on the booze while offering moral support.

Tooting should be in my life more.

Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga

I New Year resolved to make a start on This Thing Of Darkness this morning. I've been a bit intimidated by it because it is so rare these days to see a book weighing in at nearly 750 pages that doesn't involve dragons, elves, runes and quests.

As I cracked the spine, I noticed that Harry Thompson also wrote a Biography of Peter Cookthat I read and rated highly years ago. I'm a huge admirer of Cook (see Icons passim) who will have been dead for twelve years a week from tomorrow. For all the jokes and fun, Cook's story is a tragedy. The book charts his giddy precocious rise, and the precipitous drink-fuelled fall that ended in his death.

I remember telling Kim about the book back in 1998.

"It is heart breaking to read the story of a talented man throwing his life away through booze," I said.

"Really?" she trilled innocently. "Did someone give the book to you as a present?"

Touche. If there is anything worse than being misunderstood by a woman, it is being understood by a woman.

(P.S. John McWhorter explains the peculiar title of this post here.)

Don’t throw up on the carpet. It’s new.

I finished a 30 day challenge at Hot Bikram Yoga's Balham studio yesterday. That's thirty consecutive days of one and a half hours of yoga sessions in a humid room heated to 40 degrees Celsius.

I started it because I had hurt my left elbow in the gym and I wanted to give it a rest from weights. In the first week, I put out my back out rushing Standing Separate Leg Head to Knee Pose. In the second week I got, what I took to be, gout in my left big toe triggered by dehydration and what may euphemistically be described as lifestyle choices (diet and booze). By this time, it was taking me twenty minutes to get out of bed before I could leave for the 6:30am class, and I couldn't hobble over a pedestrian crossing before the light turned red again.

I remember in this semi invalid period watching some other people in the full expression of Standing Separate Leg Stretching Pose. I had no idea we were attempting something that looked so extreme, or indeed that human beings could actually do it.

There is a strange sense in which, if you are committed to doing something every day, there is no rush, and for the last few weeks it has all been on the up. (Apart from one evening where I took a class, ate dinner at 9pm, found that Enter the Dragon was playing at 10pm on the TV, watched it over a wine box, and still took myself off to Balham at six thirty the next morning. That wasn't pretty.)

Then yesterday, as I was looking forward to finishing and chucking it in for a while, I finally got my head turned correctly in triangle pose found myself thinking, "I can probably get the hang of this if I do it forever."

Is that all there is?

We went along to St Pancras for the Foodie Fortnight last night. It was a bit of non-event to be brutally frank, and we didn't end up seeing anything at all.

Ennui levels are also illustrated by the fact that we could hear the arc discharge from Hundreds flee in Eurostar panic as live cable collapses and couldn't even be bothered to find out what was going on with that.

Is that all there is, is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

The Meyerowitz Stories

John thinks that we should take the old man out for a drink when I am back this weekend. It was good for him to get out of the home on Sunday, and also means a collective-noun of Brownes aren't crowding into his room or infesting communal spaces to the bemusement of others.

Candidate establishments as far as I can see are

• The Four Elms (the nearest)
• The Royal Oak (not much further away while featuring Peerless Jim Driscoll and Joe Erskine boxing anecdotes and memorabilia)
• The Claude (reachable and where I have been meeting up with Tim and Phil for the last year of a Friday when I am back)

I have watched Kodachrome (Icons passim) on Netflix now. Given Dustin Hoffman's appalling ("Dad, what the fugg!) public booze-snatching behaviour in the trailer I think that the Ageing-Curmudgeon-Confronts-Mortality movie baton can be safely passed on to The Meyerowitz Stories.

English Riots

The BBC has instructed presenters to refer to "English" instead of "UK" riots in case they upset residents of other regions.

In its latest dictum on how to cover the unrest, the corporation said it was changing policy "in recognition of the sensitivities involved for people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland".

Quite right too.

Why not come along to AbbeyFest tonight? It is only a matter of a couple of hundred yards or so from the burned out Tandem Centre but the show goes on.

In the words of the incomparable Peggy Lee:

I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames.
And when it was all over I said to myself, "Is that all there is to a fire?"

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

L'Affaire Polanski

Myself (studiously gender neutral): Plying a child with booze and ludes all the better to munch on budding genitalia and penetrate thirteen year old sphincter is a criminal act that should attract punishment from authority and contempt from society.

Prodnose: You won't be signing Thierry Fremaux's petition then?

Myself (reverting to smutty type after an uncharateristic serious statement): If my refusal to have it shoved down my throat means I can't widen the circle of my friends, so be it.

Eros and Thanatos

I met up with quite a few of my peers from the old days back in Wales over the Christmas and New Year break. Satisying as it was to note that I was probably trimmer and more limber than is average for my contemporaries, I couldn't help but notice, as we were drinking in rounds, that I certainly conistently put more booze away more quickly than average as well.

I therefore call upon you to witness to the fact that I am giving up the demon drink for January.

Prodnose: That's not very erotic.
Welsh Born (with considerable dignity): I beg your pardon.
Prodnose: The news that you are going on the wagon for a month; what has Eros to do with it? Your title is a come-on hinting at carnality.
Welsh Born: Dunderhead! According to Sigmund Freud, humans have a life instinct - which he named 'Eros' - and a death drive, which is commonly called (though not by Freud himself) 'Thanatos'. This postulated death drive allegedly compels humans to engage in self-destructive acts. I used the title, a tad melodramatically I'll grant you, to compare and contrast my daily habit of training and then undoing my good work in the pub. Better people than you enjoy these classical references. Did you think I meant country matters?
Prodnose (looking like a fool): Uh no. I mean yes. I see.
Welsh Born (protesting too much): I suppose I could have used Apollo and Dionysus in the sense that Nietzsche uses the terms Apollonian and Dionysian in The Birth of Tradgedy: Apollo, as the sun-god, represents light, clarity, and bench presses, whereas Dionysus, as the wine-god, represents drunkenness and ecstasy.
Prodnose et al: ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Welsh Born (astride hobby horse): The Dionysian, which corresponds roughly to Schopenhauer's conception of Will, is directly opposed to the Apollonian, which corresponds to Schopenhauer's principium individuationis ...........................

You say you want a resolution, well you know

Dear Universe,

I weighed thirteen stone and ten pounds this morning.

On my birthday in June I would like to weigh twelve stone dead.

Further, I would like to do this without cutting down on booze or food.

Can you fix it for me?

All the best,

Nick

Cities in Acts

 

I found the map above on this page by a Jill Marshall, yesterday after my strange (possibly booze inspired) conflation of the Arabian Nights and the Acts of the Apostles yesterday He got around that St Paul didn't he.

I would love to see a similar Decameron\Don Quixote\1,001 Nights map.

Allez Les Blues, Les Boos, Les Booze

Schadenfreude's a German word I'll grant you, but still the mot juste, my French friends, for how I felt yesterday when all your compatriots in the Stade de France started giving President Macron the bird at the Rugby World Cup opening ceremony yesterday.

The consensus on this side of the channel seems to be that it was because citizens are still angry about controversial pension reforms, but I - perhaps being over optimistic about the public's interest in a wider world - wonder.

The Spectacularlyboring:

How Africa turned on France

Repeated humiliations at the hands of its ex-colonies are tarnishing France’s international image

On Wednesday last week, a new Gabonese military junta installed itself, having ousted President Ali Bongo, whose family have ruled the country since 1967. Just two days earlier, the French president Emmanuel Macron gave a speech to his ambassadors in which he spoke of an “epidemic of putschs” in what was formerly France’s greatest sphere of post-colonial influence.

Although most of these states have been independent for decades, Paris kept them firmly in the French orbit

There have now been six coups d’état in francophone sub-Saharan Africa in three years — Mali, Chad, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger and now the small but wealthy nation of Gabon. France’s whole African policy is on the skids and there will be trepidation in other presidential palaces, such as those of ninety-year-old Paul Biya in Cameroon and seventy-nine-year-old Denis Sassou Nguesso in Congo.

What Macron did not say was that a common feature of most of these overthrows has been anti-French sentiment. Nor did anyone expect him to acknowledge what is stated widely: that this is the end of Françafrique and with it the long-delayed end of France’s imperial adventure.

Although most of these francophone states have been independent for decades, Paris managed to keep them firmly in the French orbit. The benefits were substantial on both sides. Largely corrupt regimes saw their leaders, family and descendants maintained in power by benevolent French diplomatic, financial and military agreements. African leaders could siphon off wealth to French banks and property investments, access high-level Parisian medical facilities, and remain confident of their invulnerability because of the presence of French troop garrisons.

... read on ...

Last Night on Earth

I went to see a charity performance of War Horse in the West End. (You should go and see it as well. It is extraordinary.)

On the way home - and well past midnight - I popped into the Tesco Express for the eggs, bread and milk I would need when I woke up. There was a dread-locked skateboarder in front of me in the queue buying two bottles of wine. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a 24 hour hour booze sale license, but it seems they've got one.

Progress over the last century?

Binge Thinking

It turns out the fall of man probably didn't begin with an apple. More likely, it was a handful of mushy figs that first led humankind astray.

Here is how the story likely began -- a prehistoric human picked up some dropped fruit from the ground and popped it unsuspectingly into his or her mouth. The first effect was nothing more than an agreeably bittersweet flavor spreading across the palate. But as alcohol entered the bloodstream, the brain started sending out a new message -- whatever that was, I want more of it!

Humankind's first encounters with alcohol in the form of fermented fruit probably occurred in just such an accidental fashion. But once they were familiar with the effect, archaeologist Patrick McGovern believes, humans stopped at nothing in their pursuit of frequent intoxication.

A secure supply of alcohol appears to have been part of the human community's basic requirements much earlier than was long believed. As early as around 9,000 years ago, long before the invention of the wheel, inhabitants of the Neolithic village Jiahu in China were brewing a type of mead with an alcohol content of 10 percent, McGovern discovered recently.

I'm very tempted to bang out some load of old rubbish claiming we have evolved to booze.

Ducks in a row

 I have finally managed to get our group trip to Get Up Stand Up, the Bob Marley musical sorted though it is quite different from the original plan (Icons passim).

The tickets are for the evening of February 5th. "What?" I hear you cry. "That is the first weekend of the Six Nations!" (Shorely shome mishtake; Ed.)

Breaks down like this:

Ireland Wales kicks off the tournament at quarter past two in the afternoon in Dublin. All of us (plus Gareth the rugby gnome, my daffodil head dress, my half Wales half Ireland rugby jersey, and my DNA results) can watch the game in the Standard (180 High Street Colliers Wood, London SW19 2BN).

Corleone (186A High Street Colliers Wood London SW19 2BN) is open from noon on Saturday. We can eat pizza there after the game, which will stop me from getting off my head as history proves that once I have had a meal I can't booze any more.

It is only 25 minutes from Colliers Wood to Leicester Square on the Northern Line.

If we get on the tube a little after six, we will get to the Lyric Theatre (Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 7ES) in plenty of time for a 7:30 show.

I lovers rock it when a plan comes together.

Old Ruts Kenya

Anyone would think it was the weekend already!

The world is a stage for these children after the confidence and joy @kingsrugbyKE instills in them 🕺😎@maroitoje @borispomroy @victoriahrush pic.twitter.com/wdqYAFtjQr

— The Atlas Foundation (@theatlascharity) July 26, 2022

A quick pint in the Standard straight after work yesterday with the son and heir, followed by a pizza in Corleone. (No booze for Ben who was off to the gym eightish.)

I forgot to tell him that Maro Itoje had been out to visit Old Ruts Kenya. The jerseys are unmistakable; what a wonderful club the Ruts are. I was never happier than when I was watching him playing for them as a boy on Sunday mornings.

Hair of the Dog

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

I finished reading "The Colour of a Dog Running Away" this morning through the fog of a gentleman's head occasioned by last night's AbbeyFest, and reflected that this was the first book I've read since Sean's "Deadwater" in which the central character drinks as much as, if not more than, me. What is it with Welsh authors and protagonists and booze?

I can't say much about the book pre el grupo meeting, but it certainly contains a scene worthy of a Bad Sex in Fiction Award; whenever I read about tongues "flickering" I get a mental image of monitor lizards rather than any sort of erotic charge.

Welsh fiction is a bibulously libidinous bibliography, and if your tongue can twist that without tripping (or flickering) you are not drunk.

FAQ

1. How is it made?
Crabbie’s Alcoholic Ginger Beer is made from a fermented ginger base. Crabbie’s is made with real Ginger powder and root extract by steeping for 6 weeks, to infuse the liquid with a real ginger flavour. The Crabbie’s recipe is a traditional and guarded one with four 'secret' ingredients added to it.

The product is all natural in terms of its flavoring components.


2. What is the ABV?
4% ABV

3. Who makes it?
Crabbies is still made in Scotland but is wholly owned by Halewood International – who are based in Huyton

4. How many units of Alcohol are there in a 500ml bottle?
2 Units


5. What supermarkets/ stores are stocking Crabbie’s?
Waitrose, Sainsbury, Morrison’s, Booths, Netto, Bargain Booze, Nisa, Select & Save, Spar (Appleby Westward, capper, James Hall) & Botterills (Scotland).

6. Is it vegetarian ?
No

7. Is it gluten free ?
Yes


8. What pubs/managed bars/ bar chains are stocking it?
JD Wetherspoons, Mitchells and Butlers, Marstons, Belhaven Pub company, Yates, Hogshead and many independent bars.

9. What wholesalers/cash & carry’s can I buy from?
Nationally available through Bookers, Matthew Clarke, Classic Drinks, St. Austell Brewery, Parfetts, Batleys, Bestway, Bellevue, LWC, Makro, JW Filshill, United Wholesale, Hyperama, AF Blakemore, Inbev, Global Cash & carry, Morcambe Bay Wines, Molson Coors, HB Clark, Goldspot Cash & carry & many many more.