March 8th, 2010
The tide of scare stories in the press about alcohol has been temporarily stemmed by reports, first mentioned in the Sunday Times, of a study in Boston (the US one) that suggested that alcohol isn’t actually as fattening as commonly assumed — for women anyway. Alcohol contains a lot of energy and it had been assumed that any excess in the body was converted into fat, as with any other foodstuff. However, it’s now hypothesised that regular drinkers’ livers process energy from alcohol in a more complex way than previously thought and that much excess energy is turned to heat, not fat. So the argument goes that alcohol is not as fattening as its calorie count might suggest.
A couple of pieces of anecdotal evidence might support this. One is that while there are many CAMRA types who have large beer bellies, they’re probably not as large as their calorie intake might lead one to believe. A moderately heavy ale drinker might drink twenty pints a week — at a couple of hundred calories a go that’s four thousand extra calories — almost the equivalent of two days worth of energy for an adult male — or about 15 Mars bars a week. Most drinkers in this category take a surprisingly long time — several years — to develop a belly. I’ve also been on an alcohol reduction drive recently and have expected the weight to fall off. Even allowing for my new found substitute of chocolate digestives, I’ve not seen my weight plummeting to the extent that the shortfall in calories might suggest. And also there are plenty of women wine drinkers, as the study suggests, who aren’t anorexics but don’t put on the vast amounts of extra weight that the calorie content alone of the wine might suggest.
However, I don’t subscribe to the point of view that’s current in some drinking circles that beer is entirely unfattening and it’s the fondness for curries and takeaways that it creates which is wholly responsible for bellies.
This article in the Daily Mail summarises the various healthy effects that have been scientifically proven for a number of drinks — from red wine to beer via Baileys, gin, cider and others. It has to be added that the overall negative health effects of alcohol aren’t included but these generally tend not to be pronounced at moderate levels anyway. Beer is revealed as being a particularly nutrient-rich drink, with four pints giving an adult’s complete daily intake of folate. There’s even a study that purports to dismiss the causative effect of beer on large bellies.
Tags: alcohol, Beer, bellies, calories, health fascists, wine
Posted in Beer | No Comments »
March 5th, 2010
I saw my first bumblebee of the spring today — fortunately in our garden buzzing around the snowdrops and crocuses I’ve planted. The second came hot on its heels — in the garden of the Carriers’ Arms, Watlington, attracted again by crocuses. The Carriers’ Arms is a lovely, friendly little pub — stuffed full of old, country types on a Friday lunchtime. It’s out of our CAMRA branch area, unfortunately, but we always pitch up there on a Wednesday in mid July to have our traditional Aunt Sally practice. It’s usually a lovely balmy evening — now the evenings are becoming lighter I’m more easily able to imagine it after this miserable, cold winter.
(At this time of year, when we’re getting close to the equinox the day length changes much more rapidly than nearer either solstice — so we’ll see a huge change over the next few weeks in light evenings even discounting the clocks going forward.)
Tags: bees, day length, solstice, Spring
Posted in Meaning of Life | No Comments »
March 2nd, 2010
Either the top BBC management are incredibly stupid or they’re trying to be too clever by half — and, quite possibly, they’re both. Why on earth do they think that axing BBC Radio 6 and the Asian Network is a strategic course of action?
By its charter, the BBC has to primarily cover public service obligations that commercial broadcasters arguably won’t undertake but it also feels it can’t be too elitist if it’s levying a regressive tax of £130 per household for its services. Interestingly, the range of programming on channels like Sky Arts and, to a lesser extent, Classic FM and many US cable channels like HBO shows that it’s possible to produce commercial broadcasting that doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence. In fact the most crass, dumbest programming that can be viewed on any remotely mainstream channel (such as on Freeview) is BBC3 – inspiration of gems like ‘F*ck Off I’m Ginger’, ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’, patronising rubbish snippets of news presented by ‘cool’ presenters who no doubt got the job through their father’s connections down the lodge, repeats of ‘Eastenders’, various programmes where people film their genitals for an hour, ego-trip hagiographies of BBC programme makers (‘Dr Who Confidential’) and where the only half-decent programming is destined for BBC2 anyway. It’s almost entirely absolute total rubbish but is considered inviolable by the idiotic BBC management as it’s targeted at the sacred Yoof market — people who the BBC commissioners completely fail to understand despite their obsessive pursuit of the demographic. You have to end up watching Stag Party Channel on Sky at midnight on a Friday to see anything equivalently witless to the general rubbish pumped out by BBC3.
So this expensive pile of insulting crap remains untouchable whereas a couple of cheap radio stations that serve less fashionable demographics are to be wiped from the schedules. I’m not sure what the Asian Network has done to offend the BBC management so much. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it but it appears to be a more public service orientated station than its untouched equivalent — 1Extra. This would appear from its publicity to be focused on the sort of music that Radio One provides quite a substantial outlet for and pirate stations in London even more so – and it seems to address a far narrower audience than something generic like the Asian Network. 6 Music falls down because it’s meant to serve those too grown up for Radio One (surely anyone over about 13?) and those not old enough for Radio 2 (over 35s apparently). I thought the targeting of those two stations was simpler — Radio One is for single people and Radio 2 for marrieds or equivalents (just listen to any dedication that comes in on Radio 2 — it always mentions a wonderful spouse). At heart it’s a fairly serious music station, despite being hijacked by the egos of ‘look at me I’m a rising star’ merchants like George Lamb or that Lauren Laverne, 6 Music is playing the sort of slightly less commercial music that a public service broadcaster ought to play and the last thing that should happen is it to be closed down. Radio One is far harder to justify, as is Radio Two.
People have speculated the whole thing is a cynical exercise in creating a grass-roots movement to ’save’ 6 Music — perhaps the BBC realised that the crass stations they want to preserve like Radio One and BBC3 wouldn’t generate such almost universal sympathy and goodwill? Yet, if they’ve been cynical enough to do this, they’ve only just drawn further attention to the rubbish that they’ve been too weak to consider touching.
All I can say is that they’d better not even hint that they’re threatening BBC4.
Tags: 6 Music, BBC, BBC3, BBC4, cuts, demographics, idiocy, management, radio 2, Radio One
Posted in Media | 1 Comment »
March 2nd, 2010
The poll in the Sunday Times that gave the Tories a lead of only two points is a wake up call for everyone with an interest in politics. It is a very damning verdict on the competence of Cameron and also shows the lasting hostility to the Tories nearly 20 years after their removal of Thatcher’s divisive influence. I have a theory that Thatcher’s worst legacy was to leave an embittered and deeply politicised academic and cultural establishment which became receptive to the abhorrent and cynical use of political correctness (for want of a better description) as a neo-Stalinist tool of power and manipulation that has been the most insidious hallmark of New Labour — something that will wreak far more long-lasting damage to the country (IMHO) than anything Thatcher did.
This fairly superficial embitterdness towards the Tories seems to suggest that there isn’t the sort of popular acclaim for removing this clapped-out disgrace of an administration that there was with Major in 1997 — ironically a government now which seems to have been the most effective of the last 50 years (so much for the threat of hung parliaments). Even so, I think the whole country would want to see Cameron and company ritually disembowelled if they wake up the morning after a general election to see Brown’s psychotic grin as he walks back into Number Ten — no doubt with Alistair Darling, James Purnell, Caroline Flint and the rest on their way to the Gulag as he preaches about a listening government of all the talents.
Almost all Labour MPs seem to realise it’s in their best interests for Brown to lose by a small majority so they can cast him out to howl impotently with his forces of hell (Balls) and that they could look forward to a fairly new election with a leader who’s a member of the human race. Personally I’d consider voting for a Labour Party led by Darling — the only one with any guts shown in the last couple of years.
There are really two words that describe Cameron’s biggest mistake — George Osborne. Bad enough that Cameron is an Eton toff but at least he presents a semblance of humanity. Osborne both looks and acts irredeemably like a complete anachronism and irrelevance to the vast majority of the voting public — an image of the Tory party that goes back to Douglas Home and Eden. He reminds me of that awful upper-class ventriloquists dummy that Ray Alan (remember him) used to turn up with on dire 70s variety shows — mind you the dummy showed more independence of thought and character than most Labour MPs.
I’ll be disenfranchised — voting in Bercow’s constituency so no Labour, Tories or Lib Dem candidates. Should UKIP stand I certainly wouldn’t vote for them but I’m hoping the Greens put someone up. While I disagree strongly with a lot of their practical policies, I have great sympathy with their basic premise — that global capital is a rapacious monster that’s defiling and destroying the world for the benefit of few but the very richest elites — which makes it bizarre that Brown and Blair so worshipped it.
I also like the practical application of green principles — protecting nature, growning your own and so on and I took delivery of a box full of seed potato and onion sets yesterday to prove it. Give a man a potato and you feed him a bag of crisps, give him a seed potato and some soil and (in my case) you get the magic of digging up a few knobbly organic specimens and you give the slugs a feast.
Tags: David Cameron, election, global capital, Gordon Brown, government, Green Party, New Labour, opinion polls, political correctness, politicians, stupidity, Thatcher
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 3 Comments »
February 28th, 2010
…it’s a job creation scheme for gold medal winning athletes from years ago. The Winter Olympics is a case in point. The main qualification seems to be respectable and middle-class rather than to know anything much about the sport. I’m used to people like Sue Barker and Gary Lineker presenting programmes and the likes of Steve Cram do a reasonable job presenting and Matthew Pinsent makes a relatively enthusiastic reporter but this Winter Olympics seems to have the medal winning presenters and reporters crossing the liminal zone into commentator and pundit territory. Therefore Matthew Pinsent has been volunteering his expertise on both curling and ice hockey. He’s a nice chap (I’ve even held one of his gold medals at a corporate event) but I wonder how much more he knows about these sports than any viewer who’s read the papers and watched a bit of it on television. I guess the BBC would argue that he has a unique insight into the psychologyof the medal winning athletes — but that argument is utterly self-defeating because if none of the audience thought they had an ability to try and imagine what it’s like to win gold then the viewing figures would probably be cut by about 95%.
Tags: BBC, experts, Matthew Pinsent, middle classes, Winter Olympics
Posted in Media | No Comments »
February 19th, 2010
The Clerk's Well, Farringdon
I’ve recently become quite fascinated by the hidden geography of London — one of the most interesting aspects of which is the concealment of various rivers that flow through the capital. The largest of these is the River Fleet (as in Fleet Street) which rises on Hampstead Heath and flows via Camden, King’s Cross, Clerkenwell and Farringdon to meet the Thames at Blackfriars. For almost all its length the Fleet is now culverted into a storm-relief sewer. Nevertheless, the shape of the valley is quite distinct from various vantage points. One is from near the British Library, looking down towards King’s Cross station. Another is from Farringdon Road, just north of Farringdon station where a wide river valley can easily be imagined — and apparently two or three hundred years ago this was an area that was still fairly rural on the edge of the City and was used as a place to water livestock that were driven to Smithfield Market.
This is now the very trendy area of Clerkenwell, which takes its name from access to the water found in the Fleet Valley. The name derives from a well, known as ‘the Clerk’s Well’ which dates back to 1140. The well can still be seen as it’s incorporated into a modern office building (14-16 Farringdon Lane) which has a very discreet display that can be seen through some plate glass windows. A pump was added to the well in 1800 and this is commemorated in a plaque which still can be seen on the wall above the well. I got a grainy photo of the plaque. It was a bit too dark to photograph the well but its stone rim can be clearly seen.
Tags: Clerkenwell, Farringdon, hidden rivers, london
Posted in Travel | No Comments »
February 19th, 2010
Apparently that’s Paloma Faith’s ‘life motto’ as reported in an interview in ‘The Independent’. I like the general sentiment of the comment — similar to lots of exhortations to hard work and so on — but I like the phrase mainly because a creative writing tutor once marked me down because I wrote a line in a screenplay where a female character (about Paloma Faith’s age) says the word ‘tw*t’ (only asterisking this out so it doesn’t get so easily indexed by p*rn websites). She said that a woman would never use such a word!
I’ve also bought Paloma Faith’s album — ‘Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful’ — which I really like. I particularly rate the title track. It seems like she’s being marketed as the next Amy Winehouse, which is always going to self-defeating. I don’t think the music or singing is that similar to Amy Winehouse either — it reminds me of the Mark Ronson ‘Version’ album on which Amy Winehouse does her cover of ‘Valerie’. It’s quite theatrical music, which is unusual. I also like the premise of the title track — a bit of the same conceit used by Fleetwood Mac in ‘Little Lies’ — as it goes to the heart of a lot of human relationships — do you want to hear the truth or something that’s more enjoyable. It could be said to define the idea of fiction too.
It’s a shame she looks so ridiculous. The photos in the CD booklet have her in ludicrous hairdos and costumes except for one which shows she’s actually rather pretty. I heard her perform live on Simon Mayo’s Radio 2 show when she did a short interview in which she sounded astonishingly stupid and inarticulate. The album shows that, in reality, she’s certainly neither. No one stupid could write a song like ‘Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful’.
Tags: female swearing, Paloma Faith
Posted in Music | No Comments »
February 12th, 2010
When I received an e-mail with the title ‘Nothing Says “‘I Love You” Like A Pink Drill’ I thought it was a stray mail that should have gone in the spam folder with the blue pill offers and the mails that promise to stretch parts of the male anatomy. Either that or it was an interesting reference to obscure sexual practices.
But no — it was a genuine marketing attempt from Screwfix. You have to admire their chutzpah in trying to get mail order DIY muscling in on the Valentines market but I’m quite dumbfounded by who they think might be the recipient of the drill. And, yes, it is bright pink. It can be seen online here along with their other Valentine’s offers.
I’m not sure that any sort of handyman, however in touch with his feminine side, is really ever going to want a pink drill so I’m inclined to think this advert is aimed at men buying Valentine’s presents for women. Apart from the fact that a drill is an ultimate utility purchase that has little romantic interest as far as I can see, this sort of present suggests that the recipient is expected to make good use of it. Rather than put up a few shelves or picture frames on Valentine’s day I can imagine most female recipients wanting to use the present to inflict violence on whoever bought it for them. Maybe I’m being old-fashioned and sexist but I’m not going to try it.
Tags: advertising, DIY, global capital, marketing, pink, power tools, romance, Screwfix, Valentine's Day
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 3 Comments »
February 11th, 2010
I’ve given up trying to understand the new ‘best-loser’ format in University Challenge. It seems to be more difficult to grasp than the subject matter of most of the questions. One advantage it does have, in television terms, is that you see the teams return more regularly to have another go and you get an interesting sense of déja vu. I particularly welcomed seeing Girton College, Cambridge return to the fray on Monday. They had a particularly gripping bout against St. Andrews where they took an early lead, then were caught up by their opponents (mainly due to an incredible streak of starter answers from someone called Flaherty). I wasn’t too keen on St. Andrews as, although Jeremy Paxman said their average age was 24, they appeared to be mainly mature students (i.e. ones doing PhDs and other research) and not undergraduate students: I always think it’s unfair when a bunch of hairy, beardy, beer-bellied blokes in T-shirts come up against ‘normal’ students.
I found myself getting behind Girton as they eventually pulled ahead of St. Andrews. This might not have been unconnected with the composition of the Girton team — unusually having two female students. Being a thoroughly feminist minded chap I particularly admired the intellect displayed by Becca Cawley (reading English) whose appearance will probably encourage more applications to Oxbridge (admittedly male ones) than any amount of government target-setting. I particularly liked the way she was game to have a go at questions she really didn’t know the answer to (usually because St. Andrews had buzzed too quickly) and the hesitant way she volunteered these answers — the complete antithesis of the sort of arrogant swot one might associate with academia.
In the end I was almost cheering when Girton got through to fight another day. I’ll scrutinise the Radio Times for when this day is as I’ll make a point of watching.
Tags: BBC, Becca Cawley, Oxbridge, students, university challenge
Posted in Media | No Comments »
February 7th, 2010
Ever wondered how Asda and Tesco can sell their supposed £6 a bottle wine for 3 for £10. One trick is to cut the distance between the manufacture of the glass bottle and the place where it is filled with the unctuous liquid. In the case of Lindeman’s Tollana Shiraz/Cabernet the distance is probably about a few hundred yards.
If you look very carefully at the label you’ll see the wine is bottled at CH2 4LF — doesn’t sound very Australian as it’s not. It’s actually on an industrial estate, not near South Australia’s Barossa Valley, but next door to the picturesque Stanlow Oil Refinery on the plains of the Dee outside Chester (yes, in Cheshire). You can see an aerial view here.
It’s a long way from the old French ‘mise en chateaux’ guarantee of quality as the Aussie wine is transported in bulk to its export markets and bottled close to its eventual consumers. There’s a sound environmental reason for doing this — it prevents carbon being wasted by unnecessarily transporting the weight of glass bottles around the globe (and it also means the recycled bottles don’t need transporting back again.) However, it’s an interesting reminder of how economics and globalisation have made the wine come to the bottler and not vice versa.
The concept is taken to its extreme in Chester as the bottler is also the glass maker — a company called Quinn Glass. They even have a video on their website of the 400 bottles per minute production line where your Aussie plonk is put into bottle — get to it via their filling page. They also operate a bonded warehouse which means they can hold their customers’ stock so they don’t have to pay duty until the wine leaves the premises just before delivery. It’s a clever and lean operation with the cullet (smashed up recycled glass) arriving at the factory and conceivably being turned into a full wine bottle within hours. There’s no doubt this ingenuity must knock a substantial amount of the cost of a bottle of wine — which makes the con of something like Hardy’s Crest being retailed at an RRP of £9.99 even more ridiculous than most people already realise when they see it perpetually ‘on offer’ for £4.99.
Quinn don’t just do wine. They do beer, spirits, alcopops — the lot. One interesting page on their website exposes the manufacturing process for a lot of drinks: ‘Product can be processed at sales gravity or high gravity product then diluted and carbonated. Flavoured Alcoholic Beverages and soft drinks can be made from concentrate or from a recipe.’ That is to say that a lot of commercial drinks are watered down on bottling. Again, it might be an economic and environmentally smart idea to produce alcopops or even beers in concentrated form although it makes the stomach churn to think of what some concentrated version of WKD or Smirnoff Ice might be like.
Tags: Australian Wine, corporate strategy, glass, global capital, Quinn Glass, wine bottles
Posted in Beer | No Comments »
February 6th, 2010
Richard Madeley has been doing the Radio 2 6-8am show on a Saturday while Zoe Ball is on maternity leave. Having not been a devotee of daytime TV I’ve listened to the show with absolute fascination as he’s completely unpredictable: you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth next. It’s like ghoulishly waiting for an oral car-crash to happen. It can be very endearing and revealing, though. I heard him recently on the radio saying something I’ve hardly ever heard about a famous actor — that he’d met this actor at a party and he was completely pissed (can’t remember exactly who it was now). Most of the luvvies cover all this up when addressing the likes of you and me.
I only caught the end of his show this morning but I listened with increasing horror to his ‘recipe’ for Tuna Fish Bake. He apparently Twittered on Thursday that he was cooking it for his dinner (who says Twitter is all about trivia?). ‘Yup,it’s a culinary legend tonight, all tins,packets and e-numbers.Utter rubbish but tasty as hell’. He then gave out the recipe, if it can be called that:
- Tuna bake:1 tin chickn&1tin mushrm soup.2 tins tuna.Prawns.Mushrooms.Mixed herbs.Peas/sweetcorn.Dash w. wine.S&Pepper.Serve w pasta.Delish.
- &two bags of crushed crisps.Mix it up,top put uncrushed crisps on top and bake for 30″.Vile recipe but comfort food like Heinz Tom Soup. 2:49 PM Feb 4th from web
- Crushed crisps make it less runny;crisps on top make it, well, crispy.How tastily ghastly! 3:03 PM Feb 4th from web
Get more on his Twitter page.
This was apparently what he cooked Judy Finnegan on their first date! If the tins of soup are decent quality the recipe might not be too bad up to the entrance of the crisps. It’s those that catapult it into the league of completely bizarre crap. The recipe made it into the Daily Mail and he reprised it on the radio. If his recipes have anything like the pull of Richard and Judy’s book club then the supermarket shelves will be being stripped of tins of mushroom soup and tuna as I type.
Anyone who refers to tuna as ‘tuna fish’ immediately strikes a soft spot with me as I’m old enough to remember when it was thought of as something of a delicacy (thus you had to stress that it was fish) and didn’t have the cat-meat status that food snobs confer on the tinned stuff today.
Tags: fish, food, radio 2, recipes, Richard Madeley, tuna, tuna fish
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 4th, 2010
…Agree to disagree but disagree to part, but after all it’s just a compromise of the Things We Do For Love’.
This is one of the few modern pop songs to feature a gong. It’s smashed three or four times during the course of the song and I realised when I heard it on Radio 2 this morning, half asleep, that its’ such an incredibly enervating song. Notwithstanding the avant-garde influence of Godley and Creme, who left 10cc because they thought this song was too commercial, I think it’s the band’s best track, despite having a tedious playout. The wonderful harmonies are self-evident but the drumming is engagingly stop-start throughout…and the organ is incredible.
Tags: 10cc, gong
Posted in Music | No Comments »
February 3rd, 2010
Well, in this particular case, I picked up a leaflet from the Moon on the Square in Feltham last night with the nutritional breakdown of everything on Wetherspoons’ menu (there’s a version on line). The large mixed grill Dave Roe had in Shrewsbury was 1885 calories, 168% GDA of fat, 211% GDA of Saturated Fat. It was the most fatty and second most calorific item on the whole menu. So in his case all the beer that he consumed throughout the day probably had less calories than the food. My ham, egg and chips was 683 calories.
Tags: Beer, calories, Dave Roe, Healthy eating, large mixed grill, wetherspoon
Posted in Beer | 2 Comments »
January 29th, 2010
A reactionary friend and I had an e-mail conversation about how hypocritical it is for the media to bewail the calibre of politician we have. They are one of the main reasons why politicians have become discredited — it didn’t take too long for the spin doctors and interview coaches to teach politicians how to avoid the elephant traps the likes of Paxman and Humphreys set for them and how easy it is to manipulate lazy journalists into following a set agenda. In short we have politicians who evade and distort because we have a news media that is devious and generally lacking in ethics (see Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe).
There was a fantastic example of biased reporting which pushes a narrative set by politicians yesterday. The BBC website reported a fact that may astonish most people in this country –alcohol consumption per capita is going down – and going down quite rapidly. What the BBC report didn’t even mention was the figure for overall average consumption figure: down to 12.2 units per week in 2008 compared to 13.5 in 2006 (buried in a Reuters report). This is, according to my calculations, a 9.6% drop over two years. The BBC report described this as ’slight’. In what other context would a 10% decrease be described as ’slight’? I can guarantee that if the figures were the other way round and showed an increase of the same magnitude that there would be the lead story — ‘Alcohol consumption going up by 5% a year!!!!’
Instead the BBC deliberately broke down the figures by class to report that professionals were drinking more than the working class — 13.8 units — sensationalising the findings to suggest a growing crisis but not supporting this with evidence of any increase at all.
While this is a good news story that belies the general narrative that we are fast becoming a nation of drunks, the BBC was careful to conflate this with reports that drink related deaths are increasing. Alcohol related deaths rose from 8,724 in 2007 to 9,031 in 2008 — now that’s an increase of 3.5% in a year — which is obviously something to be concerned about but is smaller than the slightly less than 5% fall (allowing for compounding) in average consumption. Was that 3.5% increase also reported as ’slight’? No. It was used as the headline for the web page.
Moreover, the number of total deaths in 2008 according to the ONS is 509,090 which makes alcohol related deaths 1.7% of the total. Again, because these are avoidable then this is obviously way too many but I doubt a headline that says nearly 2% of people in the UK are killed by booze would grab so much attention. (I would guess the man or woman in the street would think it at least double or even quadruple that). However, at a steady rate of growth of 3.5% (compounded) it would take another 18 years for the number of alcohol related deaths to rise by 50%, which would be around 4% of the total number (making the assumption that all other trends continue).
At least the page later conceded that consumption had been falling since 2002 and because the deaths are largely concentrated in older people who have, almost by definition, been drinking for many years that the positive trend of lower consumption will take a similarly lengthy period of time to show in the mortality figures.
Of course a rise in alcohol related deaths is very bad news and should be reported but so should the facts that show that overall this country is getting more sober and in general taking a more sensible attitude to drinking, albeit there may be more extremes in number of genuine problem drinkers and a large number of teetotallers.
Yet the way the Department of Health and other lobby groups put out a drip feed of press released that are regurgitated by lazy journalists shows that the media is complicit in completely misrepresenting a positive story into scaremongering. We might expect some of the tabloid press to do this but for the BBC to be so complicit is quite shocking.
Tags: alcohol, alcohol consumption, BBC, government, idiocy, journalists, lies, ONS, statistics
Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »
