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The First ‘Out’ Gay Rugby Player — They’ll All Be Taking Their Clothes Off Next

Apparently former Wales and British Lions rugby captain Gareth Thomas has outed himself as gay. According to the BBC he said “It’s pretty tough for me being the only international rugby player prepared to break the taboo. Statistically I can’t be the only one, but I’m not aware of any other gay player still in the game.” Good luck to him in having made this public as a player in “the toughest, most macho of male sports”.

In my experience rugby has such a bizarre, almost homo-erotic culture that it would likely provoke the most strange reactions in a genuinely gay player. It’s well known that rugby players like to get extremely drunk. This often culminates in clothing being removed and it’s quite common for a bunch of rugby players at the end of a night to be stark naked in the bar — usually but not exclusively in an all male environment. This seems to be a rite of passage. Not exactly related to nudity but on a scatalogical theme is that it’s also considered by the more extreme drinkers that someone hasn’t had a good night’s drinking unless they have drunk so much they’ve lost control of their bodily functions — vomiting and losing bladder control are a bit passé, the ultimate is to wake up in bed caked in one’s own fæces.

I used to live with (in the non-biblical sense) a member of the university rugby team. When on tour his teammates used to play a hilarious trick on any player who they spotted asleep. It was better if the slumbering student had his mouth open as the trick was that another team-mate would place his penis as far into the sleeper’s mouth as possible. The rest of the team would then wake the victim and laugh at his shock at what was resting on his lips. One of the team also had an ambition that he was well on the way to realising — to drink ‘a pint of piss from every county’. This meant that in the bar after the match a pint pot would be passed around the opposition, who would urinate in it until it was full. Our hero then downed the pint in one — to much enthusiastic applause.

I also lived with another club rugby player who went on a European tour with his club. He brought back the most strange set of holiday photos — he was quite lucky to get Boots to develop them. There was the obligatory tour photo of course — all thirty or so players (all male) stood in a familiar school photo tiered arrangement with the minor detail that none were wearing any clothing. Some had their modesty covered by the players in front but plenty of the team were happy to bear all. That’s probably fairly par for the course. What was most bizarre was their game of human skittles. This involved turning the bar into a bowling alley by piling up chairs and stolls at one end like skittles and then making a bowling lane along the length of the bar. This was lubricated with soapy water. The human skittle was then propelled down the makeshify bowling alley at the ‘skittles’ with the objective of knocking over as many as possible. Naturally, to avoid friction the human skittle himself had to be stark naked and was thrown face down as hard as possible by four teammates who grabbed each limb and swung him forward to gain momentum before releasing him down the alley. This was all captured on the photos in step-by-step detail and the skittle himself seemed quite pleased with his achievement.

This subculture would no doubt be of fascination to anthropologists practised, as it was, by red-blooded heterosexual males. No wonder Gareth Thomas went to great lengths (he got married) to keep his self-knowledge secret.

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‘I Grew Up Watching This’

So said ‘shocked’ BBC Sports Personality Winner of the Year 2009, Ryan Giggs, in his genuinely unrehearsed speech. Ironic then that most of the generation that will succeed Giggs were growing up watching the X-Factor on ITV. What sort of values the X-Factor implants into impressionable minds we might not know until it’s too late, when any genuine creative talent in this country has finally been snuffed out. The lessons of the X-Factor seem to have been predicted by the Pet Shop Boys song ‘Opportunities’ nearly 25 years ago — ‘I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money.’ In fact the principle of grooming some nice boy singer to croon other people’s songs pre-dated the Pet Shop Boys by another 25 years — it was the way ‘Tin Pan Alley’ worked up until the early 60s when the Beatles broke the mould (at least for the next 40 years or so) by both writing and performing their own material. How ironic then that who should pop up on the X-Factor final but Paul McCartney. I was quite pleased to see him — at least two of the songs were performed by the person that wrote them. I would doubt whether any X-Factor winner will ever write, or more to the point be allowed to write, their own material. It was quite nice to see McCartney performing live on the biggest TV show this year but it throws up an interesting question — was Paul McCartney unwittingly bookending the era of innovative pop music that he largely started?

The most annoying thing about the X-Factor is the ridiculous hysteria in the audience. The sound mixers on the programme must realise that the judges rarely contribute anything other than vapid platitudes so the whooping and yelling of the idiots in the audience is mixed high. I speculated whether audience members for the X-Factor had to take an intelligence test and only those that failed it would be eligible for tickets. This is unlikely to be true as the pass mark would need to be set so low that only people who had yet to learn to hold a pencil would have a realistic chance of getting tickets . Whoever manipulates the audience seems to be peddling the absurd New Labour notion (especially in the context of a talent show) that everyone’s a winner and everyone deserves to win and be praised by the judges. If everyone could win then there would be no show — that’s the whole point of it. It seems to be an extension of the Blairite Lady Diana ‘People’s Princess’ self-conscious emoting.

It was odd for Giggs to be selected for the shortlist this year — he must have been coming up for a lifetime achievement soon anyway. However, he showed in his speech that he did have a real personality — a far more genuine set of comments than those rehearsed with PR advisers in advance.

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Carrick and Owen Do Their South Africa Chances No Harm

For the next six months or so we can all play the game of second guessing Fabio Capello’s choice of his 22 or 23 for South Africa. Probably using up more column inches than anything else will be the fate of two players — Beckham and Owen. Interestingly, Owen’s rejuvenated career at Man Utd seems to be suiting him as his reduced involvement in matches seems to mean he’s got less chance of succumbing to the sorts of injuries that have plagued him between international tournaments. He showed tonight against Wolfsburg that he’s still incredibly predatory in and around the six yard box. He’s never likely to start for England but in a big match I think it’s worth having a fit Owen on the bench.

Man Utd’s incredible lack of defenders (only Evra is fit) shows the squad aspect of international selection. In the 22 or 23 there should be a few players who are flexible and Carrick did himself no harm by his unlikely pairing with Fletcher. He wasn’t brilliant against Wolfsburg and you’d never want to start him for England there but at least there’s a midfield player available who’s played centre back in the Champions League (and looks likely to play there against Villa on Saturday). I wonder whether some colossuses of the England midfield, like Stevie G, would be quite so happy to play there.

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Thornbridge Pioneer

I’ve always rated Thornbridge Brewery for its superb Jaipur IPA but last night I tasted another superb beer from the brewery — Pioneer. This was in the Wetherspoons in High Wycombe (the Falcon) which usually has interesting beer but not always at its best. However, the Pioneer was absolutely stunning — an incredible hop intensity for a beer that was 4.5%. The aroma was exactly the same as one gets in brewery tours when the hop cones are handed out for visitors to smell. It was in superb condition as well. (Unfortunately I had to drink the pint in about 10 minutes as I had to walk all the way round Wycombe to the bus station to get the bus as there was some Christmas lights funfair on in the centre of town.) Sadly the beer is a one-off as it was brewed specially for Wetherspoons and their 30th anniversary. I found this out as I just phoned the brewery to ask if I could buy any.

One thing I didn’t know is that one of the founders of Thornbridge left the brewery a couple of years ago to found another of my favourite new breweries — yes, Brewdog!

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Roger vs. Brewdog

I happened to see a link to Roger Protz’s blog on the Swan Supping homepage where he has a real go at Brewdog for behaving non-sensibly. (Actually it could be that he’s most put out that the Independent sent Oz Clarke — a wine writer who surely cannot be trusted to write about beer — to cover the story rather than, perhaps, a well-known specialist beer writer?). I don’t know what juvenile antics they got up to with Oz but I heard the brewer interviewed on the Food Programme on Radio Four and he made a lot of sense. No doubt their very hoppy and alcoholic beers with in-yer-face names and labels represent something of a generational conflict with the CAMRA old-timers. It’s odd how they like to celebrate 35 years or more of campaigning by reminiscing about how radical they were then while criticising some of the more radical, exuberant brewers of the present. Protz seems to think Brewdog will antagonise the anti-alcohol lobby further with their 18% or so beers but CAMRA policy is now starting to face the fact that the more militant members of the anti-alcohol brigade will never be appeased. I think I’m less in the mild and best bitter camp than the Trashy Blonde on this one.

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Something Fishy

There’s a fascinating article in this week’s Economist (it appears to be free for non-subscribers but perhaps only for the current week) on the reason why most red wine traditionally doesn’t complement fish. It’s all to do with the iron content of wine and how iron reacts with fatty compounds in fish to produce genuinely vile flavour combinations — it’s all scientifically proven. (The iron-rich red wines tasted ok when they were chelated i.e. had the iron removed by addition of a chemical to make it inert.)

One thing this shows is the fascinating role of minerals in the taste of food and drink.  The amount of iron that makes it into wine, through the skins and stalks (and even the juice as it’s in some white wines), must be pretty miniscule but it’s enough to make it unpalatable with fish.

Wine is thought to have a fairly low mineral content compared with drinks where the vegetable matter is more aggressively infused into the drink, such as the malt that is ground to make the wort for beer. It makes one wonder how much of these trace elements might be ingested by a regular beer or wine drinker compared with the tiny amounts of these elements put in the average vitamin pill.

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Charlie’s Best Fest Beers

I went to the Aylesbury Beer Festival in Stoke Mandeville at  the weekend and partook of some lovely beer. There were 28 barrels (see photo) to try.  

Lots of Lovely Beer
Lots of Lovely Beer

Unsurprisingly the best beers (IMHO) were the ones that ran out first. St.Austell ‘Bucket of Blood’ was the first to go — this was a sweet, dark bitter. Not far behind was Tring ‘Phantom Monk’ — a very pale, light beer that I enjoyed a lot. One of the more unusual beers was Greenjack ‘Orange Wheat’ — a wheat beer that thankfully was bronish rather than actually orange (as is the colour of Cheddar Valley real cider that looks like radioactive nuclear waste that has been vomited up and is very popular with real cider lovers). There were a few reliable standbys — Woodforde’s ‘Wherry’ and two from reliable breweries Bath Ales ‘Barnstormer’ and Loddon ‘Russet’. Vale had a couple of beers — their ‘Something Wicked’ was based on ‘Gravitas’, which is their very drinkable strong, pale coloured ale. Harviestoun ‘s real lager ‘Schiehallion’ kept its condition well right to the end. Of the stronger beers Derventio’s ‘Barbarian Stout’ was good, as was the hard-to-find Chiltern ‘Lord Lieutenant’s Porter’ which was sponsored in memory of Dick Moore, who was a stalwart of the festival in previous years and who died a few weeks ago.  

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GNVQs in Tin Opening? Breathalysers in the Kitchen?

The Restaurant on BBC2 promised to plumb further depths of the stupidity of the deluded members of the British middle-class who convince themselves that running a restaurant is some sort of decadent leisure activity for the indolent celebrity class rather than be a very hard way of making a living. (Beware: spoiler alert below).

There was some shocking ineptness from the start when the contestants were asked to cook a ‘signature’ dish — some of them tried something they’d never even attempted before. They knew that their dish would be served to Raymond Blanc (with his two Michelin stars), although they might not have been aware that he’d be wandering round the kitchen looking at the packaging on their food. Even so, it was staggering that three of the couples went shopping for their food in Asda (‘voted Britain’s cheapest supermarket). Now Asda can do a few foodie things that even M&S and Waitrose don’t do (chopped up organic carrot batons for one) but its customer base cannot be said to be the most discerning smoked salmon connoisseurs. (I’m not being a food snob. I go there myself sometimes where it’s fine for basic things but a smoked salmon specialist it’s definitely not.). It was no surprise that they failed to find gravadlax there — this is probably only reliably found at Christmas in places like M&S, though Waitrose has plenty of types of smoked salmon and may do it all year round. The thought of going to a specialist smoked fish supplier probably never crossed their minds. Even so, this pair did nothing with their plain Asda smoked salmon except put it on a plate with a load of chopped up beetroot or something and a few crusts of bread. They then stood around looking pleased with themselves while the other contestants busted a gut to finish their dishes in an hour. Even so, they survived until next week.

One of the most intriguing things about this reality show is the mismatched abilities of the couples. One has to deal with front of house while the other is the chef. Often one of the two is reasonably competent with the other being completely useless and a persistent cause of failure — this leads to fascinating strains in the partnership, particularly when the two are related. There was a team of dominating mother and henpecked son. She was a decent cook but lost out because her son told the lovely Sarah (who has one of the most comically expressive faces on television) that it was impossible to describe his mother’s restaurant concept — completely clueless.

The most amazing part of the show came when another parent-child couple tried to open a coconut — which they eventually manage to bludgeon into a pulp — and then were stumped by a tin of evaporated milk. The daughter of the couple didn’t look so young she’d never have encountered old style tins (without the handy ring on the top) but she seemed to have no concept of what a tin opener was. Perhaps using a tin opener will need to be taught and assessed in schools (maybe it’s on the A-level syllabus for domestic science, which explains youngsters’ ignorance) or perhaps the sharp edges to the tins break health and safety regulations? However, what health and safety types wilfully fail to

An Innovative Way to Open A Tin of Condensed Milk
An Innovative Way to Open A Tin of Condensed Milk

recognise is the incredibly dangerous methods people dream up to achieve their objectives left to their own devices. In the case of the can of condensed milk, the opening method attempted was to hold a butcher’s cleaver vertically against the can lid (its point downwards) and to then hammer the knife handle with a rolling pin. The film crew must have been waiting hopefully for an accidental disembowelment if the extra sharp Raymond Blanc knife slipped into the woman’s stomach when she attempted to smash down on the knife to gain access to the tin. Fortunately, Raymond spotted her in time and showed her a helpful gadget that has no doubt saved many lives in similar circumstances in about 150 years of canned food — a tin opener. It would have been fascinating to see the education in other kitchen utensils that this couple may have gained in later episodes — oven gloves, corkscrews, bottle openers, perhaps — but Raymond sadly sent them home for their own safety.

It makes quite a serious point about health and safety as almost everyone has enough in their kitchen to do horrendous damage to both themselves and others — sharp knives, roasting hot ovens, boiling water, naked flames. Yet many people happily cook complex meals involving these and many other dangers while lubricating themselves with alcohol at well over the legal drink drive limit. Watch out for the government to go into cahoots with ready meal makers and supermarkets and bring in the kitchen breathalyser built into appliances which will lock all drawers and turn off all appliances except the microwave (to be used for M&S ready meals) if a cook is found to be over the limit.

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Surprising Beers at Majestic

My local Majestic Wine Warehouse had an encouragingly large and diverse selection of beers.  Not only were the usual suspects well represented (Fullers, Young and Wells, Shepherd Neame, Adnams, Greene King and so on) but there were some cases from the likes of Hop Back (Summer Lightning), Black Sheep, Thwaites and even Tring had Sidepocket for a Toad and Death or Glory on sale

Unusual Breweries at Majestic
Unusual Breweries at Majestic

Best from my perspective was a mixed case of Bath Ales beers — including Gem, Wild Hare, Barnstormer and Dark Hare. With the Majestic discount (£6 off 2 cases of beer) this worked out at exactly £1.50 per bottle. That’s not a bad price to support an up and coming brewery.

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Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Weight

I went to the impressive new Sainsbury’s in High Wycombe and ended up, surprisingly, in the beer department at the weekend. They had a special 3 for £10 deal on bottled Meantime beers. This wasn’t bad value as the beers are normally sold at over £4 each. The bottles are 750ml which makes one wonder if they are trying too hard to compete with wine. I bought two IPAs and one London Porter (the only two available). 

Meantime seem to be darlings of the beer writing establishment. However, I found the beers to be quite pleasant but not justifying the hype of some journalists. The IPA was enjoyable but had nothing like the complexity of the cask conditioned Thornbridge Jaipur IPA, for example. The London Porter seemed a little underpowered to me and nothing comparable with something live like the Chiltern Brewery Lord Lieutenant’s Porter.

When it came to bagging up the empty bottles to go to the recycling bin I realised that Meantime must be a marketing-driven operation as they’d pulled the a wine marketing trick. This was something I read about a famous wine warehouse chain who had advised their producers that a good way of upping the price consumers will pay for a wine is to put it in a heavier bottle. Apparently we, as consumers, equate bottle weight with quality and it’s possible that (before duty) more money will be spent on a bottle than on the liquid inside. Meantime’s bottles are almost as heavy as champagne bottles (and they have no reason to be as there is nowhere near the internal pressure in the bottle that champagne has). The bottles are stoppered like sparkling wine too. Apart from trying to con the customer these bottles are very eco-unfriendly.

Overall, they were nice beers but not the classics that the extremely expensive packaging suggested. Maybe Meantime should pay slightly more attention to their beer than their marketing — but I guess that this sort of sublimal marketing is part of their business plan. Often marketing considerations can degrade a beer’s quality as breweries, like a famous one in Kent, bottle their beers in clear bottles despite the adverse effect light can have on a beer’s flavour — at least Meantime’s bottles were the right colour. Even so, it’s funny how some of Meantime’s biggest fans in the press used to criticise lager lover for just drinking the marketing.

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Big People, Fight For Your Rights!

Today outside the Mayor of London’s office there’s a demonstration against prejudice against obese people. I thought this might be more self-pitying, politically correct rubbish until I noted one of the protestors’ objectives: ‘protesters want the UK to follow San Francisco, where a law bans “fat-ism”…and stops doctors pressing patients to slim down’. Seeing as there’s far more of a causal effect between obesity and poor health than there is with alcohol, I’d fully support these radical ‘persons of size’ because that would set a precedent that would stop the constant lecturing of the likes of the BMA about the dangers of alcohol. There was yet another piece of dubious statistical interpretation released to the press today and all over Google News.

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Wednesdays Will Never Be the Same Again At the Red Lion, Caerleon

I had dismal hopes for the Channel Four programme — the Red Lion — on Thursday. Another instalment of government promoted doom and gloom about the evils of drinking seemed on the cards.

The programme visited 10 of the 600 Red Lion pubs in the country (the most popular pub name) and the first one featured unashamed, wanton binge drinking, the only objective of which was ‘to get hammered’ — but this was by a group of women. It was a student netball team from Newport University (no, I never realised there was a university there either) who religiously went out on a Wednesday to get completely plastered playing ‘pub golf’ (a close relative of drinking golf that I’ve played myself) at 9 local pubs. So the programme started with a dozen or so girls downing a pint of Guinness in one at the Red Lion. Rather than be apologetic, the students they interviewed were refreshingly honest about their motives — drinking to get pissed (although they have to be able to stand up or else that would be a bad night) and ‘feeling like shit’ the next morning was a big part of it. These women were not violent or sad or ill — they were all pretty athletic as they played netball for the university. I remained in awe as they went on to other pubs in Caerleon to down other drinks in one. I expect that, after this programme, Caerleon will never be the same again on a Wednesday night as hundreds of male binge drinkers will no doubt want to make a favourable impression on the netball players by consuming even larger amounts of alcohol. Where is it again?

After that classic opening, the programme went to a reasonable cross section of other Red Lions. It seemed that even when they found the inevitable solitary drinkers whose whole lives revolved around the pub that even these characters came out of the programme with a lot of dignity. My favourite Red Lion was one in Whitworth, north of Rochdale, which was pretty typical of the pubs I learned to drink in (in Tim Martin approved fashion) myself just over the hills from there. There was one Rugby League player who cheerfully admitted to spending £100 on beer a week — as he didn’t have much else to do. He also gave one of the most eloquent descriptions of the pleasure of being mildly inebriated.  As with the netball players, even the BMA might have problems correlating the large volume of alcohol consumed with the physical fitness required of the players. (It brings to mind the conclusion that Jancis Robinson came to in The Demon Drink when she reviewed the scientific literature that the people who drink most do so because they can — i.e. fit young people in their 20s can outdrink almost anyone with no ill effects.)

What the programme managed to convey quite effectively was the sense of camaraderie and community that can be found in all good pubs. It showed the pub is a leveller of society and class — with the regulars being incredibly brutal in their comments towards each other but all done so in the safe knowledge that they’ll be back there the next night. The pub pricks pretension and is an amazing social leveller. Many of these issues have been examined by social anthropologist, Kate Fox, who devotes a whole section of her book ‘Watching the English’ to the etiquette of round buying. The last Red Lion was closed — bought up by an owner who has no intention of re-opening it but, by the look of the boarded up windows, can’t get planning permission to do anything else with the building. Speculating and profiteering were ripping the heart out of a community — odd that after 12 years of New Labour.

There was plenty of potential for ridiculing the pubgoers, who were remarkably candid, but what came across was an amazing feeling of common humanity bonding the pubgoers. After all, the pub is basically an institution where ‘the public’ are invited into a ‘house’.  The programme generated a very favourable review in The Guardian. I can’t put the conclusion better myself:  ‘a lovely portrait of a peculiarly British institution’. The Times review says ‘Drinking in moderation, the contributors suggested, was a dreary waste of time.’ I couldn’t possibly comment.

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Curse of Internet Streaming — I Hope

Those who paid out £11.99 for watching a blurry picture on a computer will have been rewarded by being first to see a thoroughly poor performance by England. I followed the highlights saga in the news and wasn’t too surprised to see the BBC showing the highlights at short notice but it seems very dodgy that they, in effect, colluded with the spivs who were streaming the match on the Internet by keeping quiet about the highlights being shown until after the last kick.

England were lucky not to lose 3-0 at least — with a missed penalty, the woodwork being hit and James making some spectacular saves. Nonetheless, they created quite a few chances with ten men. There are some who think that that England won’t be too sad if the result means that Croatia miss the playoffs when the final results are in on Wednesday. I’ll be a little sad if it means less chance of Blanka Vlasic making an appearance but that might be compensated by the likes of Eduardo missing out.

I wonder if we’ll ever be told how many people paid to watch this miserable non-event but it’s heartening that Rio ‘The Wanderer’ Ferdinand and Cashley Cole seemed to treat the occasion with the contempt that maybe comes of thinking that one man and his internet dog are the only ones watching.