Water, water everywhere...

... but if you dare run any down a hosepipe that's 1000 quid fine,matey.

Within the next couple of weeks the people who supply my water will be making it an offence to use a hosepipe. Now in my innocence I thought that this simply meant "don't use a hosepipe irresponsibly" such as leaving your lawn sprinkler on but no, it's anything. Got a bit of a bad back (like me) and you'd like to fill your watering can up from a hose so you don't knacker yourself carting the can back and forward to the tap, sod you dragon, you're not doing that!

Oh you can have a dispensation if you're disabled but, get this, the qualification for "disabled" is you have one of those disabled parking badges! Well what fecking use is that! You have to be virtually immobile before you can get one of those these days and if you're that screwed up physically I would posit that your hobbies are unlikely to include vegetable gardening.

And as regular readers of this blog know, I have horses; how exactly am I going to get water to their paddocks and stables without a hosepipe given your average hoss will neck down up to 30 litres of water on a hot day?

The best bit though came when I saw the water companies are encouraging people to rat on any of their neighbours who dare get the hose out to fill the kid's paddling pool. I can only assume that it is only a matter of time before we have self-appointed wasser blockleiters who will be prowling the district looking for any evidence of "hose crimes". Maybe for every three people they report they get to run a bath?


Look we all know its been dry and there's not so much of the H₂O to go around but how about for once treating us like intelligent, responsible adults rather than naughty children and just telling us "Look, it's been dry, be sensible with water please. Here are some things you can do to help." You could use some of that740 million quid in profits you made last year to run a few TV ads.

Oh and speaking of Anglian Water's 740 million profits; .given we lose 25% or more through leaks and unrepaired busts maybe you could attend to that first rather than encouraging people to frogmarch their friends to the police station for daring to water the parsnips.

I need a drink

So as expected and blogged about previously here comes Dishface Cameron and his tight lipped, clenched buttocked puritans and bansturbators determined to grind any bit of pleasure out of our lives and wielding a 45p per unit minimum price for alcohol.

It's all for our own good of course as they keep banging on about in those awful Keith Haring-esque animated propaganda ads; we're all naughty boozers killing ourselves and costing the NHS a fortune. But  I fail to see why ending the three for a tenner wine offers in Tesco is going to stop the arseholes getting shitfaced on jaegerbombs and lambrini in every town centre in the land as I can bet your average town centre aircraft hanger sized theme pub will be charging a shitload more than 45p a unit.

No, this is an attack on, well, me to be honest, your middle age hacked off working guy who likes a drink or three in the comfort of his own home when he gets in from the office or factory. We're the problem you see, drinking ourselves into an early grave and if we're not being wage slaves we're a drain on the state; quite ignoring the fact that the duty I've paid on booze over the years could probably equip a medium sized intensive care unit.

By my back-of-a-beer-mat calculations your average 11 unit bottle of wine will have a minimum price of just shy of a fiver and to be honest if you're paying less than a fiver now for wine in the UK you're likely drinking shite. But given you can at the moment get bulk buys of a 6 or 7 quid bottle for 3.50 or so then kiss those kinds of deals goodbye. And remember this is just the introductory rate. You know that above inflation rises will follow on swift wings and that bottle of cheap but cheerful midweek Barolo that makes your pizza slip down a treat will start setting you back eight, nine, ten quid in a couple of years.

If you're a gin and tonic fan it's worse. You get punted right in the bollocks from the get-go. A bit of googling shows me you can get a litre of Sainsbury's Taste the Difference export strength (43%) gin goes for 14.49 a litre, it's got 43 units in it so under the new puritans that's going to cost you 19.35. Ouch. You might as well buy Tanqueray No. 10 and be done with it.

Well I for one am not going to play. You're not going to get a single red cent in duty from me because I'm going to make my own. To be honest as part of my downsizing and off-grid plans I was going to start making most of my own wine anyway but this has just sped things up. The equipment is cheap as chips, about 35 quid and the better kits cost around the same for 30 to 36 bottles. Two batches and your kit is paid for.

Sure you're not going to knock out an '07 Malbec in your attic but from all the reviews I've read these kits have come on a long way from the crap you got in the 80's and with a little aging stand up well to stuff you'd pay 6 to 8 quid for. And the best thing, not a single penny in duty to the government.  As for the good stuff, well an annual trip to France and pleasant week trundling round Gascony gets that sorted.

OK so what if you like a G&T. Ah well they have kind of got you there. You see whereas right now it's perfectly legit to brew your own beer and wine you can't distill any kind of spirit without a licence from HMRC, not even for your own use and not even if you're trying to make ethanol for fuel from your home grown spuds.. There's no health reason for this, they are not trying to stop Mr Average brewing up a batch of what he thinks is vodka but turns him and his neighbors blind because he cocked up the distillation, this is purely a revenue raising scam.

OK so I'll apply for a licence. Ah no, no you won't Little Dragon. Because HMRC have rather kindly put together "Notice 39" which tells you everything to know about getting a licence to make your own hooch and you aren't getting one because...

2.3 Can you refuse or revoke a licence?

We may refuse to issue a licence, or revoke an existing licence, where:

    the largest still to be used has a capacity below 18 hectoliters

That's a minimum still size of 18000 liters, the size of a medium sized road oil tanker. 

However just like there's nothing that says you can't own, say, a bong and a packet of hemp seeds there's equally nothing that says you can't own a still. You can and what's more you can buy them online for around 100 quid for a simple one or 350 for something a bit more flash. The days of miles of bent copper tubing and fretting about fusil oils are long gone as these things are semi automated and judging by the demo videos a piece of piddle to operate. You could be knocking your own, admittedly illegal, gin out for a couple of quid a litre in no time.

Now am I going to get into home distilling, Well no, I really don't drink enough spirits to make it economically viable and when I do have a drop of the hard stuff it tends to be of the more expensive range and only available directly from the distillery or more specialist retailers.. However if you're a bit of a gin hound or a bit of a chancer on some estate with a ready market I could see it being more attractive.

But as for wine there's no excuse. Starve the beast and stick up a hearty English two fingers at the puritans. I'll let you know how I get on. Mine's a large one.

My liver, not yours.

Here we go again. Having demonised the smokers out of existence The Righteous are, as we have come to expect, training their guns on anything else that, heaven forfend, might give us some kind of pleasure and of course the next demon to be slain is the drink.

Latest on the block are pseudo-charity the British Liver Trust. Pseudo charity? Well when did you last see these people rattling a tin on the street or were accosted by a cheery Aussie chugger demanding you sign over your children yea unto the seventh generation to them? You didn't because they are funded largely by the Government, this from their most recent filing at the Charities Commission:

Key fundraising successes of the year include a three year grant amounting to a total of £489,506 from the Big Lottery Fund’s Reaching Communities Programme to expand our support group network ...

OK so not funded out of taxes but its a reasonable supposition that they're not going to be wanting to piss off Whitehall any time soon or no Lottery cash for you Mr Hepatitis.

But look, you could say, they are having a go at the government, it's all over the BBC...

Government-led policies on alcohol throughout the UK have been branded a joke by the chief executive of the charity the British Liver Trust.

"We need to see direct action to prevent the daily death rate from liver cancer increasing," said Mr Langford. "At the moment all we are seeing are weak policies or no action at all. However, there are so many solutions to the problem."

And rather conveniently, up pops a government spokesman to say...

"We will shortly be setting out how we will tackle all the health and social impacts of alcohol in our alcohol strategy," he said.

 Well wasn't that convenient?

And you know, you just know, that "our alcohol strategy' will be "tax the fuck out of the dragon because he's got the money and he likes glass or two of wine when he gets home". But all for my own good of course, see the Liver Trust says we have to do these things to help you; you're only a dragon, you can't possibly be trusted to make your own descisions about your health. Trust us, we are The Worthy, we are The Righteous.

Well you can all go and fuck yourself with the biggest dildo Bad Dragon make*  Look it's not as if I don't know what alcohol does, you tell me often enough. Do I drink more than your reccomended 21 units a week? You bet on Fafnir's scaly tail I do, but that's my call, not yours. I will take that risk.

And it's not that much of a risk when you look at it...

In 2010, an estimated 3,788 people died from liver cancer across the UK, equating to an average of 10 people each day

... to put that into perspective that's 0.006% of the population.

"But the problem is growing!' screams Dr Liver...

Mr Langford said the condition seemed to be the poor relation to the other big killers, but was the only health problem out of the big five - cardiovascular, respiratory, circulatory and general cancers are the other four - showing an increasing trend.

Well how about the reason for that is that people are surviving some cancers and dying from others, that and we are all living longer so we're more likely to get rarer cancers, plus the rise, since 1977 which is their baseline in the report, of HIV/AIDS and associated conditions such as Hepatitis? You can't just point at the booze and say "that's your cause, right there, outlaw that and you'll see liver cancer rates drop" - that's just bad science.

Look I'm sure the British Liver Foundation do good work supporting people with liver disease and the like but will you please stop using dodgy statistics and cozying up to government giving the po faced arseholes an excuse to demonise and tax the fuck out of one of the few affordable pleasures we have left.

Or I could come round to your place, douse you in a fine XO Armagnac and sneeze in your direction; up to you.



* it's the Sea Dragon in aquamarine with the integral spooge-tube in case you're interested

Thinking of the chiiiildren, again.

Ah yes, the Tories. Just like Labour always ready with their ban-hammer when it comes to the thought that someone out there is having a good time. Following on from a report from that bastion of all things blue rinse and prudery the Mother's Union (whose leader appears to be a bloke called "Reg" for some unfathomable reason) your lovely nanny state will insist that the main broadband providers will offer a block on "adult content" to all subscribers.

Of course there's no detail on this but I would imagine it'll be some sort of BT Cleanfeed and so easily subvertable by any moderately tech savvy twelve year old (and they all are) who can configure a proxy.  In  other words this is a fig leaf, a sop to those members of the party faithful bluenoses who wander around with a disapproving expression and looking for all the world like someone has just rammed a pine cone up their arse.

And how is this going to work in terms of opt in or opt out? The Daily Fail is saying "opt in" whereas everyone else reporting the story is non-commital on that point.  Mind you opt in is going to make for some amusing conversations in PC World.

"Do you want porn with your new Dell laptop?"
"Er, yes please."
(Turns on tannoy) "Mr Verity to the checkout please. Can you bring a porn opt-in form. Gentleman wants internet filth on his PC. Now sir, what sort of porn do you want? Straight, gay, midgets, horses, horses with midgets..."

And who, exactly, is going to administer this list of what is "adult material"? Sure so it's a fair bet that a website with a name like "HotSexyDragonsDoingItWithAnythingThatMoves.com" will end up on the list¹ but how about some gay advocacy sites that offer advice to to teenagers struggling with their sexuality? What about stuff that's not actually sexual or illegal in any way but maybe you really would not want your kids looking at such as these "pro anorexia" sites?  What about "dangerous" political sites that you find distasteful such as those from extreme right and left wing parties or Muslim extremists?

See where as it's nice an easy to block something obvious that we can pretty much all agree on a definition of such as child porn² it starts to end up like a quagmire of The Dead Marshes proportions as soon as you try to categorise what's "adult" and what isn't.

And as ever, with politicians in charge, they are bound to monumentally fuck this up.

¹ memo to self: register that domain name ASAP.
² and even there, if the spam I get in my mailbox inviting me to come to sites with names like "hot-teens.grubbysmut.org" is to be believed, where I am sure the models are of legal age but are pretending not to be so, where do we stand with the ban-hammer on this one?

Doing your thinking for you

So I haven't written much recently. So what, neither has Shakespeare.

Well I've been thinking about getting back into blogging recently (and was kind of goaded into it by my fellow blogger Steve over at Natural Yoghurt). Mainly I took some time out as, well, I used to just grump about the government and general fuckwittery of my fellow inhabitants of planet Earth and a change of government last year kind of felt like a breath of fresh air. Well that air is getting rather stale and this week it took on a decided whiff of "hang on, doesn't this smell like the same bullshit we had before".

First up we have the latest "oh no, evil peeeedofils! Little kiddywinks are dressing up in "suggestive" clothing and being sexualised" - whatever the feck sexualised means. Of course the answer here is not to look at why there is a demand for a padded bikini top for an eight year old - because all the shops are doing is responding to that demand from their customers - but of course reach for the ban hammer, the first, last and only weapon of the lazy, mob-ruled politician.

Maybe if we took a good luck at what our culture has become, little more than panem et circenses which teaches us all you need to be a success is to kick a pig's bladder around or perform some "raunchy" dance routine and win a talent contest (that's rigged anyway, see here) we might see why kids want to look "cool" and "sexy" because that's all that seems to count. Education, manners, learning to be a decent and engaged citizen? Nah, I'm gonna win celebrity come X factor's got talent and get rich and shit, innit.

And fresh from pandering to this along comes the British Board of Film Classification, a bunch of middle class cunt-trumpets who apparently have this amazing insight into the processes in my brain and have determined that if I watch a certain film by the name of "Human Centipede II" I will be so mentally damaged that I'll start going around and stitching human beings together with Mrs Dracunculus' Toshiba sewing machine ¹. OK now having glanced at the plot of this film which seems to involve masturbating with sandpaper, coprophilia and rape with fencing materials I can tell you here and now that I won't be "damaged" at all by this piece of crap because I will under no circumstances be watching it as I would like to retain the contents of my stomach but surely that, as an adult, is my decision and not that of some faceless committee meeting in a room in London somewhere. I've no problem with them placing "ratings" on films, saying "This film contains explicit scenes of X, Y, Z and Justin Beiber and is therefore only suitable for adults and throwing in the bin" so parents can make an informed decision on what their kids see but a flat out "you can't see this, we think it will warp your tiny little minds you ordinary people" is as offensive as the movie they just banned.

Meet the new boss, just the same as the old boss.



¹ Which as I have utterly failed to figure out how it works on no less than three occasions would mean some very lumpy and misshapen aberrations walking around Norfolk - not that anyone would notice.

I can't believe it's not yellow chemical gloop

You probably saw reported on the news yesterday that another self appointed health-fascist by the name of Shyam Kolvekar has decided that his job of heart surgeon paid for out of my taxes is far to time consuming and interferes with his game of golf or rug-butting at the mosque or something and that butter should be banned.

Yes, that butter, you know the yellow stuff that comes out of cows, the stuff that mankind has been making and consuming since we first domesticated Daisy and Buttercup.

OK so there's the predictable backlash from the Daily Mail, the usual suspects in the blogosphere and, well, me.

Ok so he's never going to get the ban is he but it's an event with a quantum probability of close to 1 that some wanker in government is going to go "we need to discourage people from eating butter for their health so we are going to put a minimum price on cow products like butter, cream and the bullshit that spews from my mouth" of course like the minimum price on alcohol that's surely coming it will not be too punitive, yet... but once they have it, and they will, just watch it ratchet up year on year until the only way to get something tasty on your toast is to keep your own cow - assuming you can and the EU haven't made that next to impossible thanks to tons of restrictive legislation. Of course it's all for your own good.

The reason these twats get away with spouting this ordure is, I am increasingly convinced, that we have the NHS. You see as the state provides healthcare the state gets a say in how we, as individuals, manage our health. What they forget is the I fucking paid for the NHS though the 50% of my sodding income you take from me by force so if I want to eat a packet of sodding Lurpack washed down with a bottle of 12 year old Glen Cirrhosis then you can fucking well treat me using the hospitals and doctors I bastard well paid for.

Well you could but there's no way I'll let you as I'm not being treated in your MRSA ridden pits staffed by nurses who barely speak English and got their qualifications by sending away five corn-flake packet tops. So despite having to pay for the NHS I have medical insurance so if something happens at least I stand a chance of leaving the hospital without having acquired several opportunistic infections.

Anyway, back to Dr Bansturbator, he has 18 holes to play at Wentworth Park so let's not keep him waiting. Tell me doctor who are you working for...

Mr Kolvekar's comments were issued by KTB, a public relations company

And KTB are also the PR Company for?

a public relations company that works for Unilever

And besides soap and toothpaste what do Unilever make?

Unilever, the maker of Flora margarine

Riiiight.

But there's no link...

a KTB spokesman said there were no financial ties between the consultant and Unilever and he was not receiving any payment. 'These are his views,' added the spokesman.
The surgeon timed his comments to coincide with the Food Standards Agency's campaign to promote the virtues of low-fat milk.

So why the fuck is he not saying "try your latte with semi-skimmed, it tastes nearly as good"? Of course there will be no direct link, no big fat wad of cash, but it's a bit of a coincidence don't you think.

Fuckers, torch the lot of them.