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.

When I want your advice I'll ask for it

Oh what fun. Just when you thought we actually had got rid of the NuLabour nanny state do as I say bollocks up pop BlueLabour with a tick-the-box-your-government-knows-best bullshit scheme where all NHS staff have to lecture you to promote "Good Health"  every time you have the misfortune to come into contact with you.

Now we all know this is going to be a box ticking exercise like the last lots' "Quality of Outcomes" shit. As an example of what will happen here I give you Mrs Dracunculus. She was at the doctors today, routine visit for a long standing complaint just to review, make sure its not getting worse, check the ongoing medication and tweak as necessary. Now she gets five minutes of the doctors time in which he has to do this and she informs me that five minutes was fully used. But in the future three of those five minutes is taken up with a stern lecture from Dr Mopp about how the glass of Sauvignon she likes of an evening will make her sodding tail fall off so what's he going to miss about the actual problem he was being consulted with in the first place?

What we have here is the underlying problem of the NHS. It was set up with the noblest of motives; free at the point of use so all citizens would be able to have their serious medical needs attended to and we would be free of the spectre of people dying for want of seeing a doctor. But since its founding its grown to way, way more than that simple basic service, and we're all partly guilty of making it suck. Over the generations we've demanded more, more, more from the NHS. We want every sniffle and cold treated, every illness given immediate and the best treatment, the treatment of ridiculous conditions (you can get a sex change on the NHS for fuck's sake) and the system simply can't cope. Accordingly the government step in to lecture, harangue and bully us into whatever bullshit they can come up with to try and keep us "healthy" and out of the doctor's surgery. We allowed the NHS to change from a backstop into a state monolith that seeks to control our "healthy choices" because they feel they have to just to stop the whole edifice collapsing in a mountain of debt and unpaid bills.

I'm quite aware that the Cuban Habaneros and that bottle of Malbec aren't good for me thanks. It's my choice and when I want your health advice I will ask for it. Oh, and I have BUPA so, state, kindly sod off.

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

What a doughnut

The first of the looters in Manchester are being hauled before the beak this week. Now down in the smoke it was kids kicking in the windows of Currys and strolling off with a Sony Bravia. Not in Manchester:

A man who helped himself to doughnuts from a Krispy Kreme shop during riots in Manchester city centre has been jailed for 16 months.

Apparently his excuse was he was hungry:

He was not involved in rioting but took the doughnuts because he was hungry, having spent his money on tobacco

oh and before he bought his tabs:

Thomas Downey, 48, was released from HMP Manchester at 19:30 BST on 9 August when he became caught up in the riots. The serial offender went to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous before downing a bottle of sherry.

That 12 step programme is working a treat I see.

According to the article on the Beeb's website this bloke has over 100 convictions for 233 offences.

You know I try to feel sorry for people like this, I really do (deep down I am actually quite a caring dragon) but I have to ask myself wouldn't it be better if people like Thomas and the few thousand other Thomases out there, you know the 0.1% of the population that cause 95% of the trouble, could just be put somewhere away from the rest of us? Hell give them access to booze, drugs and 24/7 porn or something but isolate the infection so the rest of us can just get on with doing our everyday stuff without Mr Sherry and Doughnuts wandering into view and kicking off on a booze and sugar rush.

Mind you the one man I do not have any sympathy for is this loser:

Father-of-four Anthony Winder, 38, looted the Swarovski Crystal store and smashed a display cabinet to get an ornamental dog, the court heard.

You actually wanted a Swarovski crystal dog? You deserve to be executed for crimes against taste.

To the gurning copper at the Raoul Moat standoff

Hello, yes you, the gurning copper with the taser.



Look I know you get a bit upset with people taking pictures, especially pictures of coppers, but might I give you a spot of health and safety advice. If you are going to turn your head, grimace and berate a member of the public for having the temerity to photograph you in the course of your duties it would be a really good idea if YOU TOOK YOUR FUCKING FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER OF YOUR SODDING WEAPON!

Thanks for listening.

Grumpy.

PS: Apparently former footballer and celebrity wife-beater and pisshead Paul "Gazzer" Gascoigne turned up in Rothbury last night, pissed as a newt, wanting to take his old mate "Moatie" some chicken, a warm coat and a can a lager then sit down with him and do some fishing. A local radio station managed to get an interview with him which is hilarious... go have a listen: http://ht.ly/29y6m

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.

On not stinking like an ashtray

Your little dragon was out on the ales last night with long time friend and occasional commentator on this blog "Blackpowder"¹; as usual at these events much Timmy Taylor's Landlord was consumed, laughs were had and I seem to remember we called the McCanns a bunch of creepy cunts on more than one occasion.

However about half way through the evening I noticed something... I was breathing. As you may know I'm a slightly asthmatic dragon and I don't tolerate smoke especially well but it wasn't smoky. Of course I'd forgotten about the smoking ban and this was the first time I'd been in a pub since it came into force. I must admit to being somewhat torn on the idea of a smoking ban. On the one hand I take a classic libertarian approach in that people can do what they want to their own bodies and the owner of a premises should be free to dictate the terms of use of those premises. conversely I fucking hate cigarette smoke and waking up in the morning stinking like an ashtray with a trip to the dry cleaners in prospect as my clothing now smells like Beelzebub's arse.

The clincher came this morning however. After a night in the pub on the Milk of Amnesia I woke up without that feeling that throughout the night two gay bull elephants have been bouncing up and down on my chest whilst having sloppy botty sex.

Smoking ban = good thing.


¹ Who I think I managed to persuade to start his own blog which is sure to be hilarious and even more grumpy than mine.