Beer and breast milk

I've just started reading Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. Like other novels by Dickens - Great Expectations, David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop - it abounds with references to beer and brewing.

As the novel opens, the son of the title has just been born. His mother dies shortly afterwards, leading Mr Dombey to employ a working-class "wet nurse" to breast feed him.  He also orders that she be supplied with "porter - quite unlimited."

I've heard the idea before that stout promotes the production of breast milk.  According to the beer writer Michael Jackson, in Malta Farsons Lacto Stout is prescribed by doctors to breastfeeding mothers. 

The question is whether it's actually true.  Is it an advertising ploy like Guiness is Good for You or is there scientific evidence to back the claim up?

Higgs boson and the triumph of science

I don't pretend to understand the physics behind the experiments carried out at the CERN nuclear research centre in Switzerland but I'm still excited by today's announcement that scientists there think they may have seen a Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that is thought to give other matter its mass (I think!).  What is just as interesting is that before the announcement the physicists at CERN said that if the Higgs boson could be shown not to exist they would have to rewrite the laws of particle physics from scratch.  This is still possible given the provisional nature of the results and mirrors the situation with the last publicly discussed results from CERN which seemingly showed particles travelling at more than the speed of light, contravening the theory of general relativity put forward by Einstein.

Science's willingness to treat evidence as provisional rather than immutable and completely rewrite its theories when new evidence becomes known is of course what makes it science - in contrast to the pseudoscience perpetrated by whacky Midwestern creationists - but those qualities should nevertheless still be celebrated by all rational people.

The Killing II

I've been watching the second series of the Danish crime drama The Killing as avidly as I watched the first.  With only a couple of episodes to go, I've still got no idea who the mysterious army officer Perk supposedly behind the murders is.

There are a lot of reasons that I like The Killing:

1. the acting obviously, especially that of Sofie Gråbøl as the main character Sarah Lund.

2. the combination of crime drama and political thriller.

3. the atmospheric dark shooting of it, reminiscent of my native North of England.

4. the Danish language which not only sounds a bit like German but Northern English as well.

The Killing might just still be pipped by Wallander as my favourite Scandinavian crime drama (the Krister Henriksson one obviously) for its team rather than lone wolf approach and humour but it's a close run thing. The last two episodes of the current series are next Saturday. If you haven't seen it, here's a clip.

Little Englanders and Europe

I've been in Germany most of this week which provided an interesting perspective on the anti-Europeanism  of the Tory party and the Little Englander tabloid press.  There may be such attitudes on the far right on the continent but not in the political mainstream or even the popular press. The exceptionalism of Little Englanderism can be explained by history and geography. 

Britain as an island is by definition cut off from the rest of Europe where people are used to moving across national borders without a passport.  There's also the fact that European wars and revolutions have seen areas occupied and borders change dozens of times over the last couple of hundred years.  The Rhineland where I was for example has in that time been controlled by Napoleonic France, Prussia, France again, Weimar and Nazi Germany and since World War II has had thousands of British troops stationed there.

Auf Wiedersehen

I'm off to the Rhineland tomorrow for a few days.  I'll be visiting Düsseldorf, Cologne and Bonn, going to a few Christmas markets and looking round Cologne Cathedral.  I may also find time to pop in a pub or two.

Bis dann!

Bigmouth Strikes Again

I don't know or care whether Jeremy Clarkson was being serious when he called for striking public sector workers to be executed on TV the other night.  He obviously said it to be controversial and provoke a reaction which is just what he got as Twitter and Facebook went into meltdown.  Given he was on the show to promote a book, him and his publicist must be laughing at all the publicity his remarks have attracted.  Rather than phoning the police or complaining to the BBC, a much better response would have been to yawn and turn over.  It's like a child throwing a tantrum: make a fuss and they just carry on; ignore them and they give up.

Clarkson's pal David Cameron has unsurprisingly tried to downplay the remarks.  Cameron and Clarkson have a lot in common: educated at public school, part of the Chipping Norton set in Oxfordshire, and ironically, unlike the strikers they condemn, in receipt of very generous wages and pensions paid for by the taxpayer.

Toffs and tax

Having been on the public sector workers' pensions demo in Manchester yesterday, I watched the BBC2 programme Your Money and How They Spend It more out of interest than any expectation of it being very incisive.

My low expectations of the programme were borne out as the presenter, ex-national chairman of the Young Conservatives Nick Robinson, interviewed former Labour and Conservative Chancellors of the Excheque who all basically said: "People want decent public services but won't vote for higher taxes".  Needless to say, the obvious point that rich people and big companies could pay more, or in many cases even start paying tax, was not put to them.

The most interesting part was where Robinson walked round a racecourse asking people who they thought "the rich" were, how much "rich people" earned and how many of them there were.  Unsurprisingly, the richer people are, the higher their bar for what counts as rich.  No one admitted to being rich themselves even when they clearly were and estimates of how many people earned the same as them were also way off with people guessing that 25% of the population earn over £120,000 rather than the actual figure of 1%.