The tax on beer

There's an interesting debate going on at Tandleman's blog about the relationship between the price of a pint and the level of taxation on beer.

Although I support CAMRA's campaign to cut tax on beer, I know that there are other factors pushing up the price of a pint, including rising fuel and raw material costs. I also agree that international comparisons can be misleading: beer might only be taxed at 12p a pint in Poland but at 50p a pint that's twenty-four per cent of the total compared to around eighteen per cent in England.

The price of beer is not just determined by how much it costs to produce but how much people are prepared to pay for it, as anyone who's bought drinks at a football match or music gig will know. The answer is not just to cut the tax on beer but also introduce maximum prices as well.

England expects...or maybe not

"Solid", "gritty", "cautious" and "disciplined" are all words that have been used to describe England's performance in their one-all draw with France in Donetsk yesterday afternoon.

"A bit boring" would be a more honest assessment. I know expectations in England are low - as are the number of flags flying compared to the last World Cup - but is not being beaten by France really now to be seen as an achievement? Although nominally playing with two wingers, England played so deep that by the end it was clear that they had no intention of pushing forward for a winner. Wayne Rooney sitting in the stands looked as though he was mentally kicking every ball and must be desperate to lace up his boots for England's last group game - possibly the only one he'll play in the tournament.

Roll Out the Books

I've been watching Roll Out the Barrel, a new DVD from the British Film Institute of information and promotional films about pubs.

As far as I know, there's no equivalent compendium of writing about pubs. In English literature, the novels of Patrick Hamilton are most connected to pubs, closely followed by those of Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Graham Greene. In German, Hermann Hesse and Franz Kafka describe with evident relish the taverns and beer gardens of their youth.

It seems to me that publishers are missing a trick here. I'd buy such a book, as would I'm sure lots of other people.

Punk TV

BBC2 is showing the second part of its series Punk Britannia tonight. Last week focussed on the proto-punk of Dr Feelgood, the New York Dolls and others; part two is the high point of punk in 1977.

In the summer of 1977, I was a six year old eating jelly at a Silver Jubilee street party. The first punk I heard was the Sex Pistols records an older lad up the road played to us a couple of years later.  In the 1980's, as well as listening to post-punk bands like The Jam, I also worked back from The Smiths to The Buzzcocks and from Madness to the ska roots of reggae that influenced punk.

The NME journalist Danny Kelly summed up the conditions that created punk as "council estates; amphetamine sulphate; the dole; John Peel; Bob Harris; pub venues; glue; the suburbs...". I hope BBC2 manages to capture the excitement of what Kelly rightly called "brilliant, revolutionary music".

RIP Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, who has died aged 91, is probably best known for his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, about a future totalitarian American state in which the fire brigade is responsible for burning books.

The book burning has echoes of Nazi Germany, but also of 1950's America where the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunt saw libraries ban books such as Robin Hood for being "socialistic". The novel is also a critique of the consumer society then emerging in which advertising, TV and sport are used to distract the masses from thinking - plus ça change. The ending in which a nuclear war wipes out the totalitarian state and leaves behind a group of survivors with the last remaining books living in the wilderness but intending to return to the devastated cities and create civilisation anew clearly reflects the millenarianism produced by the Cold War world.

Bradbury was also fan of libraries - he typed Fahrenheit 451 in one. As he said in this 2009 interview with the New York Times:

"Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

The Queen's English

A society set up to promote the correct usage of English grammar has decided to disband.

The Queens English Society say that popular indiferrence to the inapropriate use of apostrophe's and spelling words korrectly mean that it cant continue. I dont kno what they mean, do u?

A swift quarter

A report from "health experts" has called on the Government to introduce a daily alcohol limit of half a unit, equivalent to a quarter of a pint of beer.

I'm not sure if the report's authors ever go in pubs but I'd like to see them order a quarter of a pint. If they're with someone else, I suppose they could order a half and another glass. Good luck with that in a backstreet boozer in Manchester. The only legal measures for beer in pubs are a pint, the new two-thirds measure, half a pint and the rarely seen third of a pint, known as "a nip". Maybe a quarter of a pint measure could be called "a sip".