Fruit beer and journo hype

I've just read an article about a supposed "surge" in the drinking of fruit beer in Britain.

The opening sentence claims that "The traditional pint is being given a run for its money by continental-style fruit and spirit-flavoured beers, enjoyed by consumers as a thirst-quenching summer drink or to inspire imaginative pairing with food."

By "the traditional pint", I assume she means cask beer. Is it really "being given a run for its money" or is this just another example of journalistic hype? Perhaps tellingly, there are no figures given for the actual volumes of fruit beer being drunk but it's surely nowhere near the approximately two and a half million barrels (more than seven hundred million pints) of cask beer consumed annually. In fact, apart from the bottled Belgian fruit beers in their attractive paper wrapping you see in supermarkets and a couple of specialist beer bars that have them on draught, you could go to a lot of pubs and never see one.

Like "craft keg", fruit beer is a niche product that appeals mostly to beer bloggers, journalists and writers rather than the everyday drinker. I suspect that the journalist who wrote this piece is basing her claims on what her friends are drinking in some trendy North London pub or on a corporate press release.

Morrissey in Manchester

I went to the Manchester Arena on Saturday night to see Morrissey.

I can't quite imagine seeing Morrissey anywhere but Manchester given his connection with the hometown crowd and witty barbs directed at his native city.

The setlist might have been tilted towards his more recent material and the latest backing band haven't quite got their chops together yet on Smiths classics but Morrissey can still deliver wonderfully anthemic, sing along to every word performances, whether with How Soon is Now or the sublimely melancholic Everyday is Like Sunday.

As a Mancunian of working-class Irish Catholic descent, I'm genetically, culturally and geographically predisposed to be a fan of Morrissey and The Smiths. As a teenager in the mid-1980's, The Smiths provided a soundtrack to what was still very visibly a post-industrial city. The photo of them in Manchester's derelict Central Station summed up the city's decline in the early years of Thatcherism (a few years back, I saw Morrissey perform there, now redeveloped as a convention centre). It's both heartening and intriguing to see teenagers at gigs now who clearly feel the same connection to his music.

Making Manchester eggs

I was in a pub in Mossley the other week which sells Manchester eggs. They're like a Scotch egg but with black pudding.

You can only buy this snack in a couple of other pubs in Manchester so I decided I'd have a go at making some myself.  I tweaked the recipe in a couple of ways: I thought the pickled egg was a bit of a sharp taste so just used hard-boiled ones and I also used flour rather than egg wash for the breadcrumbs which I probably wouldn't do next time.  So anyway, here's a recipe that you won't find in Delia Smith, Nigella Lawson or any of those other fancy Southern cook books.

Manchester egg

Medium sausage

Slice of black pudding

Hard-boiled egg

Remove skin from sausage and black pudding and mix together in bowl with a fork. Make into a ball before flattening it into a circle about half an inch thick. Place hard-boiled egg in middle and wrap sausage and black pudding around it before coating with breadcrumbs.

Most people deep fry them but I just cooked them in the oven at 200°C for half an hour and they turned out fine. If you're lucky enough to live in the North West, I recommend buying the ingredients from Tittertons, Stockport's premier provider of pork products, but if not any butcher's shop that makes their own sausages and black pudding.

Beer tax and pub closures

The news that beer sales dropped in the second quarter of the year by nearly five and a half per cent has prompted the British Beer and Pub Association, the trade body representing brewers and pub companies, to call again for the automatic increase in beer duty in each year's Budget to be scrapped.

I agree that the escalator as it's called should be scrapped but not for the same reasons as the BBPA. I'm in favour of cutting and eventually removing all tax on beer for three reasons: like all indirect taxes, it hits people on lower incomes more than people on higher incomes; it does that even more on people with an alcohol problem without helping them; it would make beer cheaper for social drinkers like me. The BBPA argues that increases in beer duty mean job losses in breweries and pubs closing. I'm not sure either of those things is true. I'd like to see some evidence of a link, especially on the latter which is now accepted as an obvious fact by most people.

I've always thought that well-run breweries and pubs making and selling decent beer will do OK, even in a recession and a typical English summer, and those that aren't and don't won't. I believe it's called the market economy...

Amy one year on

I watched a BBC Arena documentary last night to mark the anniversary of the death of Amy Winehouse, consisting of a performance and interview she did in Dingle in the far south-west of Ireland in 2006.

I remember the first time I heard Amy Winehouse, about the same time, when Rehab came on a pub jukebox. I thought it was a sixties soul record at first and was surprised when I realised it was actually a current hit.

In the interview, Amy talked about the musicians who had influenced her, some of them fairly obvious like Ray Charles but also unexpected ones such as Thelonious Monk.

One of the saddest things I've read about Amy is Tony Bennett, who recorded a duet with her just before death, saying that he thinks she knew that she wasn't going to survive much longer. Towards the end of her life, she had apparently overcome her drug addictions but was still struggling with the alcoholism that would ultimately kill her.

Watching the interview in which she comes over as both thoughtful and fun, it's hard to accept that she's no longer with us. Rest in peace Amy.

Gun laws the wrong target

The mass shooting at a cinema in Colorado has inevitably sparked comparisons in the British media between our murder rate and gun laws and those in the United States.

I find a lot of the analysis unconvincing. I'm not saying that everyone should be able to walk around with thousands of rounds, as it appears the killer in Colorado did, but I do have sympathy with those who say it would have been better if some of the audience in the cinema had been carrying firearms.

Some people also seem to think that America's higher murder rate is solely because of its gun laws and ignore social conditions. America is scarred by poverty, inequality, racism and a lack of access to housing, health care and education. It's hardly surprising that it has a high murder rate. Tightening up gun laws might reduce mass shootings like last week's but wouldn't remove the roots of violence that lead some people to kill. Switzerland with its high standards of living and social provision, and where miltary reservists keep automatic weapons and ammunition at home, has low gun crime and murder rates.

Britain's gun laws are relatively recent. Up until the 1903 Pistols Act, anyone could buy a gun and until 1920 carry it without a firearms licence. Gun laws are almost always brought in in times of industrial or social conflict. Before the First World War, striking Welsh miners defended themselves against the police with legally-held weapons, just as miners in West Virginia in the 1920's and 1970's and the Black Panthers in the 1960's did.

It would of course be better if no one carried a gun. If you say that some people - such as the police - should be able to carry guns but not others, you're basically saying that you trust them not to misuse their firearms. I don't. Incidents like Dunblane, Hungerford and the Cumbrian shootings show that even relatively tight gun laws won't stop people intent on mass murder getting their hands on weapons but do leave unarmed victims without the means to defend themselves. As William S. Burroughs said, "After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."

Dreyfus, de Dion and the Tour de France

I watched the final stage of the Tour de France yesterday afternoon.

I don't really follow cycling and haven't watched any of the other stages.  I watched mainly because it promised to be a bit of sports history, an Englishman winning the world's most famous cycling race for the first time.  Bradley Wiggins is also a Mod and indie fan who lives in the North West and trains in the hills of Lancashire and at Manchester velodrome.

Reading up on the history of the Tour de France, I found this article about how it began in 1903 as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, the imprisonment of a Jewish army officer for espionage that divided France and increased anti-semitism and nationalism on one side and radicalism and anti-clericalism on the other. The car manufacturer Jules-Albert de Dion, an anti-Dreyfusard, joined other industrialists outraged at the pro-Dreyfus stance of France's leading sports newspaper Le Vélo in setting up a rival publication, now L'Équipe, which sponsored the first race.

The final stage of the Tour goes through some rather pretty countryside. I've been to France but not Paris. If the aerial shots of the gardens at Versailles are anything to go by, they'd be top of my list of places to see if I'm ever there.

I went for a walk after the race had ended. Maybe it was my imagination but there seemed to be a lot of middle-aged men on bikes out on the roads...