Black Country bound

I'll be in Wolverhampton and the Black Country next week, going round some of the small brewery taps the area is known for.

I'm especially looking forward to drinking some mild, including the Banks's Mild I drank quite a bit of as a student in Stoke in the early 90's, Bathams Mild in the Bull and Bladder and Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild at the Beacon Hotel in Sedgley.

As they say in the Black Country, terrar a bit!

Go South!

The Labour Group on Northumberland County Council has sparked a political row by arguing that the council should run an advertising campaign to attract Scottish drinkers when a minimum alcohol unit price is introduced north of the border.

There is of course nothing the Scottish Government can do to stop incursions of Pictish proportions into the unregulated English alcohol market. But what if Scotland votes for independence? Will bootleggers be chased over the Tweed by Scottish sheriffs? Will Glasgow become the new Chicago with speakeasies selling cheap imported English booze?

What's the point of pubs?

I've just listened to this radio programme presented by the journalist Quentin Letts. 

Letts has being doing a series called What's the Point of..? This week he looked at pubs. I know it's supposed to be light-hearted but I was slightly irritated by his assumption that  British pubs are in decline, it's because of the smoking ban and drink-driving laws and the only answer is to target families and serve food, an assumption belied by the successful new pubs he visited, including wet-led ones.

I have no idea what pubs the Italian academic Letts interviewed has been drinking in but his paean to the classlessness of British pubs ("the banker and the shop assistant drinking together") is nonsense. Although Karl Marx is supposed to have joked that a revolution wouldn't start in Cologne because the bosses drank in the same pubs as their workers, British pubs have always been divided by class, both different types of pub (posh pubs, estate pubs) and inside the pub itself with the lounge/vault distinction. I used to work opposite two pubs: one was known and understood as the management pub where only supervisors and those aspiring to become one drank and the other as the workers' pub where you could go and talk about mangement without it getting back to them.

JR is back!

Channel 5 has announced that they will be showing the new series of Dallas next month.

I watched the first series of Dallas as a child - in fact, my tenth birthday party ended early so people could watch the episode where it was revealed who shot JR.

Dallas, based on the feud between rival oil barons the Ewings and the Barnes, is best watched as a comedy. Clive James mercilessly lampooned the ten-gallon hats and far-fetched storylines in the 80's and Larry Hagman as JR Ewing always seemed to me to be playing his character for laughs.  He's back in the new series, the twinkle in his eye undimmed.

Always something there to remind me

I listened to the first episode of a new series of The Reunion yesterday, presented by Sue MacGregor.

MacGregor always reminds me of the Scottish doctor in Tony Hancock's The Blood Donor, her name suggesting a descent from the Highland clans at odds with her cultured English tones, but she does a good job in getting people to recall events they were involved in. Yesterday it was English female pop singers of the 1960's Sandie Shaw, Helen Shapiro and Petula Clark talking about the music industry of that decade along with songwriter Jackie Trent and producer Vicki Wickham.

I first remember Sandie Shaw singing Hand in Glove with The Smiths in the 1980's and in interviews since then I've always been impressed by her fesity self-confidence. She worked at the Ford Dagenham factory in the early 60's before becoming a pop singer and if she'd still been there I can imagine her being on the picket line in the 1968 machinist's strike, a key event in the still ongoing struggle for equal pay for women.

The programme also highlighted the fusion of English working-class youth culture and African-American R&B and soul with singers including Shaw, Clark and Dusty Springfield performing and recording in the US and helping to showcase artists on the Atlantic and Motown labels here.

VS Naipaul at eighty

The Trinidadian novelist VS Naipaul is eighty today.

Naipaul is a bit of a cariacture these days, the English gentleman making reactionary remarks and pursuing literary feuds over whisky at his club, but I still find his 1961 masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas with its Dickensian range of characters as funny now as when I first read it twenty or so years ago.

This piece written by the eponymous hero when he's working as a journalist always make me laugh:

"Less than a year ago Daddy - George Elmer Edman, the celebrated traveller and explorer - left home to explore the Amazon. Well, I have news for you, kiddies. Daddy is on his way home. Yesterday he passed through Trinidad. In a coffin."

Black Country brewpubs

I'm off to the Black Country for a few days in a couple of weeks. It's somewhere I've passed through on the train dozens of times but never actually been to.

One of the main reasons I'm going is because of the small brewery taps like the Beacon Hotel in Sedgley and the Bull and Bladder in Brierley Hill. Michael Jackson and others have written about them but there's one question I've never seen answered.  Why did small breweries and brewpubs continue to exist in the Black Country when they pretty much disappeared everywhere else in England in the twentieth century?  I'd guess it's something to do with industry and geography but maybe there are other reasons too.