One over the eight

The latest shot from the temperance, sorry "responsible drinking", lobby is that people are undereporting how much they drink. Apparently there's a big gap between the amount of alcohol sold and the amount people say they drink.

It reminds me of a guy I used to work with who went to his doctor's for a health check. The nurse asked him how much he drank a week and when he told her she started saying, "That's quite a lot isn't it? Do you know about the Government guidelines on units per day?" and he said he thought to himself, "Actually, I've only told her what I drink in the week, not what I drink at weekends."

The King's Speech and brewing

I've just watched the film The King's Speech about the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue who helped George VI with his stammer. It's a lot better than I expected.

In one scene, Logue tells the future king that his father was a brewer. According to this, Logue's grandfather Edward was a Dublin publican who emigrated to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century and became an owner of the Kent Town Brewery in Adelaide.  The brewery is now - surprise, surprise - an apartment block and its beers are produced by Australasian drinks conglomerate Lion.

Thankfully, Adelaide still has an independent family brewery producing decent beer, the famously traditional Coopers whose bottle conditioned Pale Ale you can get in supermarkets here.

The next train to Batley

I've just watched the second episode of the BBC series The Railway: Keeping Britain on Track.

This week's programme looked at the Transpennine Real Ale Trail, the pub crawl by train from Manchester to Batley, stopping off at Huddersfield, Mirfield, Slaithwaite ("Slawit" to locals), Dewsbury, the unofficial pub at Mossley and my own favourite, the Railway at Greenfield where the excellence of the beer is matched by that of the pork pies.

The BBC made the trail look like a hazardous, vomit spattered stagger across Lancashire and Yorkshire with people falling onto the track and abusing other rail passengers and train staff. I've done it a few times for birthdays and stag nights and while some people drink a bit more than they should, the number who cause trouble is tiny compared to the thousands who enjoy a beery day out.

If I lived in one of the small towns on the route, I might think differently about the weekly invasion of inebriated travellers but surely a bit of litter and public urination is a small price to pay for keeping your pubs open and regular train services running?

Orwell and beer

Seventy years after he left the BBC, Radio Four is running a series of programmes on The Real George Orwell. I listened to one of them this weekend, a dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four with Christopher Eccleston as Winston Smith.

Even though Nineteen-Eighty Four is set almost four decades after Orwell wrote it, it still has the feel of London in the late forties: bomb sites, steam trains, rationing and a scene in a pub where an old man says to Winston,"When I was a young man, mild beer - wallop, we used to call it - was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course."

A major theme in Orwell's work is Englishness, including the most English of subjects, beer and pubs. I can't think of any of his novels where they don't appear, from the chemically tasting pint of bitter in the hotel bar in Coming Up for Air to the "dark common ale" in the backstreet beerhouse in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

A couple of years ago, a local newspaper interviewed the former landlady of a village pub in Hertfordshire who served Orwell with pints of mild in a jug when he rented a cottage there.

Horsey, horsey – when will it stop?

Like a riderless mount in the Grand National, the so-called horse meat scandal just keeps running and running. The food industry has been pumping products full of fat, sugar and salt for decades, leading to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from heart disease, but the moment they add a bit of harmless horse meat to burgers the media is suddenly up in arms demanding that the Government DO SOMETHING NOW.

In 1855 in Paris, a hundred and thirty-two people, among them the novelist Gustave Flaubert, sat down to a banquet which included horse soup, sausages and roast horse and fillet of horse with mushrooms, accompanied by potatoes fried in horse fat. The event is credited with sparking the French enthusiasm for horse dishes that continues to this day.

I'd have no problem eating horse meat, and as a customer of Burger King I probably already have.

Baum romps home

CAMRA yesterday gave its Pub of the Year award to The Baum in Rochdale.

I haven't been to The Baum but I've heard lots of good things about it from other CAMRA members and it's definitely on my "pubs I really must go to" list.

BBC North West sent a film crew along to the pub last night with the reporter mentioning the number of handpumps, as does the CAMRA press release. I'm sure The Baum has more than enough trade to have seven or eight handpumps dispensing beer in top condition but it got me thinking: how few beers could a pub have on and still pick up the Pub of the Year award? I can think of a couple of Holt's houses in Eccles that serve cracking pints of bitter and mild and also have the atmosphere, decor, welcome, service, value for money and customer mix that CAMRA looks for when making the award.

Pope resigns

To be honest, I just wanted to write that headline. Who knows, it might be another six hundred years before anyone gets the chance again.