Fighting Freddie

As Mancunian boxer Ricky Hatton finally hangs up his gloves, another local sporting legend, former Lancashire and England cricketer Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff, is preparing to step into the ring against American heavyweight Richard Dawson in Manchester tonight.

I'm no fan of the so-called fight game. Professional boxing - people beating each other up for money - is not my idea of sport but in most cases I can understand why they do it. For many boxers from the inner city estates of London, Manchester, New York or Chicago, the only alternative means to escape the poverty and deprivation of their surroundings is crime (Flintoff's opponent Dawson is apparently an ex-convict). But in Flintoff's case, I fail to see why a wealthy young man would risk serious injury or worse by taking up boxing.

Bronze Age brewing

Archaeologists from the University of Manchester say they have found a Bronze Age brewery in Cyprus.

The eight foot square structure is thought to have been built around three and a half thousand years ago to dry malt for brewing beer with. The research team have already brewed a test beer based on the grains found at the excavation site and are making the recipe available to others.

Who knows, maybe in another couple of thousand years archaeolgists will be digging up Boddies Brewery in Strangeways and declaring it a site of cultural significance.

Lighting up the Dark Ages

A new series about art in the so-called Dark Ages, the period of Late Antiquity following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, started on BBC4 last night.

Art crtic Waldemar Januszczak began by looking at Christian art in the early fourth century, when Christianity was still a persecuted sect whose adherents gathered secretly in catacombs (within a couple of decades, it would become the official State religion of the Roman Empire and begin its rise to power as the Catholic Church). 

Januszczak is a witty and engaging presenter. I enjoyed his explanation of the Latin Rotas square, a secret Christian code that I hadn't heard of before, unlike the  well-known Greek chi rho (XP) and Ichthys (fish) symbols which he also discusssed. His look around the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna with its stunning Byzantine mosaics was the highlight of the programme for me though.

The rest of the series will counter the myth that the peoples who migrated into the collapsing Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries were uncultured barbarians and that the Dark Ages represent a step backwards for European culture.

Wine after beer?

The Guardian last weekend had a review of a new book about wine by Eric Asimov.

The main target of the book seems to be wine critics and their blind tastings, scorecards and tasting notes. It reminded me of a recent BBC4 documentary about Australian wine in which snobby critics who laughed about Chateau Chunder from Down Under went on to rate it highly in blind tastings.

Asimov talks about his wine epiphanies, the moments he understood what all the fuss was about. I can relate to that in terms of beer: the first glass of Schumacher Alt in Düsseldorf, Päffgen Kölsch in Cologne, Augustiner Edelstoff in Munich and Schlenkerla Rauchmärzen in Bamberg.

Apart from the odd glass of champagne at weddings and christenings, I don't drink wine. It's like classical music - something lots of people seem to derive a great deal of pleasure from but whose appeal I find hard to understand.

Maybe the reason is that I've never drunk really good wine. There's a lot of talk about how wine's been demystified and democratised over the years but I'm not sure that's really true. Maybe cheap wine has but the really good stuff is still beyond the pockets of all but a few rich collectors. With beer it's the other way round: the best beers in the world tend to be cheaper than the mass-produced ones.

Football and fascism

For the second time in a week, Tottenham fans have been subjected to anti-Semitic abuse as a result of the club being perceived to have a large support in the Jewish communtiy of North London.

Last Thursday in Rome, Spurs fans were attacked in a bar by men shouting "Jews!" and then racially abused by Lazio supporters in the Olympic Stadium. Yesterday at White Hart Lane, West Ham fans  chanted about Hitler and hissed in imitation of the poison gas the Nazis used to kill Jews in the Holocaust.

At the height of football hooliganism in the 1970's and 80's, British clubs including Chelsea and Leeds had a sizeable far-right following. At others, notably Manchester City and Newcastle, the fascists were driven off by a combination of the left and the local black community.

The conflict between Republicans and Loyalists in Northern Ireland means that fascist hooliganism in Britain is also linked to religious identity with clubs having a large Catholic support seen as left-wing and anti-fascist and Protestant ones such as Rangers in Glasgow providing foot soldiers for the BNP and National Front. Unlike in Britain. where Catholics are overwhelmingly of working-class Irish descent, in Spain and Italy the Church, football and fascism have long been linked with clubs such as Real Madrid, Espanyol, Lazio and Inter supported by fascist politicians and organised neo-Nazi groups on the terraces.

Hey Jimi

A new album of unreleased material by Jimi Hendrix is coming out next year. According to the  Hendrix website, the tracks, recorded in 1968 and 1969, show "new, experimental directions" and "fresh diversions from his legendary guitar work".

Hendrix's music is clearly rooted in the blues. You could describe it as psychedelic blues, blues on a LSD trip to Mars and back.  Buddy Guy in his autobiography tells the story of Hendrix turning up at one of his gigs and asking if he could record it on his tape-to-tape machine. I've also seen an interview with Guy where he demonstrates how Hendrix's Voodoo Chile is based on a Muddy Waters lick.

Hendrix would have been the first to acknowledge his blues influences. According to people who knew him in New York in the mid-60's, he played Muddy Waters records pretty much continuously in his apartment. At the end of his life, he experimented with acoustic blues as well as playing with R&B musicians in the Band of Gypsys. I wonder where Jimi would be now musically if it hadn't died so prematurely in 1970.

Giving thanks with beer

Across their Atlantic, our American cousins are celebrating Thanksgiving.

There's lot of advice online about what beer to drink with your Thansksgiving dinner. Given it's basically a Christmas dinner with a few extra trimmings, I'd say any bitter/pale ale would do.

I'm not that into beer and food pairing. Apart from the classics - pork pie and a pint of bitter, lager with Chinese and Indian food - it strikes me as an attempt by the beer world to ape wine. Having said that, you occasionally stumble across a combination that really works, like the cheese and onion cob and pint of mild I had in the Beacon Hotel on my tour of the Black Country a few months back or Robinson's Old Tom with Christmas pudding.