I have been thinking a lot about the pub; or lack thereof for quite a while.

I was lucky enough to be brought up and witness the end of the pub crawl, a ritual undertaken by all walks of life up and down the country. It was a simple idea really. You come home on a Friday night after a hard week’s graft, and got ready to go out to start the weekend; there was an enjoyment in doing the simplest of things. Changing clothes to go out always had to be accompanied by some good music. Not just anything; but fist pumping back beats and catchy melodies you’ll have stuck in your head for the next hour. Your dinner was prepared quickly but it was never just reheated leftovers from Thursday… it was always something special even if it was just a trip to the chippy on your way home. As soon as you finished your private rituals you set off for the pub.

The pubs back then were laid heavy with smoke, stale beer and perpetually gloomy even though the sun had not yet set. People who ordered food in such places were looked at with disdain; this was a Friday night after all and good times should be had by all.

The first pint was always a risk… most of the time it had been in the pipes since last night so a gut wrenching sour after taste almost always accompanied it. There was no real ale… there was a choice between: bitter, lager or Guinness; all of which kind of tasted the same and you differentiated between them by the cost and alcohol percentage. Now cost, there is a touchy subject, and one I’ll return to later.

But the first pint was always a good one; no matter how sour watered down it may be. It was a symbol of breaking the tyranny of the 9-5 day and recognising you would not need to wake up early to go into work tomorrow. One by one your friends started to gather to be greeted with choruses of “hellos” or in some cases people who you have not seen for a while by cheers.

One pint became two; two became three; and invariably the subject was raised: where to next?

Nights out were never a single pub; there were several pubs; meeting different people in each one your group splitting up, merging from pub to pub. Some pubs were noted for their great jukeboxes; others for their atmosphere. Sometimes another part of our anatomy did the talking and other pubs were suggested simply because we knew other people will be there. Debates were raged over the benefits of each pub and the group flowed from one to another – driven by seemingly random impulses across town.

Towns and cities back then were heaving with revealers relishing the fact it was the weekend travelling back and forth between the many pubs which dotted our towns. I have been out recently and you no longer see the trains of people moving between pubs… just single groups here and there moving between the few pubs which remain. When I first started going out there were bouncers on most pub doors – simply to make sure the place did not become too overcrowded. This was Friday nights out on the town, every weekend; Saturday nights sometimes as well; but that never had the same “just off work feel” that the magical Friday gave.

I’m sorry that people who are turning 18 now cannot experience the pub culture and crawl; in the glimpses of young people I have seen around town these days the entire premise seems to revolve around vodka and how fast you can drink it in a trendy bar with hard lines and cold lighting. Nights drinking sterilised and chemically pure alcohol in various fizzy and fruity concoctions in a cool over-metallic environment. The weird smell of smoke machines and too much Lynx following them around all night.

You are not likely to bump into an old man at the bar who twists your ear about politics; there is no old dusty settee in the corner which had lost all its spring long ago. There is no travel between the different pubs to experience each character. There is no need. There is a bar which has the same type of people and the same layout as the last one. Always too cold; and always the same. Dozens of ramshackle little pubs with less space than an Ethiopian grain storage silo are replaced with sprawling “state of the art” and neon bars.

Have we progressed? I think not. The decent few pubs who remain are always on the verge of collapse with groups of patrons sitting in the corder mumbling in the corner about the prices of beer. When I was 18 I went out with a tenner in my pocket and it was enough for six pints of beer and either a taxi home or a kebab; and that was more than ample to have a good time.

So what does this mean for the Friday night this week?

Well I plan to have a couple of pints in the pub and go home early… perhaps picking up a few cans from the shop. There is no dancing to oasis when you are getting dressed to go out any-more; there is no changing your razor blade for a new one; and there is no more pub crawl… in fact the last pub crawl I was in involved a car… as the distances were too far to walk.

Beer festival · Blackburn · crawl · ethopia · friday · friends · night · oasis · pub · Thwaites · youth

I recently claimed on here that the French are no good at beer which is actually a tad unfair, as well as being entirely accurate. You see, en Francais they can’t make a decent pint to save their lives, probably because they’re all far too busy committing exhistalist acts of adultery whilst guzzling decadent pastries and smoking 300 Gitanes a day. However, they do have an apperatif, called Picon.

On it’s own, it tastes of burnt oranges and looks like the sort of cough syrup that Victorian nannies gave to pauper children in the workhouse to shut them up till they died of cholera or something. It’s not really very pleasant when knocked back by itself and it doesn’t really work with a typical mixer but throw it into a pint of blonde biere and things get decidedly engaging.

I first got a chance to try a picon biere out in La Rochelle earlier this year after having a pop at one of my favourite holiday pursuits- Foreign Beer Menu Pontoon. Basically you sit at one of those lovely European cafe bars, out front on the pavement if you can, and peruse the menu which, if it’s a good establishment, should have 6 or 7 beers on there that you’ve never heard of.

Picon- the apperatif that doesn't have a funny caption

Now the idea is to start working through them trying to have a better drink with each successive choice. If you pick one of those awful dark Europen beers that tastes of treacle and death, or if you’re really unlucky and pick the non-alcoholic lager, you’ve ‘bust’ and it’s time to leave the bar. Trust me, it’s fun.

Anyway, one such game on the French Atlantic coast lead me to order a Picon biere and be confronted shortly afterwards with a sort of orangey brown and moderately fizzy pint. Intriguingly, the addition of an orangey liqeur to continental lager creates a drink with the taste of a nice pale ale but the cool, sparkling refreshment of a shandy. It was confusing and alluring at the same time, like a wet dream about a second cousin.  I was hooked.

Upon returning to France the other week, and after the success of the floating Leffe, I decided to source a bottle of Picon and intorduce everyone else in the villa to the majesty of it’s marriage to lager. One problem- the drink I’d had in La Rochelle had been served to me out on the pavement so I’d not seen it being prepared. I therefore had no idea of measurements, of how to mix the two ingredients, of the order in which to put them in the glass and even of the best beer to use.

This is what Picon bieres should look like. NB- serving in glasses with the names of astronomical phenomena is not strictly necessary

What followed was, as a suitably appropriate sequel to our previous engineering project in the pool, the beer equivalent of Crick and Watson figuring out the structure of DNA. Yet again the gentlemen of the house descended on the task, this time in the kitchen and tried to decipher the exact way to create a drink that only one of them had ever tasted and the flavour of which had been described as ‘like a wet dream about a second cousin’ which, to be frank, wasn’t helping anyone. The label on the back of the Picon bottle seemed to offer some guidance but only a couple of us involved understand any French and neither of us did a GCSE in the language that covered the manufacture of regional beer cocktails.

Did we crack it? Not really. Obviously the secret of nailing a perfect Picon Biere is a closely-guarded secret passed down from father to son in the bars of the Loire Valley. As well as being printed in detail on the back of Picon bottles to be read by anyone with a decent level of French comprehension.

But, by God, trying to nail the recipe was addictive. For a while a kitchen in a French farmhouse turned into a ramshackle version of a British micro-brewery as 4 men battled with a few simple ingredients and measures to craft a perfect drink. Different continental lagers and blonde beers were tried, along with a variety of measures of Picon and every conceivable form of mixing technique. Frankly, that last one got a bit silly and a genuine attempt was made to mix the drink using a food blender. Oddly, this turned out to be one of our best tasting attempts.

But the drink I’d had earlier in the year proved elusive. No matter what we mixed, or how, it didn’t taste like it did sat outside that cafe in the back streets of La Rochelle. And, of course, unless I was back there it never could.

Are the French bad at beer? No, they aren’t. They just don’t have to make it as interesting as ours, because they’ve got much better places to drink it.

The day: 15.
The drink: Picon Biere (sort of)
The place: Near Decartes, France
Positives: Trying to figure the way to make Picon Biere out is as close as drinking has ever got to a spiritual quest for me.
Negatives: Quest ended in ultimate failure.
Conclusion: Everyone should try Picon Biere. But get a French bloke to make it.

biere · France · French beer · lager · picon · picon biere

First of all, the Duvel website is cracking. Well thought out with lots of good videos. There’s a day by day diary of how the drink is brewed, fascinating stuff. 

I considered this for the Drinks 30/30 but Ale in the living room barely qualifies. I’m really going to struggle to beat Matt’s beer on a tank. Unless I can knock back a pint of stout while sky diving or down a tumbler of scotch while rafting the Amazon, Taylor has this wrapped up. It’s not even a particularly exciting living room, there’s a fetching Dali-esque print from a local artist in Spain. The UK version of Law & Order on TV is disappointing, I don’t have anything against Bradley Walsh but he’s no Jerry Orbach. God rest his soul. He put Baby in a corner.

The Beer. At 8.5% it has a mad kick to it. It hangs around the back of the throat for a while. It’s not particularly golden either, it looks like someone washed some straw and this was what was left. I don’t judge a beer on how it looks though, unless it’s purple or blue. It tastes fine, it’s an tricky taste though. It tastes like your normal light golden ale then smacks you round the back the head with no warning. I’d imagine it’s like dating a hot ninja, they entice you in with their pleasant aroma, smooth taste and stories of bare handed chop-sockery and then KAPOW. Judo chop to the back of the head and welcome to a world of pain.

Lets wrap this up quickly so I can get back to Halo Reach. While I’ve no reason to dislike Duval, I just found that there’s far too much happening to make it a nice, casual beer. I seem to have found another beer for which this is neither the time nor place.

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If you have ever written a letter to Tim Wetherspoon (his lesser-known boyband name) please stop reading now, for the coming paragraphs will only antagonise you and prompt you into spending the next three hours sat at your desk penning a furious response, something along the lines of…

Dear Richard,

Myself and my wife have always greatly enjoyed your fine tales, drinking adventures and reasonably priced exploits in drunkenness. However, your recent mockery of Mr Tim Martin by means of illustrating how shit the food his miserable teenage staff make was, I must say, beneath the belt. Myself and my wife have many a time enjoyed Mr Tim Martin’s reasonably priced shit food, washed down with a pleasant drink – often “gratis”!!! In future, please leave this stalwart of great British business out of your so-called “discussions” of comically inedible food.

Regards,

Mr P Dimmond, Nuneaton

You will pass it to your secretary to proof-read, studiously ignoring any suggestions she makes; then you’ll email it to your wife at home, basking in the glowing reply she sends half an hour later. “Susan! Have this in the next post, post haste!” Please, if you don’t like hearing a bad word about your favourite local reasonably priced retailer of food and drink, stop reading now and save yourself that letter.

Over the last decade I’ve seen a lot change in my town, Blackburn, in ways that haven’t been seen in similar nearby towns. Quite a lot of pubs have disappeared and there are a few reasons why: first came the trial of late-night licensing in a few select pubs in the town centre. Blackburn was a guinea pig for this around the turn of the century, so I caught both sides of the scene, before and after the changes. First it was 1am, then 2am and by now it’s 4am. Everybody loved this at first – it was a chance to go out at a normal time and if you fancied, stay out an hour longer! Brilliant. Indeed it was, until the shift began towards people realising they could stay out later, so they could stay at home drinking first and come out later. Net effect: town centre pubs became mostly vacant until 10pm within a few years of this change.

The second cause has been the shift in drinking habits among my generation and the one beneath me. Alcopops and ciders have enabled younger and younger people to begin drinking in their own groups. They tend to favour bars and clubs – what I call anti-pubs – and a shift began around a decade ago that converted some of Blackburn’s old pubs into bars. Virtually instantly, that’s a place off the map for anyone who enjoyed a normal pub. On top of that, the bars don’t open in the day so it’s become a pub desert during the afternoon. It’s only an aside, albeit a sad one, that many of these converted bars are now closed altogether so whole streets have become pub- and bar-free.

The Postal Order: the scourge of real pubs. Courtesy of Cottontown.

And so we come to what I’d suggest is the third cause: yep, you guessed it, JD Wetherspoon. In Blackburn’s case it’s the Postal Order, occupying a grand old building pretty much right in the town centre. The effect when it opened was immediate: queues three or four deep at weekends and busy during the week. As Blackburn has died off, this has died off with it, but the proportional effect is still there: it always has a larger share of the trade than anywhere else in town, even if the total trade is lower. On any given afternoon, if you took all the old men, all the students and all the drunks out of the Postal Order and redistributed them across the town centre, there’d be enough business to keep three or four pubs alive.

That’s the first thing I’ve always vaguely resented the Postal Order for. I’ve always gone in there, had some good times over the years, but at the back of my mind I’d have always been happy to pay an extra 50p to be in a proper pub. Why didn’t I just go to a real pub, of course you’re asking? Well, that’s my point – Wetherspoons played a part in killing them off. If you haven’t been to Blackburn I can’t begin to describe what a desert it is in the town centre for an actual, normal pub. If you’re looking for some dinner and a pint, well, you’ve got two choices – there or O’Neills. That’s it. I resent them for crumbling away the choice of pubs in this town.

The second thing I’ve always been a little bitter about is that the place isn’t even good. It’d be much more palatable if the ultimate mega-pub in the world had shot up and the opposition had died off naturally – but no, the Postal Order has just emerged like a giant turd mound and swallowed everything beneath it. It’s battered, it’s always messy, the staff are so underpaid and overworked they change every week and don’t give a damn. Losing our genuine pubs to this beast is like Mike Tyson losing his arms at the peak of his career to some poxy infection he got from a splinter. One of the standard replies people always give in that apathetic, apologist voice is “well, the food’s alright…” purely to justify that they know they keep going back for the cheap beer. Well, the food is shite and you know it. These two recent experiences, by myself and Alex, made me realise just how little people are willing to accept in the name of a cheap drink. Exhibit A:

I think this is a Japanese innovation, boil-and-eat-in-the-bag.

Come on, Mr P Dimmond from Nuneaton, what is that?! I know you only defend the place because it’s the only pub you feel safe going in these days and your ego needs some assurance, but how many times have you seen shite like this and mentally glazed over the absurdity of it by rationalising that it’s cheap or just repeating the mantra, “the food’s alright”?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit B:

The most appetising ham, egg and chips you'll ever have fortune to witness, courtesy of Alex.

I think it has become a too well-received piece of wisdom that the food in Wetherspoons “is alright”. It has, in effect, become a byword for saying “the food is shite but I want a cheap beer so I’m still going to go there”. This apathy has ended up with the only pubs I can go to for dinner in this town being a Wetherspoons, an O’Neills and a place that sells toasties to students with house music in the background. Tim Martin, credit to him, has built a successful business upon people’s levels of tolerance: until something is truly absurd and unacceptable, they will tolerate a great deal in the name of a cheap pint.

Perhaps I should have addressed all of this to Tim Wetherspoon himself. Let’s have a try.

Dear Tim,

I have always enjoyed your reasonably priced selection of fine ales, stouts and porters. Being a single man I have no wife to share these with, a fact which often sends me to sleep at night in a sinking pit of gentle weeping, but your occasional “meet the brewer” nights more than make up for this.

However, I must take umbridge with the decimation of my local pub scene at your hands. Like the Stay Puft Man rampaging through the streets of New York, you have wrought devastation in a seemingly carefree manner. I am left wondering if myself and a small bunch of maverick friends must cross streams in your award-winning yet strangely jaded urinals to put a stop to your rampage.

Please cease the expansion of your soulless empire at the earliest opportunity and allow a few real pubs to flourish.

Regards,

Richard

Blackburn · food · Ghostbusters · J D Wetherspoon · Postal Order · pub closures

Here are a few things that fill me with trepidation:

A) The ‘Beware: Danger of Falling Rocks Ahead’ road sign. Nothing like this one to fill a brief stretch of a journey with the looming fear of impending random death coming through the sunroof uninvited. If I see this sign, I’m drawn to travel the upcoming distance looking up and out of the window at the cliff face from which said boulders could tumble at any minute. This means that even if I get through without having my skull caved in the chances are I’ll drive into the back of an Eddie Stobart truck.

B) Performance reviews: Luckily, I currently have a job which doesn’t feature these, but plenty of times in the past I’ve been confronted with the opportunity to sit down on an annual basis with a line manager and have my every flaw picked apart with surgeon-like precision. Anyone who carries out these sessions for a living is basically like the killer from Se7en without the laudible can-do attitude to dealing with society’s problems.

C) Being on the front row at a comedy gig: Either you’ll become the object of some hilarity at your expense or, even worse, the comedian will try something out based on picking on you which will fail. This means that the comic will try desperately to squeeze at least a titter from this improvised material at which point one of you will get angry and this will degenerate into a slanging match and an on-stage nervous breakdown. I’m staggered at how often I’ve seen this happen.

D) Christmas ales: Here’s a fact- nobody really enjoys them. Any beer designed specifically for a short period at the end of December when everyone is already stuffed to the gills with dead poultry and chocolate is clearly on a hiding to nothing. I’m utterly convinced that Christmas ales are the last refuge for a brewery’s attempts at a beer that end up with what they would optimistically deem to be ‘character’ but what normal, sane folk would class as ‘liquid misery’. This is why Christmas ales tend to live at the back of the cupboard of even the most seasoned ale drinker until spring cleaning occurs and they can safely be hoisted into the recycling. A few bottles, however, slipped through the net from this year’s Yuletide selection at my girlfriend’s parents’ house and therefore these 4 brews were passed onto me- giving me a thought. Removed from the jolity of the festive season, what do Christmas ales actually taste of? Can they stand up of their own if drunk in, say, mid-July?

Well…

First up is the Christmas Ale by Shepherd Neame. This seems like a safe place to start- it’s by a brewery I’m aware of and it’s got a pleasant amber colour. It’s also, I note, 7% so it strikes me as a good idea to get the strong one out of the way early doors. On first taste it is actually reminiscent of Christmas, but only in the same way that the Channel Islands are reminiscent of tales of Nazi occupation. It feels like woozy overindulgence and has a distinct flavour of indigestion and overpowering spice. Drinking this feels like your tongue is being ram-raided. Trying to force the beer down of a typical Tuesday evening presents a sturdy challenge, I can only imagine that attempting to knock it back within a few hours of a full christmas dinner would be nigh on impossible. You’d be better off trying to drink your new Xmas sweater.

Christmas ales- warning, should not be drunk by anyone

Next is Seriously Bad Elf from Ridgeway Brewing in Oxfordshire. I really ought to have checked out the strengths of these beers before I tucked in as it turns out the 7%er was merely an apperatif to this double ale which weighs in at 9%. This is definitely a theme with winter ales- alcohol levels which come dangerously close to rendering a beer flammable. I’m not sure that this sort of content renders a drink particularly useful in wintery conditions- if it did then surely it stands to reason that any polar expedition should be accompanied by a few bottles of tequila and I’m pretty convinced that they usually aren’t. Getting back to the beer, it’s got a first taste that you really ought to be provided with a warning for- it hits you at the very heart of your central nervous system. It’s a little like walking into a darkened room then having hundreds of people burst out and yell ‘surprise’ while dressed as victims of serious industrial accidents. Why this is deemed suitable for Christmas I couldn’t possible tell you. Once you’re braced for each mouthful, it settles down to simply being the beerest beer the world has ever seen, like all concepts of beer have been concentrated into one bottle. This is the ale equivalent of a quasar. To improve everyone’s Yuletide celebrations, the Queen should have to down one of these while delivering his Christmas speech. It’d be amazing.

Third up, also by Ridgeway Brewing and continuing their theme of horrendous elf puns is ‘Criminally Bad Elf’. It is also becoming clear that I really should have read all four labels before I started. This is a ‘barley-wine style ale’ and packs a full 10.5% alcohol, a level at which a beer should only be used for hand-to-hand combat. After the experience of the last beer, I’m fully prepared from the first swig for whatever this brew can throw at me.

Right, before we go any further, read that last sentence back. Done it? Good. Congratulations. You have just read the most naive and utterly wrong sentence ever.

Nothing could prepare anyone for this beer, short of having all your taste buds burned out with caustic soda. And even then the first drink would still make your eyes water like a Belgian fountain. The second swig merely confirms that the first one wasn’t joking, much like when Hans Gruber shoots Ellis just to show he wasn’t messing about with Joe Takagi. Even after nearly half a pint of experience it’s still utterly impossible to knock back any of this drink without coughing. This can only be a Christmas drink designed for one of those branches of Christianity that goes in less for the celebration of Jesus’s birth and more for constant rounds of self-abasement and flagellation. And it’s still 10.5%. It’s basically like mugging yourself.

Finally, mercifully, and again from Ridgeway Brewing we have a porter called Santa’s Butt which weighs in at a practically tap water-esque 6%. This one actually tastes quite nice in that roasted, oaty manner that a good porter does though the apocalypse my tastebuds have undergone through this session, combined with the mind bending alcohol levels, means this perceived pleasentness may be the result of a combination of severe oral injury and encroaching metal incapacitation. However, it suffers from the same problem as the others and what appears to be the paradox at the heart of Christmas ales- it’s far too heavy and hefty to even be drunk after a day where I’ve purposely avoided eating too much in order to make room for it. At Xmas, they’d distend my stomach so much there’s a chance of it falling out entirely and making a break for it.

So drinking Christmas beers in July? On the whole, dreadful, deadly and not worth the bother. But drinking Christmas ales at Christmas? That’s just the act of a madman.

Beers · Christmas · Ridgeway Brewing · Shepherd Neame

We’ve decided to have a go at the second Beer Swap and have begun to pick out our four local beers. I’m hopeful at least two of the micros around here will be able to sort us out with something a bif different, but we’ll have to wait and see. Most people will have heard of Thwaites and probably Moorhouses, but East Lancashire does have a good few other little ones – just have a look at our East Lancs CAMRA page for details. In particular, we know people at Red Rose so it’d be nice to have one of theirs in – but it’s meant to be a secret, eh, so we’ll have to wait and see…

I’m quite looking forward to this one now…

Beer Swap · Beers · Moorhouses · Red Rose · Thwaites

Morrissey and Fox have been brewing for little over a year now, the following beers are available all year round, according to the official site, there are also some seasonal drinks that I look forward to tasting too. The beers were the reason for and result of a Channel 4 program in which Morrissey and Fox try to brew the perfect beer. Did they manage? Let’s see.

First of all we’ll look at the Blonde. Brewed at Neil Morrissey and Richard Fox’s microbrewery in North Yorkshire, this was perhaps the biggest ale-based surprise so far this year. The bumph on the bottle describes the beer as trying to find a good middle point between ale and lager. I didn’t get this, nor did Bernie, my second in command. I’ve drank my fair share of lager in my time, and this did not bridge the gap in any way. This however was not a bad thing. The Blonde’s taste was an aromatic mix that tasted like barley flavoured pale ale. I’m not sure if this was the intended result but it works very well. The drink leaves a distinctive but pleasurable aftertaste on the tongue. Is it the perfect beer? No, there are a few things that it falls down on however it does come close though and I would highly recommend it. Congratulations chaps. A job well done.

Now we’ll look that the Brunette, the bottle promises nutty, caramel, toffee and hoppy flavour with fruity overtones. These are all delivered without fuss or celebration. I was able to sup away at this quite contently. I do however feel this should be accompanied by something meaty, preferably a steak. This would complete the drink perfectly. As a stand alone drink, I’m not hugely overwhelmed. Not in the way I was by the Blonde. The Brunette is certainly a nice beer, very possibly a classic in the making. Another good effort by Morrissey and Fox, my only issue with this ale is that it’s certainly a ‘time and place’ ale. I wouldn’t spontaneously drink it.

Have a look at the official site, the Aussie IPA looks very, very tempting.

www.morrisseyfox.co.uk

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It’s funny how you chance upon a song or artist, my journey to Richard Shindell starts with my dad, travels via Radio 2 and ends with Amazon.co.uk. As a teen, I was exposed to High Wire Live by Willy Porter, a stunning live album with several stand out tracks, one of which was You Stay Here, in which Porter’s sublime 12 string playing is accompanied by Martin Barre’s electric meanderings. Hauntingly dark yet stunningly beautiful at the same time, it’s up there in my top songs; I’d even nominate it for the coveted Double Tune status.

Anyway, a few months ago I had Radio 2 on and this very song came on, but not only was Porter not singing, it had violins and other instruments. This did not compute, anyway, after standing stunned for 3 minutes and 59 seconds, I then returned to whatever it was I was doing and promptly forgot all about it. Later on something sparked the memory so after Google, Last.com and finally Amazon.co.uk (my beloved Play.com didn’t have this to download). After some stressful program wrangling with Amazon’s download manager, I’m now in possession of Somewhere Near Paterson.

I think Paterson is in New Jersey, which is where Shindell hails from. Released in 2000, this is his fifth studio album. The album is a pleasant and thought provoking journey, Shindell’s lyrics are very much written from the heart, although the subjects have been pretty much covered before, the stories he tells are both engrossing and easy to relate to. Simple yet phenomenal, you will be recommending this artist.

The album maintains a folk/borderline country feel throughout, opening with more upbeat songs, with the song Spring; it takes a pure folk turn, concentrating on violins more than guitars and drums. Waiting For The Storm picks up the country vibe again and the album nicely mixes all the styles for the last few songs. As much as I could talk about all the tracks at length, I’ve highlighted two superb efforts. The rest are by no means filler, these two just poke their heads slightly higher.

You Stay Here. This is the track that lead me to the album, the reason why I knew that buying it wouldn’t be a mistake and possibly one the best songs ever written. I don’t say that lightly. Essentially a tale of surviving, the images generated by the lyrics are stronger than any book I’ve ever read, even books with pictures. The hauntingly stunning guitar playing on this track maintains a constant tempo which carries you through while other instruments arrive in a perfectly worked arrangement, not too fast, not too slow. It’s easy to see why Willy Porter covered this, he’s possible the only artist who can do this justice. Simply stunning.

Merritt Parkway, 2 AM. When it comes to instrumentals tracks, this is up there with New Order’s Elegia. Very, very simple, there isn’t a complicated riff in to be found yet Shindell is able to create an atmosphere that leaves you transfixed and almost tearful, yet you won’t know how or why. Just like Pixar films are a lesson perfect film making, this song is a lesson perfect arrangement. Everything is balanced. When they make a movie of my life, expect this to be on the soundtrack.

I can’t rate this album high enough, nor can I give it a grade, it transgresses such things. Expect to be changed.

Do buy this album if…

You want to spend an hour away from the world.

You like REM but find them a bit weird and questionable at times.

You’ve got some very good ales in the fridge.

Don’t buy this album if…

You refer to guitar riffs as ‘shreds’.

Violins scare you.

You have stuff to be getting on with and want some background music. This will take precedence.

Track listing.

1. Confession
2. Abuelita
3. You Stay Here
4. My Love Will Follow You
5. Spring
6. Wisteria
7. Waiting For The Storm
8. The Grocer’s Broom
9. Merritt Parkway, 2 AM
10. Transit
11. Calling The Moon

Facts and stats from Last.com

album · Music · Richard Shindell

If I may, a proposition: many people drink because there’s nothing better to do.

I’ve thought and thought until I scweamed and I seem to be near a vague conclusion that the lack of any better alternatives is what a lot of it basically boils down to. It is very, very easy to prevaricate about the reasons why – it’s my genes, it’s my character, it’s my job’s fault, it’s my reward – but if you cut to the chase, all of those reasons essentially end up being caused by there being no better way for a person to spend their time.

This man's purpose is to make his own limbs fall off by drinking red wine for 19 solid days.

Not everyone’s condemned to a life of slavish ale quaffing. There are a group of people for whom there is a better way to spend their time, and today it finally clicked how those people get to be that way. Flicking through The Independent I came across a short piece about a tribute to Jean Charles de Menezes, sadly not a rock tribute penned by Damon Albarn with Brian May on guitar but a mural of some sort which passing tourists in years to come will walk past with little more than a bemused glance. His family stand in front of it with faces drooping with sorrow, much as they have since the day he died in 2005. That day was the day they gained purpose.

Directly beneath this story is news of a quadriplegic sailor crossing the Atlantic. Mankind has a tremendous ability to corrupt and degrade itself, as if intelligence is waged in an unknown war against evolution, and our great fondness of the critically disabled embarking on insane endeavours to cross our widest oceans and scale our highest hills is a good example of this. The whole cast of Gladiators combined into one enormous muscular super-entity would find it a fairly challenging and pointless task to sail across a massive bit of water, yet it seems an irresistible challenge for the completely body-fucked. Would this man have fancied the job if he had limbs? Not much chance. The day he lost those limbs was the day he gained purpose.

A little later in today’s paper we hit the obituaries and see that Freya Grafin von Moltke has died. She was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and then became known as an anti-Nazi worker. The last 60 years of this woman’s life have been based upon that one event; it was the day she found a purpose.

What struck me today is that there are people who shit happens to who then have a purpose for the rest of their lives. If my sister was gunned down on the tube, I’m pretty sure it’d take my life over for the next few years; going for a beer on an otherwise empty evening would cease to exist as an option. If I ran through a fiendishly-designed sawmill and lost my limbs overnight, the law of averages says I would succumb to a sudden compulsion to travel to Mars using nothing but a hand fan sellotaped to my back. If circumstances deigned I be born with access to the Fourth Reich, I’d end up plotting to blow them up; no time for gluhwein, thankyou. As it is, I’m just meandering through life with no one purpose distinct to anyone else.

My observation of the matter is that life happens to a minority, life is created by a smaller minority and for the rest, life drifts by with an opiate of choice; English society today mostly chooses beer to fill the gaps.

Beers · society

FlashForward appears a fairly decent but unremarkable programme in terms of its plot and characters, but it attempts to deliver a very potent message. It’s not anything subliminal or intricately woven, indeed, it staggers up to your face and belches its words across your cheek with a healthy splattering of spittle. All the tact of a drunken fool, you might say.

The Demon Drink - the cause of lots and lots of bad things in FlashForward

The central character is Mark Benford, a recovering alcoholic. From the word go, FlashForward makes it clear that Mark is on borrowed time. His wife will leave him if he relapses, and his AA group provide constant reminders of the cliff edge he teeters along. Mark himself lives a life of denial and fear after seeing a flash of a future in which he is drinking again – or, to use the programme’s wonderfully prohibitionist parlance, “taking a drink”.

Now, I realise America has long used television to project the image of drinking as something done largely by hopeless Irishmen in dingy late-night bars, but FlashForward ups the ante with the bluntness of its demonisation. And it is part of an ongoing campaign to cast drinking in a negative light, one which appears in the face of failure to be taking a scattergun approach across television.

House is more of a drug user but his occasional fits of drinking nearly ubiquitously end in him laid in a pool of vomit on his floor. Throughout the series, the pattern is reinforced that he drinks and makes everyone’s lives worse, while Cameron sits at home with a glass of wine after work and everything is fine. It’s a more subtle approach than FlashForward but after a couple of series it’s still pretty clear what the message is.

A more interesting case is Mad Men, another American programme which I’ve watched from the beginning and after three series still cannot conjure up one decent reason why it exists. When all comes to pass and we go up to the pearly gates for reckoning, the Mad Men Series 1-13 box set will be bouncing along in front of me and when St. Peter asks him (and it will be a him, for Mad Men is a show for men) what he’s done with his life, he’ll just shrug and go, “well, I…” and fade off into a very soulless, insubstantial yet somehow eerie 42 minute monologue about advertising and sex.

Mad Men - better known as smug cocks with brandy

The programme portrays a 1960s American view of drinking, naturally contrasting to much of what’s shown today. It’s a world of men drinking spirits in the office, cocktails over dinner and coming home to pull a beer out of the fridge. Drinking is a very routine part of life, very rarely shown to any form of excess. The over-arching impression I get is that they show drinking as something the characters do to ease their own inadequacies; whenever a tragedy or troubling moment occurs, the man reaches for the bottle while his wife falls by the wayside and tries to comfort him. It’s quite a sad picture, quite bleak, and quite off-putting – the message is, “you don’t want to be like these men”.

The antithesis to this recent phenomenon of anti-beer fascism might be Cheers. At times it’s saying exactly the same thing – too much drinking is bad for you – but it’s altogether a much gentler message. The lead character is a reformed alcoholic (well, by American standards) and it’s occasionally mentioned that he no longer drinks, but it’s only ever in passing. The bar fly at the end opens most episodes with a one-two: “Hey Norm, what do you say to a beer?”, “Hello *drinks* goodbye.” This lightheartedness is occasionally contrasted with moments when Norm takes things too far, moments which show genuine weakness in a man who likes to portray himself as easy-going; in comparison with the cudgel used by FlashForward, this way of showing how drinking can have negative effects is leagues ahead.

As ever, a history lesson would likely offer a few answers to the “drinking question”. Prohibition and demonisation do not work long term. People will still have an appetite to drink and will find ways to either circumvent legislation or filter out messages they disagree with. As sad as I find it to see pubs closing at the moment, I can’t worry about the long term because history shows that as one thing dies, something new emerges to take its place; I don’t know what that will be yet, and I’m sure when I’m an old man I’ll sit whistfully telling tales of the great public house of my youth, but it’ll be sat in whatever kind of place takes over as the social drinking place of the age.

I respect attempts to curb dangerous drinking as that is a social problem that it is justified to interfere with; as always, the moral I follow being that anyone can do whatever they like with themselves so long as it doesn’t fuck with me. But ham-fisted attempts to demonise all kinds of drinking do no-one any favours. They are unrealistic and simplistic attempts to challenge a “problem” that exists as much in perception as reality; it is a passed-on and accepted wisdom that society has a drink problem to be challenged, and successive generations attempt to apply the same old “fixes”.

I feel that all I can do is add my voice to the list of people who hope that cheap drink in supermarkets and corner shops is consigned to history, beer prices are lowered in pubs and we see something of a return to the pubs of the not-too-distant past – social drinking places where the demons are drowned out by laughter.

Beers · FlashForward · House · legislation · Mad Men · prohibition · TV