Hair of the dog bites man

Two subjects close to my heart and other vital organs: pubs and newspaper journalism. I've long thought that a study ought to be done into the effect a paper moving its offices has on the local pub trade. In the absence of that, I was delighted to stumble across the following vignette (from the Guardian's Wimbledon coverage of all things):

"All Guardian hacks are alcoholics!" That's the friendly and super-libellous-though-I-wouldn't-put-my-mortgage-on-it-in-court title of an email I've just been sent by Andy Underwood. "I was on a corporate induction yesterday and the afternoon session was a rather nice guided coach journey around the local area, taking in Farringdon. The only interesting fact that our guide had about Farringdon was that since the Guardian moved offices, three pubs have been forced to shut. Comments, please."

It would perhaps be too delicious were one of those pubs the notorious Griffin "Gentleman's Bar And Club" (as if gentlemen worked at the Guardian anyway). By contrast I have it from a highly reliable source (an Irish hack in the pub, if you must know) that a number of boozers in Victoria were facing the axe until the Telegraph moved in nearby.

But this is anecdotal. As I said, a proper study is needed. I am not sure that my A-level in economics would be quite sufficient to get funding (then again, it was a few years ago. It's probably on a par with a degree now) but I feel I should look into this matter further.

Trollied Tuesday on the telly

Spectacular drunkenness, like all vocations, requires a certain artistry. One could say the same about broadcasting, I suppose. In any case, broadcasting while blootered is one of those things that, when done properly, enters the realm of the sublime.

The Guardian's Organ Grinder has a run-down with some fine anecdotes and footage (the audio of Lt Cmdr Thomas Woodroofe's glorious "the fleet's lit up" broadcast is well worth a listen if you haven't heard it before.)

Here's a personal favourite that was missed from the Organ Grinder list: Serge Gainsbourg meeting the young Whitney Houston on French television. ("Sometimes ee's a beet drunk you know.") It has everything you could want from the human drama: comedy, farce, passion, romance and the tragedy of his eventual rejection.

You see, for the public drunkard going on telly while trollied is the ultimate performance; one that subverts the established order of things reveals profound truths about the artist and life itself. As the following vignette about Brendan Behan following one especially paralytic appearance demonstrates:

Meanwhile the writer was congratulated on the street for his performance long after the event. "Good on yer, you was properly pissed on TV last night," opined one literary buff, while another claimed he had understood every mumble Behan had made, but "hadn't a clue what that bugger Muggeridge was on about".

Seasonal Booze Ups

It is testament to how far Fleet Street as fallen from its inglory days that I was until now only dimly aware of the old journalistic tradition of Wayzgoosing. In those days newspapers did not publish on Good Friday, allowing printers and, when they cottoned on to the idea, the hacks, to indulge in spectacular piss ups.

Roy Greenslade has a fine overview of the tradition, and also links to some splendid anecdotes from the Gentlemen Ranters (this one is worth a read, not least for the picture). His own stories aren't too shabby either.

I also recall a Sun/Daily Mirror subeditorial wayzgoose that did make it to France, with embarrassing consequences. The good burghers (of Dieppe, I think) had been wrongly informed that a group of important British journalists were due to arrive and duly turned out the mayor and the town band to greet them off the ferry.

Sadly, by the time the wayzgoosers arrived, they had been drinking non-stop for many hours since leaving London and were only able to walk by leaning against each other.

Pity today's hacks – sorry, make that "content providers" – hard at work as usual today and often unaware of this custom.

It's Good Friday tomorrow, when another Easter drinking spectacular is in the offing across the water. You see, it is the one day (bar Christmas) when every pub in Ireland is forced to close. It is one of the last reflexive genuflections made towards the Catholic Church in the country; a ritual devoid of any real meaning or purpose (you may wish to develop this metaphor) and naturally, treated by all right-thinking people as the chance for a monstrous piss-up.

The greater availability of off-sales (closed on the day, of course) has helped greatly. Maundy Thursday is a boom day for retailers; as for their customers, I still recall one Good Friday party in Cork which left me feeling far worse than anyone who partakes of that curious bit of Filipino piety whereby they nail themselves to a cross would. However, in the days before off licences were so common, there were several ingenious ways by which people could get a drink.

Ferries were exempt, so trips to Wales or the Isle of Man were popular. Some people even went to the North, because if ever there was a fun place to be it was Belfast circa 1922-97. Train journeys, too, had no constraints, so many people would spend the day in a diurnal course of journeys with no end in sight and a constant stream of booze (shades of the great Moskva-Petushki there).

But the most curious exemption was the dog show held on Good Friday in the Royal Dublin Society. The bar there was the one place allowed to serve alcohol (one suspects the powers that be thought that only irredeemable West Brits would go to a dog show on that day, a similar mindset to the people who bombed the La Mon, you might note). The event was a great favourite of the likes of Brendan Beehan, Patrick Kavanagh and various other riffish and raffish sorts.

If only the Irish hacks had gone in for wayzgoosing.

Drunkeness is next to Godliness

Presbyterian drunks help save the planet.

Street drinkers in Glasgow are donating their empties to help build a church entirely from recycled materials.

Local alcoholics are said to have been "inspired" to do their bit after the Minister of Colston Milton, the Rev Christopher Rowe, told them of the ambitious plan.

Their empty beer cans are now being stored while the church raises money and collects more materials for the environmentally friendly building.

It has already been given £42,809 by the Scottish Climate Challenge Fund to carry out a study of how the "economically and ecologically sustainable" kirk can be built and maintained.

The ecologically sustainable kirk; ah what a glorious concept. I imagine the local alchies were delighted to find a cause that inspired them to keep handing over empty tins. To lapse into good Calvinist theology, the street drinkers are clearly God's elect; chosen out of the sinful mass of mankid. They may spend their days getting pished in the woods, but they are Righteous and Justified in their calling, and when the last trumpet sounds, lo, shall they say, "ye're a'ight, there, Big Man?"

Truly this is the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of puritans.

Special Brew Saved My Life

Finally, the story to fit the headline has arrived.

Jaswant was by no means a heavy drinker but on the odd occasion when there was cause for celebration, he was partial to a Carlsberg Special Brew.

And what with all his relatives here, today certainly was a special occasion. No doubt about it. One drink led to another. And another. And slowly Jaswant wasn't in such a rush anymore.

"When his glass is empty, make sure you pour him another," his brother-in-law said to the barman. The barman duly obliged.

I've frequently heard good things about Sikh weddings and when it's a Sikh wedding in Belfast one can imagine it would be something pretty special. In this case the festive mood, which spilled over into Heathrow, caused Jaswant Basuta to miss the Pan Am flight that exploded over Lockerbie. The gods look after drunks.

Scotland: a land of joy

Maybe the old distinction between a Scotsman with a grievance and ray of sunshine isn't quite so clear cut after all. The Ray of Sunshine reports:

THE traditional image of Scots as dour, doom-laden pessimists was shaken yesterday by a new Europe-wide survey showing them to be among the happiest people in the Continent.

When will people realise? Doom-laden pessimism is fun.

Along with stunning observations on the lines that people with money are happier than those without it, there are various attempts to determine just why the Scots are so cheerful. Disappointingly there has been no attempt to link this study with all the claims one hears that the Scots are among Europe's heaviest drinkers.

She was smiling on the inside.

However, forget from the stuff about a national sense of belonging and the search for political and economic explanations because there's one detail about the methodology that has so far been overlooked.

The Scottish part of the survey was conducted between May and November last year, after the SNP came to power.

I'd need a detailed breakdown of the figures to be certain, but I rather suspect that a certain football match we would otherwise prefer not to mention, but which happened at the end of the survey period might have caused a late surge up the happiness table.

Introducing Trollied Tuesday

My post in defence of the right to ignore the health police if one so wishes has led to this most excellent suggestion – and one I happy to steal – from Nick.

"Perhaps we should all go out and get sloshed on cheap booze in protest at the Government's nannying ways. We could call it 'Trolleyed Tuesday' , or 'Wankered Wednesday', or something ..."

Tuesday's the day, I think. There is a particular type for whom the idea of drinking so early in the week "on a school night" provokes gasps of horror. I hope that this innovation will encourage them to think differently.

Of course if you're getting sloshed to make a point, you have to let people know about it. My own small contribution to the cause will be as follows. Each Most Some Tuesdays will be marked with posts celebrating the pleasures of drinking, inspiring tales of heroic drinkers and anything which will amuse and inform.

This is not in itself enough, of course. In politics these days a sure fire method of getting ahead is to carve out a group identity, appoint yourself as leader of that group, then complain vociferously about the raw deal the group you've just created is getting. So it is with drinkers. I propose the formation of British Union of Boozers (led by me, naturally) which will defend the interests and rights of drinkers everywhere.

From henceforth let "It's my liver, I will do what want with it" be our rallying cry.

By this time next year I should have thought we should be powerful enough to rally outside parliament, each protesters clutching a tin of cheap supermarket lager, super strength stuff, absinth or dry martini as the choice takes them. To bolster turnout it might be worth bringing a few tins of Special Brew to encourage some the more picturesque members of the park bench community to join us.

Until such time let us raise a glass to booze and drink to the defeat of joyless puritans, wheresoever they may be.

You'll have to prise the cheap lager out of my cold, dead hands

I like work. It fascinates me. I could sit and look at it for hours - Jerome K Jerome.

How did that happen? I've been busy, constantly, these past few weeks. And it was most unpleasant: mainly a grind consisting of doing things for other people and all that sort of nonsense. So serious was it that I have neglected this blog.

Obviously, to return one needs an issue of real substance to write about. I had thought, briefly, about writing about some classic "oh really" headlines of recent days, such as Search for British Motto Turns Cynical (I vote for Mottos: Not Really Our Thing) or, even Smoke Caused by Large Fire.

But these didn't quite do it. Even the fact that the Daily Mail ran a story arguing (and I may be over-Malilifying the argument here) that Scare Stories Give You Cancer did little to inspire me. Only a topic close to my heart would do.

That topic is cheap booze. More specifically, the news that a coalition of tedious puritans thinks that cheap booze is a bad thing. The reason being, of course, that too many people drink too much so therefore we should make it harder for people to get hold of drink at all.

Leaving aside the tedious and hysterical nature of some of the scare stories (I suspect that some of the more tedious and hysterical parts of the press are as much to blame as anyone for this – especially if they get hysterical about supermarkets over-reacting to the great booze panic).

But the suggestion, by the Alcohol Health Alliance, that the tax on alcohol be raised to discourage people from drinking too much is the key thing here. There is a glib and easy point to be made about how effective this approach has been in Scandinavia and Finland (indeed, the Telegraph, the news desk of which seems to have a particular weakness for glib booze scare stories, recently depicted the latter as a land where "for men, drinking is now the number one cause of death, and as many women are killed by alcohol as by breast cancer"), so of course I'll make that glib and easy point.

What irritates me more is the mindset behind this engineering. It's fine to argue that something must be done to stop people drinking - education; a broader approach which actually looks at what causes people to drink too much and acting on that, even, I suppose, scare stories in the press; all that's fine. The mantra "please drink responsibly and in moderation" may be annoying, but it isn't the problem here. If health groups, or whoever, want to change the national culture, they're free to go ahead and try. If they succeed in curtailing drunken violence in the streets, I'll give them a round of applause.

The problem is the belief that if we, as a nation, are too stupid and blind to our own interests to mend our ways then we must be made to. Especially when, though I concede we have to pay taxes to the NHS and so on, it's essentially of question of individuals choosing to harm themselves.

This desire to enforce correct behaviour – the reflex instinct of the meddling puritan – is what I find so disagreeable here. To look at one aspect of the story, the attitude that something must be done about cheap supermarket booze.

The 22p can of lager is also singled out here. There are, goodness knows, enough things you can bash the supermarkets for. But it seems that selling alcohol cheaply isn't one of them. Corner shops, too, are pretty competitive in this regard; six cans of Grolsch or Becks, or eight of Fosters and Carlsberg, for a fiver is pretty standard round here. I bet it's easier for school kids to get served in these places and - moral panic alert, there is plenty of pornography on sale, and cigarettes too – yet these fellows don't get it in the neck.

My defense of discounted drinks is partly motivated by the fact that I like cheap booze, of course, but I would draw the line at the 22p drink in question. It's less than 3% alcohol and must – surely – taste pretty foul. If somebody is drinking copious amounts of that stuff , then I'm afraid that their life must have reached an unimaginable low and the availability of cheap booze is the last thing we should be worrying about. (Not least because Special Brew and the like are always going to be with us).

There is of course, another aspect to this: it might be bad for children. Even they, I imagine, would struggle to get drunk on own brand cheap lager, but it seems that the risk they might do so, or take advantage of another promotion, is enough to spur the legions of healthy decency into calls for action. It is not enough, clearly, that there are laws to stop children buying alcohol. Nor is the obvious point that making alcohol too expensive for school children would be every drug dealer's dream going to stick.

The danger is that if everything that might pose a threat to children were to be proscribed, or at least made more disagreeable, then life itself would soon become intolerable.

At the risk of repeating myself, this is at the heart my objection to this form of puritanism: the belief that some businesses should be forced to change their commercial strategies, that some adult drinkers should pay more tax because the authorities cannot enforce their own laws on under-age drinking, that we should, all of us, pay for the fact that some people make life style choices which health groups disapprove is not one we should encourage. Any attempt to coerce us because we can't be convinced is something to be resisted. I think that even a mind addled on Tesco Value lager should be able to work out why that is.

Still, the campaign isn't all bad. The constant reminders that supermarkets sell cheap drink prompted me to investigate what was on offer in my local Sainsbury's. I was delighted to see that the Taste the Difference Range includes a range of lagers by Greenwich's excellent Meantime brewery. I am delighted to see that a small business like this, which is dedicated to producing a quality product which will bring pleasure to discerning customers, has the chance to reach a wider audience. At less than £1 a bottle it was a real bargain and every sip was enhanced by the fancy that, somewhere, a joyless purtian's bloodless lips were being pursed ever more thinly in impotent disapproval and rage.

The loves to love the loves to love the loves to love

Norm Geras is somewhat exercised by a poll of the Greatest Love Stories of All Time, in particular by the number one position for Wuthering Heights. As he puts it: "a love story cannot be the greatest, in which things go badly wrong and one of the two romantic protagonists ends up merely a ghost... the greatest of love stories turn out well in the end".

It's understandable that a man who celebrated his 40th wedding anniversary recently would feel that way, but I don't buy his arguement. The greatest love stories have that epic-y, soul-shaking quality that, for many people, is bound up in failure, disappointment and all the rest.

I'm also guessing that most of those surveyed were women – please note, this is not supposed to be a criticism – partly because of the fondness for things like Gone With the Wind (I've never seen it, but I just know I'm supposed to hate it) and the preponderance of love stories in which the relationship between the two protagonists is absolutely central.

By way of illustration, let me point you to Rowan Pelling on this topic: "Great romantic fiction invariably requires that grim Fate conspires to keep two lovers from one another, so the reader is skewered on the rapier point of emotion. If the author is of an amiable and optimistic disposition, he or she may finally allow the beleaguered lovers their union. If the author is Thomas Hardy, then one or the other will usually end up dead."

Additionally, she makes the handy observation that a lot of men really aren't so good at this emotional stuff (imagine my surprise) whereas many women yearn for a Mr Darcy figure. (I'd be careful there, I think this Darcy complex is unintentionally revealing: that gold-digging little minx Lizzie Bennet suddenly got much more interested when she realised just how loaded he was. If he'd been broke he'd have been written off as a moody old bastard.)

Still, I might be able to answer Rowan's dilemma here (although I too prefer Patrick O'Brian):

Is it so wrong to demand a little romance in our dreary lives? As the UKTV poll establishes, 37 per cent of women would rather have a Darcy-type figure court them than a modern man. Modern men responded by saying that two thirds of them have never read a romantic novel in their lives - and "what's wrong with Patrick O'Brian anyway?" Well, that's what they said in my house anyway.

I don't think men are opposed to love and romance, per se, but a narrow, obsessive, sometimes neurotic, focus on it is alarming and off-putting. What I'm saying, really, is that a great love story doesn't need to be a simple relationship, or romantic, story. The epic-y soul-stirring stuff can come in many contexts: it is but one part of the richness of human experience, after all.

You can see this in some of the books on this list of love stories, particularly War and Peace and The Great Gatsby. This latter is an excellent choice – it's a favourite of mine – but it's about many things as well as romantic love. (We could, in fact, call those many things Romantic love: the glamourous world that seduces and damages many of the protagonists, Nick's own yearning for the sublime, Dick and Daisy's dangerous self-conceit, Gatsby's own talent for self-invention and myth-making and – of course – the yearnings which underpin all this).

Here are a few others I think worthy of inclusion on the list of great love stories, but they aren't just your few inches of ivory.

The Divine Comedy: Dante's love for Beatrice is the ultimate in hopeless yearning. Yes, there's a lot of theology, and plenty of score settling with Dante's opponents. But this near-lost soul is saved by her love, although he must first pass through the education of Hell and Purgatory before attaining his desire. After all that Paradise is rather dull. It's a good illustration that embellishments to Happy Ever After are a bad idea. (Virgil features in Dante, and I suppose you could also add the Aeneid to the list – love sacrificed on the altar of duty and all that).

The Odyssey: Come on, ten years to travel a few hundred miles through the Med. All those malicious intervention by the gods. The temptation to give up and enjoy yourself with foxy nymphs like Calypso must have been over-whelming. But no, Odysseus didn't give up, kept trying to get back to his missus. Penelope must have been pretty keen on him too since she stuck it out so long. That's quite some enduring love you've go there. (I could also include Ulysses in this list. Partly for Leo and Molly Bloom – I doubt Norm would approve – but also for Joyce's love of language and Dublin itself. I'm not so keen on the place myself: give me Cork or Belfast any day, but still. Incidentally, the title of this post is lifted from the book, via Van Morrison.)

Moscow-Petushki: If you don't know what I'm talking about, read it. Various English versions, with varying titles exist. The Stephen Mulrine translation (Moscow Stations) is out of stock unfortunately, but if you can beg, borrow or steal a copy, do so as it's the best. Otherwise, this translation is easily available.

Anyhow, Venedkit Yerofeev's work is better than The Great Gatsby, Ulysses and even PG Wodehouse, which makes it the best of the 20th century. Seriously. It has many of the qualities of Dante and Homer's great work, only much funnier: the profound, moral and theological struggle ("Eat less, drink more, so as not to be a superficial atheist"), suffering (especially when he can't find anywhere to serve him a drink, the struggle to attain the paradise that is Petushki (heavy irony there from Venichka) and the reunion with his loved one. Of course, it being set in Communist Russia there's no chance of him succeeding. His massive and heroic consumption of booze might also make things rather tricky. And there is a second, equally touching love affair here: between a man and the hard stuff. Alcohol is his only lodestone, the only thing which supports him and gives unconditionally to him, his life partner, his everything and nothing.

To give you an illustration, here is one of the greatest passages from the book.

In a word I offer you Dog's Giblets, the drink that puts all others in the shade! It's not just a drink. It's the music of the spheres. What's the most beautiful thing in life? The struggle to free all mankind. But here's something even more beautiful. Write it down.

Zhiguli beer 100g
Sadko the Wealthy Guest shampoo 30 g
anti-dandruff solution 70 g
superglue 12 g
brake fluid 35 g
insecticide 20 g

Let it marinade for a week with some cigar tobacco, then serve.

I have incidentally received letters from idle readers recommending that the infusion this obtained be strained through a colander, no less. Yes, bung it into a colander and leave overnight. God only knows what next – all these additions and emmendations derive from a flabby imagination and lack of vision. That's where these absurd notions come from.

Anyway, your Dog's Giblets is served. Drink it in big gulps when the first stars appear. After two glasses of this, I tell you, a person becomes so inspired you can walk up to within five feet of them and spit in their moosh for a whole half-hour, and they won't utter a word.

Journalists worried about drink

Today's Evening Standard front page screams "Official: We're all drinking too much".

What all of us? Even the non-drinkers? Logically not, of course, but statistically it's... ah not really. Up to two million Londoners drinking a lot - maybe once a week.

But since the headline suggests something better than the reality, if you're a teetotaller and if you die of cirrhosis due to my drinking habits, may I just say how sorry I am.

So many things to knock one sideways

The middle class smug fest that is Glastonbury. Harriet fecking Harman. Yesterday's brief panic that the Finchley Road Waitrose was out of Observers. The far more profound existential crisis once I realised how stereotypical the preceding annoyance made me.

But nothing saddened me quite as much as getting my hands on the Obs and reading the following.

Comedy double-act David Mitchell, 33, and Robert Webb, 35, stars of Peep Show and Magicians, at the North London Tavern.

David: This is my local pub. I like it because it feels like a gentlemen's club, except when they play the music too loudly, which I'm not too keen on. When I first moved to Kilburn, four or five years ago, this pub was hilariously scary.

I did try and think of a clever way in which I could respond so that I sounded like one of the amusing characters from Peep Show, but on reflection I thought that maybe Mitchell's middle class wuss persona was getting the better of him and decided to keep it simple.

He's talking desperate, irredeemable bollocks. The North London Tavern was an old school Irish boozer which has sadly fallen victim to the creeping poncification of NW6. There was nothing wrong with it in its old guise. Admittedly it might not have been to everyone's taste – but

Very brightly lit, patterned carpet, banquette seating and about six old men sitting on their own drinking half pints of Guinness. On Saturday nights they used to show Casualty on the big screen.

does not constitute an imminent threat to one's personal safety. The ould fellas drinking Guinness might not have been too welcoming to the sort of person who finds that sort of shabby melancholy deeply intimidating, but I remember it from those days and it wasn't the sort of place where they used to pass the hat round "for the boys in Ireland". Nor, for that matter was it as depressingly mired in loserdom as The Cock nor as hostile as The Kingdom (which, the one time I visited was full of identikit middle-aged Irish couples: big, hostile men channeling the spirit of the "ponce" character from Withnail & I and women who were all probably called Mary, and who had the sort of face that only a life-time of disappointment, too many children and domestic abuse can give you. The fact that there is no fancyapint review of the place - largely because I won't go there alone and Venichka is too much of a pussy to accompany me there – tells you all you need to know).

What you did get at the North London on a Saturday was fiddly-de diddly-de Irish music, a man dressed as a Leprechaun dancing along, the only people I've ever encountered using the word "colleen" in an non-ironic fashion and the whole crowd standing for Amhrán na bhFiann at the end of the night. You might find that annoying, ridiculous or simply to not your taste, but whereas gastro-pubs are ten a penny across London (and I'm not knocking them per se – the lack of pubs that serve decent meals is one of the more annoying facets of life in Ireland), I can't help but regret the loss of the old school Kilburn pubs.

The working class Irish emigrants who lived – some of them are still there – in Kilburn and Cricklewood are getting old, their descendants are either Anglified (like me, I suppose. Among other things I'm descended from Irish builders who came to England in search of a better life; it's possible I have the navvy gene which creates an ancestoral affinity to Kilburn pubs) or staying in Ireland these days. North West London is full of nice pubs where timid, middle class showbiz types won't encounter anything too horrifyingly different – damn it Hampstead is 20 minutes' or so walk from Kilburn High Road – but something of the capital's soul dies when the sort of ageing Guinness drinker who can't go back to Ireland, but who is not wholly of England, loses the only place where he feels truly at home.