A Thought Experiment for Dog Owners

In 2014, the human race will be enslaved by aliens. They start landing on earth in January; by February, it’s clear that they’re not interested in talking to us but want the planet for their own.

By the end of June, what’s left of mankind is totally subjugated and is living effectively as domestic animals in the homes of our ten-foot tall insect overlords.

Suppose then, that you are one of these survivors and that you are being taken out for a walk by your “owner”. Coming down the street towards you is another gigantic bipedal crustacean accompanied by a man on lead.

What is your natural inclination at this point? You want to greet, speak with, possibly even sniff the anus of your species-mate – right? You’re a prisoner of a being you don’t understand and you see a fellow human. Of course you’re interested.

But when you try to sidle over to communicate, you are yanked back immediately and hustled on down the street by the firm grip of three chitinous space-tentacles.

Dog owners (you see now where the anus-sniffing reference came from? Well, actually I suppose the title gave it away somewhat...). Dog owners: your dog is interested in other dogs. Just deal with it. 

They're not interested in other dogs because they perceive their lives as some kind of post-apocalyptic servitude (although some might –who knows what they think?). No – because they are dogs and the most interesting thing to a dog, is another dog.

It never ceases to amaze me how many dog owners – at the sight of another dog – dash to render their own dog as immobile as possible or to drag it along as though there was no other dog there at all.

What are you afraid of? A bit of jumping around? A bit of ass-sniffing? That they might be conspiring to overthrow us?

The number of people who live near me who (i) own a dog and must therefore be credited with some degree of insight into dog psychology and (ii) who nevertheless view the presence of ANY OTHER DOG as presenting a threat level equivalent to a gang of drug-crazed African child soldiers is truly astonishing.

Dogs are not people. They interact differently from people. Sometimes that involves growling, play-fighting and other forms of behaviour – including bum smelling - we would rightly be unpleasantly surprised at were they to occur between two humans meeting for the first time.

Dog owners: let your dog be a dog this new year. Remember, the boot might be on the other foot one day.

The True Meaning of Christmas

I’ve been helping my eldest with his homework: a project on Christmas around the world.

Now, there are no doubt people out there – not ODHSNM readers, of course – who would find this outrageous.

Not me helping my son with his homework. The “around the world” bit. The true meaning of Christmas, they declare, can’t be reduced to some multicultural, relativistic blah blah blah...  - a line of argument which you know full well will inevitably end in someone blurting out the word “Immigrants!”

The true meaning of Christmas, they will say, is...erm...

Well, dear readers, let me put this to you. Christmas is just a celebration of good stuff at a crappy time of year. It has had all sorts of stuff superimposed on it over the centuries, but at the end of the day that’s what it started out as and that’s what it still is.

Don’t give me all that “it’s the birth of Jesus” malarkey. Christ is a late addition to Christmas.

He’s been stuck on top of at least two sets of pre-Christian traditions.

Pagan dessert

Firstly, the Northern European pagan Yule celebrations around the winter solstice. That’s where you get your holly and ivy, your Druidic mistletoe, your Christmas trees, your Yule log (chocolate or otherwise) and all those other Germano-Celto-Scandinavian accessories.

Not one of those things – except perhaps a log – would have been found in the Iron Age Middle East, so have clearly come from somewhere other than the Jesus story.

The second source is Greco-Roman paganism, specifically the festival of Saturnalia.

Saturnalia (Kronoia for the Greeks among us) was a month long celebration of the good old days before that bastard Zeus cursed mankind with the need to work for a living. It involved:

• Gift giving
• Eating and drinking to excess
• A general end-of-term, office party kind of vibe all round, when slaves were afforded freedoms usually denied them and the bosses made fools of themselves

Sounds Christmassy, doesn’t it?

There are loads of other hypotheses kicking about saying that the Christian myth is based on other bits of

Not real

ancient lore, but why get into all that? It’s like arguing about whether Tolkien’s orcs were green or grey. Even if there’s a right answer, it doesn’t matter what it is because it’s ALL MADE UP.

The point is – and I’ll go out on a limb here – it is completely impossible to extract a “true” Christian core or indeed a “true” pagan core. It’s a big syncretic mess of bits and bobs appropriated from here, there and everywhere.

Look at Santa Claus. Where does he fit in? Don’t try to tell me that he’s “really” Saint Nicholas, the fourth century Turkish bishop and early Christian martyr. What the hell would he be doing with reindeer and elves? He’s as obviously mashed up as Baron Samedi.

Balls

Why do you think the Puritans banned Christmas in 1647 as “a popish festival with no biblical justification”? Precisely because they could see how pagan it all was. At least Oliver Cromwell had the balls to recognise it for what it was instead of whinging about the corruption of the “real” meaning on Radio Four.

You can’t select certain bits and say that’s the “real” Christmas and the rest of it isn’t – the Christian bits, the non-Christian bits, whatever. Every step along the way contributed to getting us where we are today. Who can say where taking any of them out would have taken us? There is no distinction between the signal and the noise.

The materialistic aspects of Christmas are just as ancient as the spiritual aspects.

And if we accept that consumerism is our current religion (or substitute for it), then a 50 year tradition of buy-buy-buy from Black Thursday to the January Sales is getting on for half the age of all “ye olde traditions” the Victorians bequeathed us.

It’s as silly to worship a tree or indeed money as it is to worship a big old beardy sky-fairy.  If you pick away rationally at every part of the Christmas myth, eventually you’re left with nothing but a bloody long winter ahead of us.

Maybe we don’t need to have a justification for having a party. The weather’s shit, it’s dark all the time – don’t we have a right to cheer ourselves up?

Perhaps THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the true meaning of Christmas. 

Apocalyptic Visions

My kids love going to the fairground. I do not share this love with them.

A trip to the fair inevitability concludes in:

1) A large wad of cash wasted – one leaves either with nothing at all to show or with something that is actually worse than nothing, such as a dart gun or a squeaky inflatable dolphin.

2) A screaming tantrum from one or both of the boys, who do not realise that there are precisely zero ways for them to have fun at a fair when the cash reserves have been exhausted.

For them to have fun, I say.  There is one thing I take pleasure in at funfairs – and best of all, it’s free.

I am, of course, talking about admiring the astonishing artwork on display.

Now, I like charmingly amateurish unlicensed renderings of popular cartoon characters as much as the next man. But what I really like are epic-scale depictions of beautiful people having KERRRAY-ZEE PARTY TIME!

In hyperreal colours!

Via airbrush!

This, for example, appears to be Amanda Palmer, with the words “Energy Dome” exploding out of her ears. Perhaps this fairground owner is a massive Dresden Dolls fan.

Actually, that’s quite a good one.

What I really like are the ones that defy the laws of perspective; which look like superficially skilful renderings of the human form (or of Porsches), but which have disturbing, subliminal inaccuracies which leave the viewer uneasy for reasons they cannot describe.

You can’t tell me that is not a disturbing image.

If Hieronymous Bosch was alive today, I think this is what his last judgments and visions of hell would look like. 

Reading Homer

Homer, not Uncle Albert

In my last post, I referred to “the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn”. Some of you may be surprised to hear that I didn’t make that phrase up.

It is, in fact, an epithet used repeatedly by the Greek poet Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Pretty much every time he mentions the dawn - which is a lot – it’s waggling its rosy fingers.

Anyway, these books are kind of a big deal. They are, I hear, a central part of the Western literary canon.

And as we all know, the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan war and the Odyssey tells the story of Ulysses’ (the translations I read were all Romanised) return from Troy.

Or do they?

In fact, the Iliad tells a very small part of the Trojan war. It doesn’t include:

Just good ol' war buddies

1. The beginning
2. The end
3. The bit everyone knows with the Trojan Horse

Essentially, it tells the story of Achilles acting like a dick because Agamemnon acted like a dick, until his boyfriend Patroclus gets killed and then Achilles kills everyone.

Not included, again, is the bit about Achilles getting killed by tearing a ligament or whatever.

In fact, what we primarily have is to pad out the above is:

• Exhaustive descriptions of various Greeks’ and Trojans’ ancestry;
• Followed more or less immediately by exhaustive descriptions of how those sorry descendents died horribly.

If I learned one thing from the Iliad, it is that there are far more ways to fuck someone up badly with a spear than I had ever imagined.

For example:

The spear struck Archelochus, son of Antenor, for heaven counselled his destruction; it struck him where the head springs from the neck at the top joint of the spine, and severed both the tendons at the back of the head. His head, mouth, and nostrils reached the ground long before his legs and knees could do so.

Thereon Polypoetes, mighty son of Pirithous, hit Damasus with a spear upon his cheek-pieced helmet. The helmet did not protect him, for the point of the spear went through it, and broke the bone, so that the brain inside was scattered about, and he died fighting.

Menelaus hit Pisander as he was coming towards him, on the forehead, just at the rise of his nose; the bones cracked and his two gore-bedrabbled eyes fell by his feet in the dust.

And so on.

So that’s the Iliad. Think you know the Odyssey?

Think again. Far from focusing on the well-known, exciting parts of Ulysses’ voyages (eg encounters with the Cyclops, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, lashing himself to the mast to listen to the Sirens), these are all dealt with in one flashback.

About 70% of the Odyssey is taken up with the frankly rather weird situation going on with his wife Penelope and 115 “suitors” who have been having a three-year long bender round at Ulysses’ in his absence.

So an awful lot of the Odyssey concerns not, in fact, what you and I might call “an odyssey” – but rather:

1. Ulysses pretending to be an aged tramp and talking to a pig herder
2. Ulysses pretending to be an aged tramp hanging around the party, getting abused (someone throws a hoof at him!)
3. Ulysses continuing to pretend to be an aged tramp long after anyone normal would have said “I’m not really an aged tramp – I am, in fact, the king and I am not happy with all this”

Eventually, of course, the “aged tramp” routine wears as thin for Ulysses as it did for everyone else several books earlier and – as is the way of Greek epic poetry – it all ends happily ever after with a massive bloodbath.

On balance, I preferred the Iliad. 

Waking up early

One of my kids is an early riser. And that means we are all early risers now.

Young Tancred (3) never knowingly misses welcoming in the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn, with a hearty slam of his bedroom door.

And that’s just a metaphor, because at this time of year “dawn” in the sense of “sunrise” comes approximately half an hour after I leave the house to go to work.

People of England: one compelling reason to hope for, pray for  – hell, even campaign for – Scottish independence is that the only people who actually want the clocks to go back in October would no longer be our fellow citizens.

The 200 or so sheep farmers (and ten to fifteen remaining milkmen) for whose benefit the remaining 60 million of us spend the best part of six months only seeing natural daylight at weekends would be someone else’s problem.

Anyway, back to our youngest.

Usually and non-metaphorically, he’s welcoming that obscure 5.30am to 5.45am slot, during which he:

1. Wakes up;
2. Has a big shit and then;
3. Decides it’s time everyone else – principally (although not exclusively) his elder brother, Roger Jr – was awake too.

Even if I sleep through or pretend to sleep through the initial barrage, I can rest assured that I will soon be woken by one grassing the other up for something or other, or someone needing their arse wiping. My favourite way to start the day. 

Roger Jr and Tancred are very different characters. While Roger Jr is eager to please and (as a corollary) fairly obedient, Tancred is a thoroughgoing anti-authoritarian anarchist. He obeys no law but himself. Nietzsche would be proud of him. Nietzsche, frankly, is welcome to him.

Every night, we pack him off to bed with a reminder that he’s to stay in his room until his clock tells him it’s morning, that he’s not to wake Roger Jr up, that he’s to stay quiet etc. And he goes along with it.

But come the morning, he does whatever he damn well feels like. Which 9 times out of 10 is to disregard the instructions he was given the evening before and go to play “jumping off the bed” or “hammering the floor with a shoe” or whatever else it is he and his brother get up to most mornings.

To be quite honest, this is starting to wear a little thin. Reasoning with a three-year old is difficult at the best of times. Reasoning with a three-year old sociopath is something else.

Your suggestions, dear readers, would be welcome.

Right now, all I can think of is to wait until he’s a teenager. And then wake HIM up EVERY MORNING.

FOR EVER. 

Russell Brand has my vote

You may have noticed Russell Brand being in the news a bit this week: not for his shagging or drug exploits or even for offending the delicate, but for saying that he doesn’t vote.

That derives from this, an article he wrote for the New Statesman – which he was guest editing this week.

Quite what it means to get a celebrity to “guest edit” a magazine, I don’t really know. How many crap contributions were spiked by Russell Brand? Did he give the advertising department a hard time for a lack of renewals? I suppose we’ll never know.

Anyway, over the course of 4,500 words, Russell Brand (celebrities are always to be referred to by their full names – that’s in the ODHSNM style guide. The editor would have a fit if I didn’t follow it) says this:

I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box.

He also says:

Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve.

This has caused an eruption of ruffled pomposity from the political and media establishment this week – whose response to Russell Brand’s unauthorised trespass into their exclusive domain has been akin to the expression on the face of a wood pigeon that has just fallen out of a tree.

It is best summed up by the tired spectacle of that sneering symbol of everything that is loathsome and exclusive about the establishment, Jeremy Paxman, calling him a “trivial man” on Newsnight – followed by columnist after columnist commenting on this and then on each other’s comments, like a dog eating its own shit, sicking it up, and then eating it again.  

The argument appears to be that Russell Brand is not entitled to express an opinion on politics because he chooses not to vote, despite having a reasoned explanation as to why this is. Maybe Russell Brand's explanation can shed some light on why millions of other people don't vote - or is that an impossibility because he's a Hollywood celebrity? I'd suggest that he has more in common with those non-voters than anyone playing the Westminster game. 

Russell Brand is a witty man who expresses himself well, while also annoying people and being a monstrous show-off. Who else was like that? Socrates was a lot like that. You could argue that Jesus was a lot like that.

CLEARLY I AM NOT COMPARING RUSSELL BRAND TO JESUS OR SOCRATES. Come on, this isn’t the Daily Telegraph comments section.

You don’t have to agree with his point of view (Russell Brand even points out later in the article – YES, I DID read it all – that he acknowledges that apathy also comes from laziness and the inability to care about distant things) but he deserves a hearing. That’s what’s different between today and back then. 

Equally ridiculous looking

Russell Brand may not be the best person to explode the political/media/business cabal, but so what if what he says resonates with people? Paxman trivialises himself once again by playing the man not the ball. His persona and schtick is just as absurd as Russell Brand's. 

Plus, this is not a new point of view. Here’s HG Wells, 100 years ago talking about Parliament.

So far representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair trial. So far we have not had representative government, but only a devastating caricature. 

Politicians are: 

Not really the elected representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party system and the ballot-box 

Criticising the electoral system, HG Wells (the celebrity, not the conference centre) says 

The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of political organisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidently demanded. The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged. Save as they speak for us, the people are dumb. 

Echoing Russell Brand, HG Wells goes on: 

Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. 

Last quote, I promise: 

Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only in theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies so eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their form and substance. 

Perhaps HG Wells was a “trivial man” too. He did, after all, write science fiction novels, thought bicycles were the future of warfare and was a prominent “useful idiot” for Lenin.  

Oops - now we can't take him seriously on anything

Perhaps I am a trivial man too. Almost certainly I am. 

And I'd much rather be one than the sort of creature a Paxman takes seriously. 

My point is simply that there has been a tradition of dissatisfaction with the (still) prevailing political orthodoxy that goes is more than a hundred years old. That critique is not new, nor is it something that establishment has a right to reject out of hand because a “celebrity” is putting it forward. 

You shouldn’t have to be nothing but “serious” to be taken seriously. Politics is not the sole domain of people who have never thought about or done anything other than politics. 

The meaning of “democracy” is not exhausted by the Westminster farce and the media wankers who tell you what you can think about it. Russell Brand has reached his own conclusions – so can you. It's as much ours as it is theirs. 

Top Five Pointless Conventions

Lots of things we take for granted in everyday life do not serve any reasonable purpose. Today, ODHSNM considers some of the most egregious.

Encore

So you’re watching a band. They’ve been on for a while and they haven’t played their most popular songs.

What’s this? They’re walking off the stage? But...but...NO! You must return! We, the audience, demand it!

What is the point of an encore? Everyone knows you’re going to do it. Band - you are not spontaneously responding to the audience. You’ve got a LIGHT SHOW sorted out for this bit, FFS.

Audience – you could all sit there in total silence and they’d still come back out and play the same three songs they intended to play all along. They're not going to waste that light show. 

Perhaps once an encore was a spontaneous response to audience demand. Now – like most of the grammar of pop music - it’s a ridiculous bit of play-acting nobody can remember why they do. Just don’t bother. 

Outside Broadcast

Suppose there has been some big news event, with a political element to it. Cue TV reports beginning:

“I am standing here outside Number 10 Downing Street...”

WHY? That is the last place on earth where anything relating to this news event is likely to happen. Nor are we convinced by the presence of a TV crew there that you are somehow at the heart of what is going on. You read a press release (or whatever) and drove the crew over there, the same as everyone else!

Why is it considered necessary to put a man in a coat in front of a well-known monument or some building that has a bearing on the story in question? Do you think we can’t grasp the idea of “politics” without a picture of the Houses of Parliament?

The 9 to 5

OK, not everybody works those particular hours, but the vast majority of us do. This is incredibly inefficient and detrimental to our collective well-being.

Rush hour, peak time fares, lunchtime queues, “all our operators are busy at the moment” – these are all side-effects of the idea that we all trying to do the same things at the same times.

Couldn’t we all stagger our working hours to avoid getting in each other’s way?

Yours sincerely

 Perhaps this valediction is in irreversible decline with letter-writing heading for extinction, but I for one will not miss it.

Firstly, at 37 years of age, I still struggle to spell it. Secondly, the whole sincerely/faithfully thing is a tiresome pinhead for pedantic angels to dance on.

But thirdly and most important, what the hell does it mean? In what sense am I claiming to be “yours”?

“I remain, Sir, your obedient servant”...? Is that what it’s derived from? If so, that’s not really how I want to sign off a letter. Because I don’t.

Parliament

Ha ha! A pun on the word “convention”.

But seriously, in what way is (i) the ability to get selected by a party machine as a candidate and (ii) the ability to make lawyerly speeches in the big green debating club in any sense correlated with (iii) having ideas about social and economic organisation that are likely to do any good and (iv) being competent to implement them?

It may have been suitable for a 19^th century Britain run by gentlemen for gentlemen, but it looks pretty preposterous today. 

PLEASE BE ADVISED - The convention that the photo and the text should be in some way related has been bypassed - this is a picture of a pelican put through Glitche.

Speed Awareness

This weekend just gone, I went on a speed awareness course.

The first irony of many to be encountered across this post is that I was aware of precisely how fast I was going when I got nicked, back at the end of July – ie 37 mph.

What I was not aware of was that Truvelo Combi (pictured) cameras take pictures of you from the front if you pass them at a speed above the limit. I had always thought they were the ones that took your number going in to a “measured mile” type of speed trap and then got you on the way out if you’re too quick. 

Naturally, I had intended to slow down sharply right before passing the second camera.

So I had already learned something valuable a long time before going on the course.

I shall spare you any further details of my lawbreaking. Suffice to say I was eventually faced with the following options:

• A £60 fine and 3 points on my licence
• Go on a 4.5-hour speed awareness course, which costs £75

Considering the price of car insurance these days – and the risk of recidivism on my part (to which we will return later) – it was a no brainer.

Not only that, I thought it would give me something funny to write about here for you, my beloved readers. I was hoping for:

• A “scared straight” police lecture to take the piss out of;
• A local government health and safety boreathon to take the piss out of; or
• At least one or more foul-tempered 50+ Yorkshire arseholes who think that arguing with the poor schmuck giving the presentation will lead to the law being immediately changed in their favour and their course fee returned, with an apology for wasting their valuable time. To take the piss out of.

My hopes in these regards were to be dashed, although there was (inevitably) a little dash of each. Just not enough to really get stuck into.

Potentially ironic photograph

It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife, innit? That is to say, debatably ironic but primarily just a little bit disappointing and wearing.

To give them their due, the pair who ran the session were very entertaining – given the subject matter and the fact that most people there were being forcibly detained under pain of punishment for the first time since school. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, no less.

I did also learn a couple of things:

• Unless there’s a sign to say otherwise (or you’re on a motorway or dual carriageway) the presence of street lighting = 30 mph speed limit. “Built up area” means nothing in this regard.
• A multi-lane road is only a dual carriageway if there’s a central reservation – and this is important because there is a different national speed limit for single carriageways and dual carriageways (ie for cars, 60 mph and 70 mph, respectively).

I expect you knew all of that, right?

As you would expect, we also heard some harrowing stories about how cars going too fast had killed people, saw some harrowing videos of cars going too fast killing people, collectively imagined what it would be like be driving a car too fast that had killed some people etc.

For me however the problem was this. Even after 4.5 hours of listening, nodding along and generally taking it all in, I didn’t really feel as though I had done anything wrong.

I got done driving past a speed camera around 7pm in the evening. There was nobody around.

On one side of the road beyond the pavement, there was a brick wall with woods on the other side of it. The wall is approximately 6 feet high on the other side of it. So nobody is about to dive into the road from that side.

On the other side is a grass verge, a pavement, a small wall, a big open lawn and finally a block of flats.

The view is very good; there are no junctions or other hazards. There are streetlights. I’m checking all this on Google StreetView as I write, so this is not just how I remember it.  

I am not saying that I shouldn’t have been done because of all these things. I’m saying I can’t understand why there is a speed camera there, unless it is just an instrument of revenue-raising or tyrannising drivers with the threat of constant surveillance.

I just cannot see a real safety reason for that camera to be there - or for a lot of other cameras to be where they are. Which makes one think: "Yes, I understand and agree with everything you've said. But what has it got to do with the situation I found myself in, which was completely unlike everything you've talked about?"

Honestly, I wanted to come out of that course a changed man. For £75 you expect an epiphany, not just a couple of cups of coffee and a free pencil. I’m not sure I was even supposed to take the pencil.

But I didn’t.

I’m not an habitual speeder – on a scooter one rarely has the opportunity to break the limit. But I still believe in my stomach that the risk of getting caught or having an accident is sometimes outweighed by my need to be somewhere, fast. I can’t help it. It’s pre-rational.

I’ll probably still believe that right up until something awful happens.

Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?

You can wear what you like

When I see politicians calling for debate about banning burqas, I have to agree with this bloke – there’s nothing to debate, because this is Britain and people can wear what the hell they like.

The ostensible reason that this tiresome old chestnut has been hauled out of the fire once again is that some judge has said a Muslim woman can’t enter a plea in court wearing a veil on the grounds that her identity could not be verified without seeing her face.

As usual, the accompanying media hoo-ha is not actually about the legal arguments involved. Though not a lawyer myself, I am not aware of any legal precedent saying that people in court have to be identified facially. We have such marvels of the 19^th century as “finger-prints”, for example, which I am told many judges are these days inclined to accept as real evidence when imprisoning people, let alone confirming who they are.

I live in West Yorkshire so most days I see at least one fully-veiled person. I can say with some confidence that it is a rare day on which they are the most remarkably-attired person I will see. It bothers me no more than when I see a Sikh man wearing a turban, a Jewish man with ringlets or a student dressing like a ridiculous clown.

That’s nothing to do with being PC or “culturally sensitive”. I believe that it is a matter of being true to “proper British values” (whatever they are) to not give a toss what anyone else wears, thinks or does unless or until it impinges on others.

Sumptuary laws were one of the first things to be dumped in the move from feudalism here in the West, so it is staggering to me that anyone would think of bringing them back today.

As a motorcyclist, I cover my face in public places a lot. This should not lead anyone to regard me as a security risk or a source of suspicion.

I accept that when I go into private places – like petrol stations – the “terms of use” of that place often require me to take my crash helmet off. If I don’t like it I can buy petrol somewhere else where they have different rules.

I do not accept, however, that when I am in a public place I should have to prove anything to anyone by verifying my identity by means of showing my face, presenting my papers or scanning a barcode tattooed onto my forehead.

I am a citizen and the source of law and political authority in a democracy is the citizenry. The state is there for our convenience and protection, not the other way round. The law is there to protect citizens from each other AND FROM THE STATE, not the other way round. A woman with a bit of cloth over her nose and mouth poses no threat to me or you by virtue of having a bit of cloth over her nose and mouth. If she thinks it’s important, that trumps your aesthetic preferences or what is easier for you to deal with. End of.

Only one of these is a burqa

There is, of course, the argument that women are being coerced into wearing veils by the actions of men, supported by cultural norms within the relevant communities.

But banning veils doesn’t tackle that problem. It’s the equivalent of treating pneumonia with cough medicine – addressing an outward symptom only.

If you think that someone else’s culture is “wrong” about something like the treatment of women, then confront that point directly – not through some ridiculous sublimated proxy like banning items of clothing.

I suspect, indeed, that forcing women to remove their veils in public is unlikely to do much to promote the cause of feminism amongst outraged men who impose it on their wives and daughters because they think it is sacrilegious. It will just alienate them from the law and convince them that it regards Islam as an enemy.

And I suppose that the idea that “Islam is our enemy” is really what is at the bottom of a lot of this; that burqa-banning is a way for Islamophobes to indulge their prejudices while pretending that they are promoting some sort of liberal values.

What people wear is none of the state’s business and none of the law’s business, no matter what their religion, their gender or their race. 

A Conspiracy against the Laity

This is what George Bernard Shaw calls “the professions” – those self interested cabals dedicated to keeping their respective shops closed, in the name of keeping standards up.

Of course, a free market would imply that any fool can set himself up as a doctor and charge whatever he can convince others into paying, whether he has any medical training or not – with the principle of “caveat emptor” putting responsibility onto the customer to be happy that the person removing their appendix knows what they are doing.

This is one of the reasons why a completely unrestricted free market is hard to defend. I do not particularly object to doctors having to adhere to some sort of common standards.

What I do take exception to – as I have said before – is the privileges accorded to the legal profession.

And remember boys and girls, the word “privilege” comes from the Latin for “private law”, meaning an arrangement to the advantage of particular individuals which is not available to everyone – which is in conflict with a key principle of legal theory, vis equality before the law.

My business’ landlord and I recently agreed to renew our lease, literally by just changing all the dates on the old lease. We want to stay. He wants us to stay. Simple.

OH BUT WAIT.

For some reason, I have to go and get a solicitor to administer an oath under the Statutory Declarations Act 1835 in order for the paperwork to be legit.

The derivation of THAT word points to the circularity going on here: only if a solicitor (or other Commissioner for Oaths) has made me read out a line of text in front of him and signed the paperwork, would my landlord or I be able to engage other lawyers to sort out any disagreement we might have in the future.

What if we all just...stopped?

I have often thought that if everyone stopped believing in financial markets, they’d disappear. If we all stopped allowing the legal profession to take on the role of authorising everything we do, made the law our servant rather than the other way round and took responsibility for ourselves, wouldn’t they vanish too?

Drinking 40 Pints of Woodforde’s Wherry from a Youngs Kit

The wait is finally over. It’s beer o’clock. Or is it?

Step 8 – The Second Wait

Once in the keg, the beer needs to be put somewhere warm for 24 hours to get the secondary fermentation (caused by the sugar) going. After that it’s supposed to be put somewhere colder to settle.

The Sicilies, however, were going on holiday – as I mentioned in the previous installment – so I stuck the keg in the cupboard under the stairs, reckoning this would be both warm AND cool.

The second wait wasn’t so bad, as we went to the North Yorkshire Moors for a week. And a jolly good time we had.

Step 9 – Preliminary Testing

 The instructions stipulated leaving the beer for anywhere between 5 and 14 days, until it was clear. I gave it eight before I tapped off a little bit (pictured) and drank it.

Well, it looked like beer. It smelled like beer.

As regards taste, it’s a little harder to say. I’m not entirely sure what Woodforde’s Wherry is supposed to taste like – bar the gibberish cited on their website quoted earlier.

I found it quite watery, but then (i) I did seemingly use a gallon or so more water than I was supposed to and (ii) Wherry is only a 3% beer, and I tend to drink stronger stuff.

It was certainly bitter, with a metallic, iron taste to it. Perhaps that’s the “delicious citrus aftertaste”...?

To conclude, I’ve tasted worse beer.

Step 10 – The Acid Test

Of course, testing the flavour is only part of the story. I did not intend to drink this in 50ml samples.

That evening, I drank three pints or so of it.

Did I feel drunk? No. But then I wouldn’t really expect to have. More research with greater quantities is required to ascertain the real strength of the beer.

Did I go blind or get a blinding hangover? No. Which would suggest that the process went according to plan without significant contamination.

Did I get that hallmark of homebrew - a raging bout of the shits? No!

I call that a rip-roaring success.

Conclusions

I have two more tins of Wherry to make up once I’ve polished this lot off – plus a gallon of primarily fermented stuff sitting around still (I suppose) fermenting further.

Here’s what I’ll do differently next time:

• Measure the water out properly. I think (i) I used too much water and (ii) it was too hot to begin with, which could have killed off some of my yeast, leading to weakness.
• Be a little more scientific about temperatures. I reckon that I slowed the whole thing down by keeping it too cold for the primary fermentation.
• Sterilise everything before putting it into the wort. Just laziness I’m afraid.

Cheers!

Making 40 Pints of Woodforde’s Wherry with a Youngs Kit – Part 3

Food and drink. Shelter and warmth. Sex. Intoxication. Since the dawn of time, these have been the first things that human beings have sought. Not necessarily in that order.

So my home brewing saga is a retelling of an ancient tale; the latest iteration burped out by the collective unconscious.

We left my five gallons of wort fermenting away happily in the garage. I waited for seven days and seven nights. Then I resumed my endeavours.

Step 6 – The Hydrometer

Before you move to the next step, you have to make sure that primary fermentation is complete – that is, that the yeast has turned enough of the sugar to ethanol for the beer to be the right strength.

Remember – ethanol, good: makes you drunk. Methanol, bad: makes you go blind. You’ve got to have a system.

You do this:

• By seeing if the wort has stopped bubbling – ie stopped producing CO2.
• By testing the specific gravity of what you’ve got.

You do the former with your eyes – the latter with an instrument called a hydrometer. Filling a measuring

tube with beer-like substance, one drops the hydrometer in and the level it floats at tells you (basically) how much thicker than water it is.

I did this once and, well, I didn’t put enough beer in the tube as the hydrometer sank to the bottom. I took this as meaning it wasn’t boozy enough and I left it for another couple of days.

Then I did it again, and it looked to me as though we were at the desired 1.104 level.

Now, I was going on holiday the following day, so I may have resolved in my mind to move to the next stage ANYWAY, but the reading appeared to be in order.

Step 7 - To Keg-a Therion

It was at this point that I realised I should have siphoned the beer out for the hydrometer test, rather than just dunking my tube in it. My measuring tube, I mean. Again, I had imperilled the final product by the risk of contamination.

Regardless, I went on to sterilise (i) my keg, (ii) my siphon and (iii) the pressurised lid. Same process as before although the brass lid had to be done just in hot water rather than steriliser. So it wasn’t so much sterile as “hot”.

I also had cause to delve into Elvira’s mystery cupboards of cosmetics on the hunt for Vaseline. I had been instructed to “liberally grease the o-ring” lest a seal not form properly.

Come on now. This isn’t one of those blogs.

So, having liberally greased my o-ring – that is, the threads on both the brass top and the keg onto which the former screwed – I began to siphon.

You do this as follows:

• Put the keg on a surface lower down than the primary fermenting vessel, so that gravity is on your side.
• Stick one end of the siphon into the wort.
• Suck on the other end.
• Stop your futile sucking and open the tap on the siphon. Suck it again, until the beer reaches your mouth.
• Immediately take the mouth end of the siphon and stick it in the bottom of the keg.

I found this part rather magical. I don’t quite understand the physics behind it, but by that single suck, all the beer transferred itself gradually from one container to the other.

Did I say “all”? Well. In my case, I found myself with about a gallon left over in the PFV once the keg was full. Both were ostensibly five gallon/40 litre containers. I had filled the PFV to the very top, imagining THAT was five gallons, but clearly it wasn’t. Again Youngs, more detail required.

I left the remaining gallon in the PFV, not entirely sure what I was going to do with it. And there it remains.

OK, into the keg went about 100g of brewers sugar. This caused the contents to fizz up and spill over the floor, as the keg was extremely full. I screwed on the brass lid, greasy o-ring to greasy o-ring. And we were done for another week. 

Making 40 Pints of Woodforde’s Wherry with a Youngs Kit – Part 2

Step 5 - The Wait 

To be honest, this was the bit I was dreading more than any other. Waiting is boring. Whenever I have to wait for anything, I feel every second of my life slipping irretrievably away. I sense my chromosomal telomeres getting shorter and shorter. Or maybe I’m just getting old.

Four to six days until fermentation stops. I could get run over by a bus in that time. Funny how rogue buses play such an important role in not only reflections on one’s mortality but also corporate risk management modelling.

So, after putting the vessel into the garage I wait.

A couple of hours later, I go to check on it.

Hmmm... we’ve had some sort of a problem. The lid has been blasted off the airlock and I can smell pub carpet. I clean it up and put everything back.

Over the next 48 hours, this happens several times – on one occasion, propelling the lid of the airlock a good six feet away. Alas, I didn’t see it happen.

Eventually, I get things under control so that the airlock is bubbling away gently without spurting foam out.

Here comes the science bit. And by “science” I mean “what I think happened”.

What I think was happening was that my wort was too hot – meaning that it was fermenting very quickly, belching out big gouts of CO2. These were generating foam on the top of the wort. Instead of the gas escaping the airlock fairly smoothly, foam was building up under pressure until – BLEEERRRRP! – it overwhelmed the friction holding the top part of the airlock on and burst out.

The reason you need an airlock is to let the CO2 - a by-product of fermentation - out without letting air – a vector for microbes, flies, cat hair etc – in. If bad shit like that gets in, it can spoil your beer.

Anyway, by the end of waiting day 2, order had been restored.

A Short Digression While We Wait

What is Woodforde’s Wherry, you may well ask?

It is beer from Norfolk – whence my brother and sister-in-law come, which is why I am making it (it was they who got me the kit). I have drunk it before, but I can’t really remember what it was like.

Woodforde’s chief brewer says it is:

Fresh and zesty with crisp floral flavours. A background of sweet malt and a hoppy 'grapefruit' bitter finish characterises this champion bitter.

Their website says:

Light but full of flavour and with a delicious citrus aftertaste. Great with Norfolk Ham and Turkey or on its own.

To that, I say “hmmm...we’ll see.”

I should also add Woodforde’s home town of Woodbastick to my list of amusing English place names.

Making 40 Pints of Woodforde’s Wherry with a Youngs Kit – Part 1

I like beer. The worst thing about beer is having to pay for it. Therefore, home brew.

In a change to the usual schedule, I will be taking you through the process of making the eponymous 40 pints of Woodforde’s Wherry with a Youngs home brew kit, step by step.

You see, I am trying to make the internet a better place after all.

See here for the story of how this kit came into my sweaty little hands.

Here are the things we’ll be using today.

Step 1 – Sterilisation

This is something I know all about.

So you have to fill the 5 gallon container with hot water and a couple of teaspoons of the steriliser per gallon. 

 I put 10 teaspoons in. It foams up like a bubble bath and smells like swimming pool.

I did this in the bath, knowing that 5 gallons of hot water is quite heavy.

You leave it for 20 minutes. I put the lid and the airlock pieces in as well. I should really have put the spoon in, I realised an hour later...


 Step 2 – Meanwhile downstairs...

The beer mixture (or whatever it’s called) is in two big cans. You are supposed to stand these in hot water for 5 minutes.

At the same time, I boiled up the requisite 3.5 litres of water on the hob.

While this was going on, I went to the garage to fetch Roger Jr’s micro scooter in. Why? Aha.


I went back upstairs, rinsed the primary fermentation vessel (for that is what it is called) out – finding that the lid had bent a little bit in the hot water. It still went on just fine, so I didn’t worry about it.

Step 3 – The Wort

That’s a beer word, ladies and gentlemen. It means the foul stinking liquid that turns into beer

So I opens the tins. I mean, I open the tins. I am not Popeye.

I opens the tins – discovering that despite having every kitchen implement imaginable, we do not have a decent tin opener. I am forced to prise the lids off with a knife. Just a bit.

This is what beer cordial looks like.

I pours it...I pour it into the vessel. You know what I did then? I put the vessel onto the micro-scooter! That is the sort of foresight that lead our ancestors to make fire. I have justified my human status.

I knew full well that attempting to carry a bucket with 5 gallons of wort in it out to the garage – the only place Elvira will allow me to conduct chemistry experiments – would result in considerable sloppage unless I used the power of wheels.

.

So, in goes the 3.5 litres of boiling water, followed by another...erm...20 odd litres of cold water, as prescribed by the highly comprehensive instructions provided.

I stir it until foul sludge stops coming up on the spoon.

My toe is also visible

Now for the magic ingredient. Yeast.

In goes the yeast. Stir it in.

On goes the lid.

A little bit of water in the airlock, so that I can see bubbles of CO2 coming out as it ferments.

I feel obliged to point out that nowhere in the instructions provided is it explained what the hell you are supposed to do with the airlock. I had to look it up on the internet.

Airlock

Step 4 – In Transit

The scooter is a piece of genius. Out we go to the garage – the new fortress of solitude.

Up it goes onto a shelf and I wraps a coat around it to keep it warm. It needs to stay at around 18 to 20 degrees Celsius for 4 to 6 days.

Then I go in and do the washing up, like a good boy.

Conclusion

Well, it took me less than a hour and it all seems to be working – the brew had started to bubble when checked. My assessment:

• One side of instructions for something that you will almost certainly ruin if you don’t do it very carefully is not good enough Youngs.
• I forgot to sterilise the spoon.
• I used too much steriliser on the bucket and now I don’t have enough left to do the pressure barrel when it comes to part 2. I’ll have to go and buy some extra.

Overall: easy, although it may yet all prove to be a complete balls-up.