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.