Friday Grab Bag: Drink Up Edition

Britain's new budget is out and starting Sunday a pint at the pub is going to be more expensive. Yesterday Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling announced an increase in the alcohol tax, a move he says is designed to stem the tide of binge-drinking.

Binge-drinking is a popular topic for the media here; newspapers are full of stories about plastered teenagers and vomiting shop assistants. I'm not out on the streets when the clubs close so I don't see the worst of it, but there are enough empty cans of cider and bottles of vodka in the park when I walk my dog each morning that I believe it's an issue. I don't see how this tax is going to address that, though.

The 4 pence increase on a pint of beer will probably be absorbed by supermarkets, where a pint averages 99p. The cost is unlikely to go up. Pubs are skating on thin ice, though. In a pub a pint costs 2.60. I expect that will rise. With their wafer-thing profit margins, pubs can't afford to eat it the 4p.

Just as frequent as binge-drinking stories are pub-closing stories. I don't sympathize with publicans who blame the smoking ban, but I do feel sorry that the new tax will hit them. I'd rather see store-bought alcohol get taxed more, with tax breaks for pubs. The government should encourage people to drink in the warm, lovely atmosphere of a pub, rather than on a park bench.

BritNews RoundUp
In her last movie, "The Golden Compass," Nicole Kidman's character had a "daemon," the animal manifestation of her soul. It was a nasty little monkey, but according to Britain's best-selling paper, the Daily Mail, another animal might be more appropriate. According to the paper, Kidman has used so much botox that she has the face of a bat. The Mail thoughtfully includes a pair of photos for comparison. That's Kidman on the left. (And if Kidman's daemon should be a bat, Britt Eklund's should be a trout, as this Mail story from a few months ago suggests.)

Poor Daily Mail. Lisa Marie Presley is suing the paper for calling her fat in an article last week. The story was really quite bitchy, illustrated with photos of Presley chowing down in a mall food court and featuring a faux "we're concerned she's eating herself to death, the way her father did" tone to it. I'd link to the piece but it's no longer on the paper's web site. I think that sort of screams guilt and I don't know why they're backing down. Presley is fat, but she has reason to be: She's pregnant.

If her strange prenatal cravings include asparagus, she might consult Jemima Packington, Britain's only "asparamancer." She uses stalks of asparagus the way others might use goose entrails or the I Ching. According to the Daily Telegraph: "Ms. Packington, from Worcester, throws the asparagus spears onto the floor and makes her predictions based on how they land." I predict you will watch this BBC video of her at work. I hope it doesn't make your pee smell funny.

Last month's news from Italy was that Italian men are no longer allowed to touch their genitals for luck. This month comes news that Italian women who commit adultery are allowed to lie about it. That was the ruling from Italy's highest court, who said that a 48-year-old woman referred to only as "Carla" did not make a false statement when she told police she did not lend her mobile phone to her lover. She was only protecting her honor. I love this line from the BBC's story: "She had lent her telephone to her secret lover, Giovanni, who then used it to call Carla's estranged husband, Vincenzo, and insult him." And Giovanni was probably making rude hand gestures while he was doing it.

The Mirror is looking for Britain's "sexiest fish and chip shop girl." I'm sure all that grease does wonders for the complexion.

I'll be spending today in London, or as participants in a survey by the TripAdvisor web site describe it: Europe's dirtiest and most expensive city.

Gargoyle of the Week


Okay, this isn't a gargoyle. It's a human face that seems to emerge from a house in Wolvercote, just north of Oxford. It's an odd little architectural feature, one of two visages that peer out of the light blue house:


To be honest, the faces are a little creepy, and I would worry that late at night, a little tipsy, they might give me a start. Of course, I can barely afford to get tipsy these days, let alone drunk.

But don't let that stop you. Have a great weekend and don't forget to tip your waitress.

By the Time We Got to Woodstock...

The mechanics of a successful pub must be the subject of great study in Britain: where to situate the pub, how to decorate it, what beer to serve, what food, what pub games and theme nights to offer. The exact combination of these factors combine to create a place people want to spend their time and their money.

Pubologists would do well to study the Woodstock Arms in Oxford--and then do the exact opposite. I haven't done enough research to determine what is the Sorriest Pub in Oxford but the Woodstock Arms certainly deserves a shot at the title. Or it would have, if it hadn't closed last week. I was walking the dog one morning and a lorry was parked outside. The pub's furniture was being loaded inside of it. The Woodstock Arms is shut tight now, though one blackboard sign leaning against a tree across the street, announcing 2-pound drinks for all of January (a good deal, if a desperate one), was somehow left behind.

The Woodstock Arms is right around the corner from our house but I've only been there twice--three times if you count the time I stopped by on a Saturday night around 10 p.m. a few months ago to find the place locked up tight. The times I was there it was like a funeral inside, but without the laughs. Where was the bonhomie?

The day after the Woodstock Arms closed I saw a headline in the Oxford Mail: "Celeb Chef Jamie Buys Local Pub." My heart leapt! Perhaps in a few months' time my local would be a gastropub operated by Jamie Oliver. But no, Oliver's opening an Italian restaurant in the city centre.

I have been to some lovely pubs. The Trout just outside Oxford is worth a walk, though I hear it's impenetrable in tourist season. The Turf is supposedly where Bill Clinton didn't inhale. The Bear is a quintessential pub: tiny, ancient (13th century, some claim), warm and cozy. The Rose and Crown has become the unofficial watering hole of the Reuters Fellows. The Argentine Fellow Abel is trying to be adopted by the landlady. Barring that, I think he wants to be reincarnated as a beer mat, so he can spend eternity in the Rose and Crown, gazing up at the amber liquid of his dreams.

The Woodstock Arms failed, I'm told, because the population of Summertown is too old. Plus, it's on a busy road, on the other side of the town from the main shopping strip that supports a more popular pub, the Dew Drop Inn. And, of course, it had no atmosphere. Whatever magical combination of attributes that a pub needs the thrive, the Woodstock Arms didn't have it.

What do you think makes a good pub?

Hell, Yeah

According to a story in the Telegraph, new research suggests what anyone who has ever worked in a high-pressure job already knew: Swearing can be good for the workplace.

Yehuda Baruch, a management professor at the University of East Anglia business school, and graduate Stuart Jenkins, set out to study bad language and its place in the work environment.
Swearing, said Prof. Baruch in a university press release, was used as "a social phenomenon to reflect solidarity and enhance group cohesiveness, or as a psychological phenomenon to release stress."

Sorry, boss, you can't fire me for dropping the F-bomb; I was merely enhancing group cohesiveness.

Prof Baruch added: “We hope that this study will serve not only to acknowledge the part that swearing plays in our work and our lives, but also to indicate that leaders sometimes need to ‘think differently’, and be open to intriguing ideas.”

The full paper-- "Swearing at Work and Permissive Leadership Culture: When Anti-Social Becomes Social and Incivility Is Acceptable"--isn't available online, but there's an abstract here. It includes this wonderful passage: "[The] paper found it necessary to use swear words (avoiding usage of the explicit form); bearing in mind the purpose of the paper, the paper hopes that this will not cause offence to the readership of the journal."

Oh, go ahead and give us the explicit form. We're #*&%@! grown-ups.

Though Suicide Is Painless...
And so last night to the Bookbinders, a funky little pub in Jericho, which is a funky neighborhood along the canal in Oxford. It was a dark and rainy night, perfect for bundling up with some beer nuts and a pint of ale. My friend Richard and I had settled in at a table in the crowded pub when he detected some tell-tale change in the atmosphere: "Ah, it's pub quiz night," he announced. "Shall we have a go?"

I don't think we have these in the States, preferring to do our drinking in private and our brain-teasing while sitting on the couch in front of "Jeopardy" or "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?"

A pub quiz is a communal exam, and quite elaborate. Some in the crowd were taking it seriously. One guy looked like he had brought a reference book. People frequently dialed up friends on their mobile phones for help. I think the prize was more beer, with entry fees going to Amnesty International.

There were five or six sections to the answer sheet that Richard and I paid a pound each for. The quizmistress read questions over the PA in such categories as Current Events, Local Knowledge, Comedy. There was a visual round, where we had to identify book titles based on just a tiny section of the cover. (We knew one must be "The DaVinci Code." Shame we picked the one that was actually "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban.") There were audio cues too, 10 snippets of music whose composer or band we had to ID. (Richard was very strong on the classical and jazz; I snagged a Beck tune. Both of us nearly threw a clot trying--and failing-- to remember who did that catchy "Duh do-do-do" song from the '80s that was used in a VW commercial. [It was Trio.])

The final round was a sort of elimination, all-or-nothing thing: Get one question wrong and you'd lose all five points. The first question was: Which televised U.S. comedy ran longer: "M*A*S*H" or "Cheers"?

Do you know? We didn't.

Declare the Pennies on Your Eyes
I was glad to witness an actual pub quiz since I'd seen this story in the Daily Mail: The U.K. government is considering taxing pub quiz winnings. I think they could have a revolt on their hands.