TIPPLED

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The Demon Drink

Recently some very weighty medical voices have been stridently bellowing that we Irish have a drink problem and I must say, I have to agree with them. The problem is the ridiculous price of the stuff here.

You can't get a decent bottle of plonk now for under a tenner and that, to my mind, is extortion plain and simple. An acceptable table wine should be available at three yo-yo's or less and a good Merlot, which you might roll appreciatively around the palate, should be a tenner tops. In a moldy old Arab shop in Paris last year I got a peach of a bottle of red for a single euro and the owner was delighted with the sale too.

But of course, the high and mighty are not complaining about price because that is immaterial to their wallets. They spit out the word beer as if it were a corked wine and we all know these types wouldn't be seen dead having a pint. However, they reluctantly admit that a thimble of beer a month is inside safe levels of consumption. Fuck that for a game of soldiers. Where beer is concerned I subscribe to the notion that the first one has a taste of more off it and we all know that it is bad luck to put the cork back on the wine bottle. 

Having said that however, I concede there are some who really do have a problem when it comes to drink. But my theory is that the problem exists already, whatever it is, and the addition of drink only fuels the problem to the surface. That thought brings me to the motivation to drink alcohol. My son in his early twenties tells me his age-group drink to get seriously pissed. They lace into shorts one after another even before they go out for the night. Something more exotic might even get smoked or snorted and by then they're in the mood to shout and dance, and apparently, it is still only 7.00pm.

The word intoxication comes from the latin 'toxicare' or toxic. Alcohol in its pure form is toxic and too much gives you toxic poisoning. If you've ever had a hangover then you know what I mean. You've poisoned your blood stream. But prior to poisoning you have the period of losing control of your faculties or behaviour. That is the reason, I believe, why some people merely drink to get drunk. There is a core unhappiness in the psyche that needs to be smothered temporarily. It is an escape mechanism used to avoid a pain felt when sober. That pain might be a low self-worth, a lack of confidence or something else entirely. The drink is only the tool of escapism.

I don't know about you but I actually like the taste of beer and wine, (in separate glasses naturally). Recently I discovered a draught beer from a micro-brewery here in Cork called "Friar Weiss," and it is a dream beer. You savour every drop rather than hosing it down the hatch. The place that sells it does a sandwich that tastes of everything you like and put the two of them together and the view of the ocean from their back windows and you have a recipe to sit and chat pleasantly for an afternoon. 

I tried tequila twice and the second time I went rubber-numb from the waist down and had to be carried out. The top half of me was coherently telling jokes at the time I tried to stand up and that was just plain weird. I suspect that Tequila makes your ankles pissed. But I'll chance a whiskey in an Irish coffee after dinner and I used to like red rum on cold days. However the feeling of dizzy-drunk is repulsive to me and that leads me to the idea of drunk, what it is and why it is attractive.

We have lots of names for it because drunk is not a single state or thing. There are degrees of drunk from mild buzz right through to unconscious and everything in between. An old friend visits my local pub with me once a month and for five hours and over many pints, we make sense of our lives together. It is talking only with no TV or radio or anything else to interrupt the communication of ideas and thoughts. It is therapy for both and the alcohol and the pub facilitates it.

We forget too that a public house is the opposite of a private house. You wouldn't meet five or six of your mates in your own front room unless you live in the snowy wastes of Canada and the nearest pub is a hundred miles away. The pub in Ireland is an institution for meeting and socializing with friends. It is not what we are but a reflection of what we like. The pub comforts us and the beer loosens us. We become convivial and happy even if it is only for a short while. We all have responsibilities and worries and they'll still be there in the morning regardless. We know that, but what we're saying is, will you just fuck off for a couple of hours and leave me alone to enjoy myself because I don't get out half enough. And while I'm at it, what's it to you?

The way the medical profession has begun lecturing us from their high moral ground about everything we do is grating on the nerves. Knowing we don't have much money and a night out must be planned and budgeted for, they now demand that Government put the price of a few pints beyond us. What the average doctor charges for five minutes in his or her clinic would give me two good nights out in any week. 

So my conclusion is that the drink problem in Ireland is due to Doctors. They'd drive you to drink!!

Up The Poll

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Have you ever been approached by a polling company looking for your views on anything? It is an important question because these polls can influence legislation all over the place. We have RedC and MRBI asking respondents questions and the answers can determine National events and public thinking.

Though the numbers polled can be as little as five hundred to a thousand the research companies involved claim high levels of accuracy in their findings. However, it is not unknown in a given week for one of them to report one thing and the other to report the direct opposite. How's that for accuracy?

AIMRO (The Association of Irish Market Research Organisations),  advises that for a properly conducted scientific national poll, a minimum sample of 1000 interviews is required and 500 interviews for a published local area poll. They waffle on about the scientific methods they use, the neutral phrasing of questions and the right gender mix in both sex and age of the respondents. There are dark hints that it is pointless to use anyone but their members as well. To which I can only say, they would wouldn't they.

Among their cautions too is a warning of what they call, 'funding bias.' He who pays the piper in other words gets to choose the tune. Interestingly, the Irish Cancer Society and the Irish Heart Foundation regularly pay these people for polls with predictable results too. Apparently we smokers would like the price of a packet of fags raised to €50.00 to ahem, 'encourage' us to quit. Shit like that gets national coverage and is followed by calls to Government to get on with it and raise the price because that's what the public want, even if they don't know it. It's an empty charade and a pack of lies but is used as a justification to persecute smokers.

I have complained elsewhere that none of us got to vote for the initial smoking ban that started the rot. Would you have voted to put aging smokers out on a cold winter's night? You see it depends on the question asked. Nobody asked any questions though it just got rushed through the Dail and one day, "WHOOSH" ……. if you lit a fag in the boozer you could be fined €3,000.

But eight years after the ban was introduced, someone did finally ask the Irish people directly. In September 2012 the Journal.ie did ask when they posed their readers the question, "Ireland’s citizens were not given a vote on the smoking ban that was introduced in 2004 so we want to know: How would you have voted?" Was anyone interested enough to vote? Was it a respectable landslide in favour of the workplace ban on smoking?  Were the medical profession, the ahem, 'charities' and the Government correct when they told us there was overwhelming support for the ban?

Well, nearly five thousand people voted that day in the Journal, (4,888 to be exact) and that response is five times the accepted level for a National Poll. But while that's surprising, what truly shocked was that only thirty-seven per cent of them were in favor of the ban. A whopping fifty-two per cent were dead against it. I was stunned because even I had begun to believe the lies we were spun. We were told then too that smokers formed nearly a third of the population at the time and if so, that poll is back to front. Surely every non-smoker wanted to see the smokers banished. But they didn't apparently. Have a look yourself if you don't believe me.

I will come back to the theme of smoking several times on this new site but this poll on the topic raises the question of democracy more so than the right to smoke. Our Health Minister at the time, Michael Martin, just bullied and bluffed this ban  through and appears to have got away with it. But it is far from over. As a wise old man said to me at the time, the ban is just a politically correct fad and it will pass because people will always be people. One bad major war somewhere and we'll all be down the pub smoking and drinking and worrying if we are going to be bombed to oblivion tomorrow. Meanwhile, the pompous narrow-minded, curtain-sniffers will sit at home that night and just fret about us instead of the war.

" Just you wait 'enry 'iggins!"

 

ADDLED BY TWIT-FACE

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ADDLED BY TWIT-FACE

I have a background in computers and technology since the mid-eighties and my saving grace learning that stuff at the time was that is was based on logic and common-sense, (or it was on the Mac platform at any rate).

Initially I toured the country trying to convince the newspaper industry of the advantages of Desk-Top Publishing over hot lead. Believe it or not, it was slow going and soul-destroying and the new technology wore a saucy price tag too. The early innovators were just getting their heads around DTP when I was back with Postscript Graphics and Photoshop. Their resistance was monumental. 

But over time they put their toe in the water of graphics and photo-retouching and then I'm back again announcing the new thing. "Internet and URL's is the future lads," I announced excitedly, "and soon you'll be putting that rag of yours out to a waiting world market." A chorus of 'Fuck-off John' came back but I persisted. 

So they dragged their weary backsides online and suddenly I'm back again. "I've had a vision lads and it is moving pictures. I give you, 'Video-Editing,' and this is really where it's at." Groans of "Jesus Mallon!" followed and I hit a brick wall. "OK, we publish at our desks now and we're making more money as a result, our pictures and graphics are winning us awards and we're ahead of our competitors online and increasing circulation massively. But we're not going to make a movie John, no fucking way!" 

So I quit my job and went making movies myself instead. The technology was brilliant but the old ways were changing and how you created awareness of who you were and what you had to offer was changing utterly. As an internet native I first came across Facebook and signed up to see what that was all about. Next came Linkedin and I got one of those too. My WAYN account was next to be opened and then Twitter came along. I stress at this point that I didn't even know what I was supposed to do with all this new shit. I was a confused lurker trying to figure out what I must be missing. 

I had my first mobile phone in 1989 and I can still remember it going off on the Cork Dublin train and passengers standing up to see where the noise was coming from. I was like one of those passengers looking at Twit-Face, as I called it all collectively. Early mobile phone users were on the damned thing always and they used it to ring home and say where they were and what they were doing, (nothing of course). People all around made eye contact with each other before throwing those eyes to heaven. That was me on Facebook. It bored the tits off me.

When all the German supermarkets began opening I had a look at that too. I don't know which one I went to first maybe Lidl or Aldi but very quickly and because of social media, I just called them all 'Addled.'

Governed or Bullied?

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Motor tax is a bit of a racket. In theory, we pay it for the maintenance and upgrading of our road system. A recent addition to this is the imposition of a fine factor inside the motor tax because cars are not flipper-friendly. Apparently, the bigger the engines the more carbons emitted and flipper just hates that.

That's the theory of motor tax Irish style. In reality our road tax is being used to prop up Irish Water, as we heard not too long ago and local authorities are using other funds to look after our roads. EU money built the motorways and the Government sold off stretches to tolling companies for a song. That means more money you must pay to drive. 

Now I used to like cars until I realized they were the single biggest drain on my meagre resources. You pay VAT on the purchase of a car, VAT on the (expensive) fuel to run it, VAT on the bills to keep it on the road and tax for using the road as well. Then there are the myriad of fines for not being perfect all of the time. Car Insurance which is compulsory, also has VAT added and most of us need a car just to get to work and pay income tax. So if you were to lose your job all of a sudden, the car becomes a luxurious liability. 

In the past, you just parked it and perhaps even advertised it for sale. You would have reasoned that you aren't using the damn thing, you are emitting no carbons so you owe nothing to anybody. Your motor is off the road with the battery running down and the tyres going flat. For you, your car is a temporary memory until times get better.

I mentioned bad laws in a recent post and one of these was snuck in during August 2013. Now motorists  who forget or fail to declare their car is off the road will be forced to pay arrears and at least three months' motor tax under tough new rules aimed at clamping down on evasion. The Department of the Environment said that anyone planning not to drive their car on a public road must tell their local tax office at least three months in advance. How's that for pure bureaucratic cheek?

You normally do not get much notice of a redundancy and what happens if you accidentally fall down the stairs and are made suddenly unable to drive? Are you supposed to anticipate such events three months in advance? At the time this law was passed, the then Environment Minister Phil Hogan said the system would deal on a local basis with cases where, for example, a person fell ill suddenly and could not use their car but could not declare it was off the road to their local tax office. I suggest that the sick person may not even be able to get out of bed to be 'dealt with locally.' And what does, "The system would deal on a local basis with cases" really mean? Is this the wink and elbow language of delight? Do you give the nod to a Garda you know? No you don't!

The bill clearly states that, "Forms will be submitted directly to motor tax offices or online, instead of at Garda stations." So do you know someone in the Motor Tax Office? This kind of nonsense infuriates me. It is political double-speak where the meat of this new law states firmly that, "The non-use declaration must be made three months in advance." It is obvious then that any "deal on a local basis," must be done by knowing somebody in authority. Otherwise the new (bad) law is black and white and the Gardai are entitled to fine you. Remember, a non-taxed car can be confiscated. 

This is a bad law that doesn't make sense to any normal person and it pre-supposes that all of us are just looking for ways to break the law. I don't like the tone of that but I'm sure you agree though that if politicians make bad laws, (for their own reasons), then ordinary decent honest people might just react by thinking, to hell with that. Look at the water tax as an example of it! This opens a further debate which should prompt you to consider some more. Do we obey our laws voluntarily because we believe it is for the common good or do we begrudgingly obey them because of the consequences of not doing so? Are we being governed or bullied?