I didn't quite catch that...

Once again, our esteemed political leaders are falling over each other in a wquest to be that little bit more freedom-hating than their opponents. This time, they’re targeting corner shops and kids.

New powers aimed at tackling the problem of under-age drinking in England and Wales have come into force.

The government says they will make it easier for police to confiscate alcohol from youths and to move on groups of teenagers who are causing trouble.

There will also be tougher penalties for shopkeepers who repeatedly sell alcohol to young people.
…
But the Conservatives have accused ministers of merely tinkering with the problem of under-age drinking.

The Tories have pledged to go further, with a much tougher licensing regime and big tax increases on drinks like alcopops that are popular with teenagers.

Here’s the kicker: kids drinking alcohol is not illegal, and it’s not immoral. It’s only when they have to go hiding it because of political scare stories that they will do it stupidly, and cause problems. Alcohol is not anti-social – in fact it’s one of the great social lubricators. Treating it as a problem when it’s only a problem in a tiny minority of cases is counter productive and ends up diluting the effect and turning the general population against the education of problem drinkers.

Oh, and as far as the tories go, it’s stupid to bring in extra taxes on things like alco-pops. Because it’s not just kids who drink them, and you’ll end up punishing the adults who drink it while the kids go and drink something cheaper. Like vodka.

This is a new one for me: it’s seven years today since I started this place. So, some figures to match that occasion:

7 years, or around 2,557 days.

4,875 posts, or nearly 2 a day.
(Clearly I was busier in my early days, the last year or two has only had five posts a week on average)

6,387 comments, which is about 2.5 a day, or 1.3 per post.

And here’s the bit that annoys me: Akismet has stopped 254,154 spam comments. Boo to spam.

So, there you go. A long and relatively prosperous life for a blog. But we’ll see if we can keep it going for a while, shall we?

It must be really painful to be Gordon Brown. His predecessor, that ‘nice’ Blair fellow, had the gift of timing and a certain idea of how to get things done. During the negotiations leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, he arrived at the crucial moment, let them get on with it and then reaped the political rewards of getting the most comprehensive and realistic peace agreement in Norn Iron to date. Well done that lad.

Brown, however, didn’t learn from the later work of Blair. See, the thing isn’t that Blair had a magic touch; that was proved in later last-gasp summits to solve things that got in the way. He was just quite good at timing and had decent people do the talking for him.

Poor Gordon; he took a lesson from 1998 and ignored the later years. He thinks that just turning up will get things moving again. But it ain’t that simple.

Overnight talks aimed at averting the collapse of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing coalition have adjourned.

Sinn Fein and the DUP have been at loggerheads over the devolution of policing and justice powers.

The British and Irish prime ministers were locked in meetings until shortly after 0600 GMT on Wednesday.

Talks are due to resume mid-morning and Downing Street has said that Gordon Brown will remain in NI and miss prime minister’s questions at Westminster.

So, he waltzes over, expecting to get things sorted in a few hours and then head home. Instead, he’ll be there for days and make tiny progress, if that. Poor fella – in this, at least, he means well. It’s just that he is unlimitedly shit at actually getting anything done.

On the plus side, hough, the rest of the UK can feel safe for a day or two. Gordon is distracted, which means that he’s not screwing anything else up. Hell, the first day he was away from London the country emerged from recession; what more sign do you want that Gordon is an anti-mascot for the land?

Lucky, lucky Londoners. The poor little kids of the capital, who are in desperate need of alcohol and cigarettes, are being given the chance to get ID cards to prove that they are who they say they are.

Young people in London are getting the chance to get their hands on an ID card, the lucky so-and-sos.

The next stage of the Home Office’s attempts to get the cards accepted is to target those privacy-disregarding, Facebook-obsessed youths in the capital. People aged between 16 and 24 years old who hold a current or recently expired passport can apply for a card from 8 February.

Because they don’t think that kids who have passports will want to show them, and will instead queue up to pay for the privilege of joining a lot of excited people from Manchester and get national identity cards. All 1,300 of them.

Something less than a rip-roaring success, yes?

Also, I think it’s quite ironic that the government is encouraging drinking on one hand, and complaining about the damage of drinking on the other…

Yesterday, myself and TLF found ourselves in Hastings, of all places. We were visiting several of her family, and such visits tend to take the form of an expedition to the local shops. This was. of course, enough to excite me almost to death; there’s nothing I like more than a trip round the high street with the aim of looking at things rather than buying them¹. But the craic was good, and I was enticed to behave with promises of an actual interesting shop at the end of the trip.

And lo, there was just such a shop. In fact, it was a second hand book shop; the sort that is definitely linked up to the L-space web; the kind of shop where the staff have signed up to work there purely because they get to read the books for free; the type of establishment where time means nothing and money loses all relevance.

What, I could get all of that series for a tenner…

No way is that sitting there for 50p…

Hang on, that has been on back order on Amazon for ages…

So, my discretionary spending for the month will, it seems, have gone on books.

Hurrah.

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¹ – Note: may contain traces of sarcasm.

When doing a review of the recent trip to Berlin, there were a couple of things I neglected to say.

First of all, I heartily recommend the Alex food place in Alexanderplatz. All you can eat for six euro? Bargain.

Secondly, there’s something about the German way of treating people that is sometimes more civilized than that in the UK; train doors can be opened just before the train stops, platforms don’t have barriers stopping you from moving if you want to, there aren’t fences at crossing points and nobody will stop you if you try to do anything stupid. In short, you’re treated like an adult. There isn’t the same safety net that nanny puts everywhere in the UK. It’s reassuring.

In other ways though, nanny is much worse. Recycling taxes being a prime example.

There’s a much more of an aggressive police presence, but they do much less. We were walking about for much of Friday and Saturday night; there were plenty of people out and about, in varying states of drunkenness. And we only saw one group being spoken to by cops. That might be something to do with the way that the cops (and even the rentacops) were walking about with large dogs and body armour all day…

The tramps also impressed. None of your special brew here, no sirree. They were all on quality beers and hardly in the way at all. Not like over here. And the cops weren’t exactly bothering them in return.

But the thing that will stick in my mind most about the trip? This little dude:

One thing about travelling with TLF: she’s been to many places like this before, and she has random things that mean things to her in each place she’s been. In Berlin, it’s the ampelmannchen* traffic signal dude. He’s a symbol of east Berlin, and it’s only really seen in Berlin. And every time it appeared anywhere, there was a small voice saying ampelmannchen!; and it was mighty cute.

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* – approximate translation: “little dude on the traffic sign”

When you can’t trust someone trying to get a hugely prestigious rize and shedloads of free publicity, who can you trust?

The winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award has been disqualified after judges ruled that the featured wolf was probably a “model”.

Of course, when people looked at the rationale behind the picture, alarm bells should have been ringing:

“I wanted to capture a photo in which you would see a wolf in an act of hunting – or predation – but without blood,” he told BBC News. “I didn’t want a cruel image.”

Now, is it cruel for a wolf to hunt? Is it cruel for a wolf to kill its prey? No, of course not; cruelty is a human concept, and putting it onto animals is a reflection more of us than of the animal. But if you needed an excuse which would a) appeal to media and b) allow you to play with a trained model, then that’s what you’d go for, isn’t it?

An email did the rounds some years ago about the types of motto that snipers gave to their brethren. One that stuck in my mind was Reach out and touch someone, another was Don’t run, you’ll only die tired. All a little bit dark, when you think about it, but then so is the work of a sniper.

Looking back, I can’t remember all the lines in that email. But I’m sure that “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” wasn’t part of it.

I’m not particularly a fan of knowing the bible cover to cover, and I’m less than a fan of the trotting out of biblical verse in everyday life. Sniping isn’t exactly everyday life, but I fail to see how someone thought that putting references to such verse on the weapons of soldiers (without their consent or knowledge) was a good idea. It makes the troops look like their crusaders, and that can’t end well if they’re captured with such material on them.

All round, a silly idea. Better just to have inscribed reach out and touch…., I think.

There are many people who are out there, writing about their exciting travels around the world. And I’m not one of those folk.

Instead, I do a little bit of travel, think about writing about it, and then decide that I can’t really be arsed. Except for the obligatory posting of a silly picture, obviously.

However, this time round, I hereby resolve to do better. I shall write sensibly about my recent trip to the capital of Germany. Or I’ll try my best to, at least.

TLF and I went out on Friday morning, and back on Sunday night. We stayed in a nice hotel in some part of the town that I couldn’t pronounce. We travelled extensively by U-bahn and walked quite a few miles. We went to the top of the Reichstag and saw the city; we saw the Brandenberg Gate and the haunting Holocaust memorial next to it. We did a couple of museums and …

No, sorry, I can’t do it. I need to get a picture in there. This is just too dull.

One of the museums we went to wasn’t so much a museum as a display before the entrance to the Stasi – der Ausstellung building, where a lot of people were reading their own bits of research into the stasi files. It was all in German, with only a small guide in English. And it was very, very haunting and more than a little bit scary, especially when you think about how many of the things that are in there are effectively the full manifestation of the baby steps being taken by such things as the RIPA and SOCA – that being how such things start.

To get away from such depressing things, I had TLF take me a picture…

We also went into a cold war bunker under Kurfürstendamm, and an excellent centre telling the story of Berlin from its founding until the fall of the Wall. And then we went for a walk to Checkpoint Charlie, which was made that little bit more interesting by the arrival of ALL THE SNOW IN THE WORLD.

What else did we do? We had a very nice walk through the Tiergarten, which was one of my highlights of the trip, for reasons that I can’t really explain. But it was one of things that’d make me go back.

I’m sure that there was plenty of other things, but I’m pretty bored writing. Except to say this: once again, we went somewhere where they managed to deal with feet of snow without any real disruption. This entire country would have stopped with any of the flurries that we saw, but they just got on with it. It’s a little bit embarrassing…

Damn straight. Always make time for tea…

It’s now 20 years since The Simpsons started showing. and this is such a big event that the BBC are even showing an interest. Despite the BBC being quite sore about losing said show to the demons at Channel 4.

One of their stories is listing their top Simpsons quotes. And my personal favourites is right at the top: “To alcohol! The cause of – and solution to – all of life’s problems!”

To alcohol!

With that in mind, myself and TLF are off to Berlin this morning. For reasons of beer and other German pursuits. Hurrah!

I suspect that you may be aware of my dislike for the teen vampire phenomenon that is Twshite. To my mind, it’s poorly written, poorly acted, they’ve skimped on the SFX budget and it shows, and it’s all really quite watery.

On the other hand, the HBO series True Blood, which covers many of the same issues, is excellent. I don’t know if it’s the acting (much better), the casting (much better), the boob quotient (much higher), the writing (much better) or simply the fact that the word teen has been removed from the description, but it’s well worth watching.

Actually, I don’t think that it’s any of that. I think that it’s the southern drawls. They make even the most ridiculous story-lines much more believable, because the accent itself distracts by being so silly…

Oh dear. Yesterday, the BBC reported on a load of councils and engineers complaining about potholes and the like. Their story included these lines:

Throughout the cold snap, much of the public’s attention has been focused on a shortage of salt for gritting treacherous roads.

But Institution of Civil Engineers vice-president Geoff French said the thaw could bring little respite, with drivers having to cope with increasing numbers of potholes.

The implication being that the freeze / cold snap was a thing of the past.

So could someone please explain to me why the pavement outside my flat is all white for the first time in four days, and why the trains are all fubar?

Brilliant timing, guys. You’re almost as good as the weather service…

Big news! It seems that 93% of the people stopped for driving suspiciously by the PSNI over Christmas weren’t drunk! This is a shocking statistic; those 93% were impaired by other things; inability to drive in the first place, inattention due to brats in the back seat, discomfort caused by large saloon cars with heavily armed people following them, any number of things. What, pray, is being done to stop this menace? Why are there seperate laws and high profile campaigns to deal with the 7% and not the others?

Unless, of course, the PSNI was conducting random drink-drive tests, just for publicity reasons. Because I find it unlikely that that many tests were carried out for rational reasons.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: these sorts of blitzes don’t sit right with me. Why pay more attention to certain crimes at certain times of the year? Clearly the incidence isn’t that high, or more than 7% of tests would be positive. So it’s for publicity and the desire to be seen doing something. Which is silly.
There may be a deterrent value from the high profile campaign, but surely it could as effectively be done after exam result week, or any other number of occasions at which groups of people hit the booze. Why Christmas?

Oh dear. The poor Norn Irish press have been handed a genuine political scandal, and they’re a little bit lost about how to deal with it.

Over here (and it still seems a bit odd to say that about England), there would be hundreds of press camped outside the houses of everyone involved. There would be rolling news. There would be claims about the end of the political world as we know it. Hell, when you think about the Cash-for-Questions events – which dealt with around £2,000 per question – this is much larger. When you think about Robin Cook doing the dirt with his secretary, there was much more coverage.

But now, with sums of £50,000, an MP and MLA taking up with someone fully a third of her age, the First Minister’s financial and moral judgement being called into question, and there’s nothing like the same level of intrusion. There are jokes, there are news stories, but they don’t seem to be on the same scale.

It’s not that the press at home is better behaved than their cousins across the Irish Sea; recently I’ve seen photographers lying on the floor of a church to catch an action shot of me carrying a coffin, so I know they’re not exactly discrete. So why are they being more polite here? Deference to the politicians? That doesn’t sound likely.

The only thing I can think of is that they’re like rabbits in the headlights – this is a genuine, non-violent, political scandal. And it’s so far from their usual fare that they don’t know how to do anything with it.

I suspect that they’ll learn quite quickly, though…

What, a man who is universally derided as a massive scrotum can’t find his? How sad…

The curse of Gatwick has struck again. We were due to fly back yesterday at 6am, but ended up flying to Stansted at 2pm instead. Because some fool built Gatwick in the worst possible place, and then organised it in such a way that it goes wrong with the least possible excuse.

On the plus side, coming into Stansted meant that we got to use their trains, which seemed to work. It was only when we got to the point of trying to get out to South London that things got hairy again – the trains were filled to the point where I’m surprised that they didn’t employ people to shove more on, Tokyo stylee. But hey, it meant that I got to be standing about three eighths of an inch from a couple that were busy planning their dirty night in. Just before the female of the couple phoned her husband to explain that the snow would prevent her getting home that evening.

Some people, eh? Can’t even plan their affairs quietly…

And now, I shall go outside and walk to work. The last temperature reading that I saw said that the temperature was -5. Wish me luck.

Sorry for my absence over the last couple of days; things have been rather hectic. Since I’ve last posted, I’ve flown to Belfast unexpectedly, I’ve gotten my face in the papers, I’ve decided that people with large cameras can act like major annoyances, I’ve dropped poor TLF in with hundreds of relatives and the like and seen her perform brilliantly.

And now, we’re waiting for the damn snow in London to get better before we can fly back. Work are likely to be wondering where I am…

In short, what passes for normal service here will be resumed shortly. Ta.