Vernon Coaker, who, despite having a name that makes him sound like a malevolent but ineffectual villain from an early Dickens novel, is a Home Office minister. According to the BBC he wants to:

change the view it [is] "acceptable to drink to get drunk".

The mechanism young Vern's going to use to do this is the National Alcohol Strategy, which is based on the naive thesis that we'll all be persuaded to drink less if the government moans at us about it long enough and loud enough.

I'm actually rather sympathetic to some of the aims of the strategy. People should be free to drink themselves silly, but I don't want to help foot the £20bn annual bill for fixing their livers and the people they beat up while they're pissed. This is one area where I'd actually say that an increase in tax is a good idea. Alcohol is, relatively, cheaper than it's been for a century. If we increase the duty on booze we can at least make drinkers pay, indirectly, for their own problems. It's what we do with smokers.

But that's far too simple a solution for Her Majesty's ministers. Instead of doing something minimal and sensible they decide they're going to '...change the English drinking culture'. This is offensive in itself: ministers should focus on educating kids, keeping the streets clean, defending us and arranging hip replacements for grannies. Trying to change our culture means manipulating the way we think.

To call it this kind of attitude 'nannyish' isn't just a cliché - it glosses over a political sensibility that's truly anti-democratic. Most people (the demos that goes with kratein to make demokratia, so kind of intrinsic to the whole deal) want neither to be bossed around by the government nor to pay for thousands of new livers every year.

So there you go, Vern: a solution to the problem. Up the booze duty, then shut up. Then if people want to get pissed, let them get pissed. They'll be covering the expenses.

As I haven't been around for a while, I ought to update you on what's been going on in the Earthman life.

1. The Münsterländer is much the same as ever, only perhaps slightly hungrier.

2. I've just bought a Tanglewood TW45, just about the sexiest guitar I've ever played.

3. I've been commissioned to write a book. How unbe-fucking-lievable is that? If that wasn't weird enough, there's talk of another one in the pipeline.

4. Contrary to all predictions and expectations (not least my own) my business is actually doing rather well.

5. I've put on a stone. At least. I'm such a fat bastard now it's ridiculous.

6. Niall is doing fine, though now I've moved I don't see him quite as much. Oh, he nearly got arrested for indecent exposure the other week. Still, could be worse.

7. I'm halfway through my MA. Milton still rocks.

8. I barely drive at all, at least on a daily basis.

9. People seek my advice about business and marketing like I know what I'm talking about.

10. I've taken to waking up in the middle of the night and playing Soduko on my phone. That's what you get for getting older.

Labels: book, Earthman, Münsterländer

Mr. Richard Soddy, chairman of the Athletic Union of Exeter University, has unwisely decided to match wits with Boris Johnson.

In case you can't be bothered to click the link, the story is related to the sad case of an Exeter student who died after a boozy initiation ceremony at the university's golf club. Richard Soddy has decided this sort of tragedy can be avoided by inventing some new rules: in future, any member of an Exeter University sports club who takes part in a drink-related ceremony could be fined £400.

Boris, quite rightly, has made some pretty firm comments about this. Students involved in university drinking activities are adults, and if they want to drink too much that's their business and their responsibility. It isn't up to the Richard Soddys of this world to tell them what they can and can't do.

It's tempting, at this stage, to let Soddy off the hook. He means well, and he's already been told off for his kindergarten fascism. But first we need to pull him up on one more thing. Stung by the BoJo bollocking, Soddy told the press that Boris

should be supporting the positive outcomes of this tragic incident and endorsing the student policies that will bring about an improved and safer experience for those in higher education.

Eh? I think that means something like, 'Boris should realise that some good has come out of this, and we'd like him to back us when we try to make student life safer.' Does anyone speak English any more?

Richard, if you ever read this, read this, too.

Labels: BoJo, idiocy, Orwell

Now that's what I call a hiatus. I've just persuaded the guys at MidPhase to unblock my account after an unfortunate mix-up involving changed credit card details that actually got sorted out two months ago.

Still and all. I'm a bit busy writing a book at the minute (details on my work blog), but when I've got some spare time I'll do some groovy new updates.

Labels: book, hiatus

Yes, I've had a great Christmas, thanks very much. I was just starting on the final batch Yuletide beers earlier when a terrible thing happened: I was reminded of the existence of Hazel Blears.

Blears, of course, was the minister put in charge of challenging the UK's culture of binge-drinking and turning us on to the so-called delights of continental café culture. She's in today's Sunday Times, trying to explain her failure to make even the remotest difference: 'I don't know whether we'll ever get to be in a European drinking culture, where you go out and have a single glass of wine,' she bleats. 'Maybe it's our Anglo-Saxon mentality. We actually enjoy getting drunk'.

Well, that's true enough, but there are other reasons too. For a start, we don't like governments telling us how to live our lives. As a nation we have - I would argue - a rather more developed sense of personal liberty than some of our continental cousins. That includes the liberty not to be nannied by mediocre ministers and to drink exactly how much we like.

Besides, can you imagine anything more boring than sitting around in some caff sipping Chardonnay and mouthing off about existentialism and Kafka's short stories? Ugh. It might suit effete New Labourites, but they were never proper Brits in the first place.

If you're a right-thinking, intelligent, decent individual who likes to have his or her blood boiled from time to time, surf over to www.whitepoppy.org. This well-meaning but rather stupid organisation should get your circulation going at a good simmer.

Why? Well, every year at about this time they promote white poppies as an alternative to the more usual red ones that we all wear in the run-up to Remembrance Day. The idea is that the white poppy remembers all victims of war (as opposed to just the service personnel who were killed) and is a statement in support of a culture of peace. For the white poppy brigade

the [red] poppy has had its problems. Some people who have chosen not to wear it have faced anger and abuse. It's also got involved with politics. In Northern Ireland, for example, it became regarded as a Protestant Loyalist symbol because of its connection with British patriotism. And a growing number of people have been concerned about the poppy's association with military power and the justification of war. Some people have wondered why, with a state welfare system, the services of the British Legion (slogan: 'Honour the dead, care for the living') are still needed; some say it's disgraceful that they were ever needed at all - though the many suffering people who have depended on help from the British Legion are profoundly grateful. (Governments have been grateful too: 'Governments cannot do everything. They cannot introduce the sympathetic touch of a voluntary organisation'!) [my emphasis]

Getting "involved in politics" is, of course, a terrible sin - if, that is, the politics in question are of a patriotic flavour. The people behind the white poppies don't seem to have any problem at all with getting involved in politics when that involves using their website to advocate a profoundly left-wing point of view. There's a reason why we restrain governments from introducing "the sympathetic touch of a voluntary organisation": once they start there's no stopping them. When the state gets too involved in nannying the living, the freedom won by the dead begins to disappear.

That's not to say we shouldn't have a welfare state or use tax money to look after our veterans, because we should. But the welfare state has to stop somewhere or the government becomes too mighty. That's where organisations like the Royal British Legion step in and do a fantastic job. The staff of the RBL, directly responsible for their own budgets and with a precise knowledge of the people they're helping, almost certainly do a better job of funneling our (donated) cash to veterans than if the government hiked taxes and organised a huge bureaucracy to handle the whole thing.

The White Poppy people (or The Peace Pledge Union, as they call themselves) are simply prodding people's emotions to promote a political point of view. Just like those nasty nationalists in Northern Ireland, in fact.

The other, even better, reason why you shouldn't wear a white poppy is that a lot of the war generation find it profoundly insulting and distressing. The PPU would probably say that that's simply because they don't understand what the white poppy stands for. That's irrelevant: upsetting the elderly is not a price worth paying to make a point as blindingly obvious as "war is bad".

Perhaps instead of a white poppy the Peace Pledge Union should produce a white t-shirt. Much less offensive. They could even include a slogan:

I'M WELL-MEANING BUT NOT VERY BRIGHT

tags: white poppy, remembrance, veterans, socialism, idiocy

I'm slumped out with work at the moment, so not much time to write the long, ranty posts I love so much. If you're in the mood for a bit of anti-religious venom, why not head over to Michael Martine's great blog, Dark Sided?

And I though I was angry...

Well, several buses, in fact. Virtually every bus in Bangor is carrying an ad from the latest Alpha Course campaign. I love Alpha: it's cuddly and it's friendly and fun, and it's designed to introduce people to Christianity by emphasizing all the cool things and quietly shoving all embarrassing stuff (homosexuality, abortion, pre-marital sex) to one side.

Its founder is a former lawyer called Nicky Gumbel. Isn't that a nice name? He sounds like a little elf. Funnily enough, he looks like one, too. He's got a nice wife called Pippa - what a nice name, makes you think of sandals and Volvos - and he's the Vicar of a nice church called Holy Trinity Brompton. HTB (as it's known) is full of hundreds of nice, rich people from nice parts of London. They have three distinguishing characteristics:

1. They all own misprinted copies of the Bible with Matthew 19:21 missing;

2. They all believe that they have been saved from sin by the death of a man who is, for the purposes of their worship, adequately represented by a small biscuit¹;

3. They are all stark, raving mad.

Unfortunately for all these nice people, Nicky Gumbel isn't a very nice man. [Maximum respec' to Jon Ronson]

^{1. I know we've talked about the metaphysics of biscuits before, but it's worth going into the subject again here. Worshippers at Holy Trinity Brompton are evangelical protestants. To them, the communion wafer and wine are symbols of body and blood of Christ rather than the transubstantiated real deal that the Catholics get. In summary, Protestants get down on their knees on a Sunday morning and worship a biscuit that represents the flesh of a 2000-year-old Galilean joiner, rather than a biscuit that has actually become his flesh.}

If you're down with the business homies you'll know that one of the hot topics of the last few years has been offshoring. If you're a company in the States that needs a website designing, why pay an American designer a fortune when you can get some guy in Mumbai to do it for free?

I occasionally get involved with offshoring projects, and the truth is that they're an almighty pain in the arse.

The main reason is that it's just bloody difficult to work with someone who you never actually meet. Email is cool, instant messengers are cool, but in terms of the quality of quick communication they allow they're a step back to the days of semaphore and the carrier pigeon. Phones are cool, but phonelines to India are often bad and Indian accents can be strong. VoIP is cool when it works properly. If you're restricted to these means of communicating with a contractor or coworker it's really difficult to form a good relationship and work out what makes the guy tick. It's even harder to weigh him up - is he a good 'un or a rotter?

When confusion arises, chaos breaks out. Emails cross, people fail to understand briefs and things that could be sorted out in two minutes with a proper phone call with someone you can understand wind up taking whole days to sort out. Because communication is so difficult, problems are magnified. Vague descriptions are a problem for freelancers at the best of times: give a woolly brief to an offshorer who doesn't know you and who is working in a different timezone and you're in trouble.

There are other problems, too: offshoring is often great for getting programming and other geek work done - providing you make the specification as detailed as possible. It's usually less successful for anything creative. Indian web designers (for example) often have great coding skills, but they rarely have a truly westernised design sensibility. Same goes for copywriters - even Indian guys who have English as their first rarely have the grasp of western idiom to pull off convincing copy.

But western businesses keep falling into the sucker trap. Why? Because it's cheap, and because it's cool. You can't blame the offshorers for trying, but you can blame the buyers for having the poor business sense to try to get involved in major projects with people they will never meet face-to-face.

Now that I'm back in Bangor I've signed up for a part-time English Lit MA. My tutor's given me a huge reading list covering my chosen topic (that's the cosmology of Paradise Lost, lit geeks) and told me to bugger off and come back when I've got through it all.

The Bangor English dept also runs an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing. What's all that about, then? How academically rigorous is it? What do the students learn? And what did they do on their holidays?

If you'd like a Creative Writing PhD but you're short of time or money, don't worry: here's a whole course in three short lessons:

Lesson One: Be concise. Never use a long word when a short one will do, and treat all adverbs with suspicion.

Lesson Two: Don't call yourself a 'scribbler' or a 'wordsmith' or refer to what you write as 'ramblings' or 'musings'. It is hard to write with your head stuck up your arse.

Lesson Three: Tell a story in which stuff happens. Include as many good jokes as you can.

Got all those? Good. You are now the proud owner of a PhD from Hilton University, which makes you at least the equal of Gillian McKeith.

Tags: writing, stories, Gillian McKeith

"Bollocks" is a word that doesn't enjoy wide usage in the United States. That's a shame, as it's really useful.

Say, for example, you're Ralph Nader. You've just seen An Inconvenient Truth and it's made you reflect that if you hadn't split the vote in 2000, America would have been governed, for at least one term, by Al Gore - a man seriously committed to tackling climate change. But because you did split the vote, America wound up with a Commander-in-Chief who, shall we say, is not enthusiastic about environmental matters. As an American you have no convenient two-syllable word to chant as you beat your head against the cinema wall in bitter self-recrimination for being the first great dickhead of the new millennium.

For a Brit it would be no problem: bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.

tags: Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Ralph Nader, global warming

It's time to run away and hide your wallets, because the Earthman is raising money.

No, no - it's not for me. It's for the The Brights, one of the world's top secularist organisations. The Brights was only formed a year or so ago, but it has thousands of members worldwide and has been endorsed in the UK by the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society.

Brights believe that the universe is not governed or affected by any supernatural power or deity, and that it's wrong to live our lives as if it is. The Brights' membership roster ranges from hardline God-bashers like St. Richard Dawkins through to moderate Christians - i.e., the ones who believe in the human and social teachings of Jesus Christ, or in Christ as metaphor, or even in a universe created by a non-interventionist God, but who don't accept all the bollocks about God being a biscuit, biscuits saving us from sin and all the rest. I've been told that Sufi Muslims find it easy to be Brights, though apparently beardy-weirdy Osama-alikes find the concept rather more of a challenge to their worldview.

Anyway, if you don't believe in fairies (or biscuits) and you think that belief in fairies (or biscuits¹) has caused far too much trouble in the world already, head over to www.the-brights.net and join up. The guys are on a fundraiser at the moment, and if you can spare twenty quid it will be gratefully received.

^{1. No matter how many times I consider this, I just can't get over it: Roman Catholics and papally-inclined Anglicans literally believe that a biscuit turns into God during the Eucharist. This belief in the apparent divinity of Hob Nobs would be quaint and charming if the defence of it hadn't caused centuries of death and suffering. What I want to know is this: if the biscuits aren't eaten during the Eucharist, do they keep their Jesusly power, or does it wear off? If the vicar takes one home and feeds it to his münsterländer, is Jesus transfigured into a big pile of steaming poo on the vicarage lawn? Does the münsterländer's digestive tract become consecrated ground? In short, what the fuck is going on?}

tags: The Brights, God, Jesus, biscuits, transubstantiation, holy communion, bollocks

Just driven back home along a rainy and windy A55 after a day of moving stuff around the country - with a bit of luck, the last one for a while.

On the way I was listening to Any Questions on Radio Four. Tonight's panel was Chris Huhne (Lib Dem, and a pretty reasonable bloke); Jacqui Smith (Labour Chief Whip, quite nice, but a lover of dull platitudes); Quentin Letts (urbane fascist) and Boris Johnson.

Ah, Boris. If they made you leader of the Tory party you'd win by a landslide. The resulting government wouldn't last more than a week, but it would be a very memorable week. I like people who manage to appear a lot more stupid than they actually are. BoJo is the acme of the type: few manage to conceal such a sharp brain behind such a buffoonish exterior.

He was the star of AQ. Although he's not as articulate as Huhne or Letts, he puts passion and sparkle into his arguments. If he has a problem it is that he's sometimes too funny, searching for gag openings when he could be scoring serious points.

He deserves to be listened to. For a start, the bloke is clever: I've just finished the book he wrote as a tie-in to his TV series, The Dream of Rome - it's clear, carefully argued and passionate. In fact, I'd say that passion is one of the (carefully concealed) marks of the man. He has the faintest whiff of idealism about him. In the introduction to the book he talks about the duty and necessity of standing for public office if you want to do something about the "thugs and barbarians" who so often achieve power.¹

OK, he offends Scousers and people from Papua New Guinea, but he at least seems to say what he thinks, and also to have a mind and moral direction of his own. That's more than you can say for most MPs. I'm reminded of an old cartoon I saw reproduced recently, depicting Churchill and Nye Bevan as giants. They squat across rows of tiny benches on opposite sides of a Lillipution House of Commons, surrounded by their small, faceless colleagues. I'm not suggesting that BoJo has quite that stature, but we should see him as more than just a figure of fun. He has his own mind and he is not afraid to use it. That, alone, makes him a giant in the current political landscape.

After AQ was another bloody awful I've-lost-my-teatowel-oh-there-it-is² Radio Four "drama". I submitted a play to R4 ages ago and it came back unread. How do I know they didn't read it? I heard a rumour that the BBC Writers Room rejects any new writer who seems to be white, male and European. So, using a Pritt Stick, I stuck together pages nine and ten with a little dollop of glue - just enough so you'd have to make a tiny effort to pull them apart. They were still stuck together when the script came back. Talking to contacts I've subsequently made at the BBC, it seems I made two mistakes:

(a) I failed to call myself Ahmed Akhbar Ali al-Khazi, or, even better, an equivalent female name, and include a cover letter explaining how the play was an exploration of the "issues" I "experienced" as a lesbian transexual growing up in Jalalabad;

(b) I wrote a play in which stuff actually happened, right from the start - i.e., it had a character-driven plot. Fatal mistake.

So, a message for Radio Four: less tea-towel drama about people "exploring" relationships and life-choices and more BoJo, please. Or, failing that, more comedy, which you actually do quite well.

<sup>1. I think that's the phrase he used, though I don't have the book in front of me. The particular barbaric thug he was referencing was Charles Clarke. Yes, him. The bloke who thought studying Classics and medieval literature was pointless. I think it's in poor taste to crow when people fall from grace, but I made an exception for Clarke. In fact, I'm still crowing now. I'll only stop crowing when John "Stalin" Reid gets his comeuppance, an event that will be marked by champagne and a small firework party in the Earthman back yard.

2. Not so long ago The Now Show produced a parody Radio Four play in which a woman loses her tea towel and then finds it again. Somewhere on a hill farm in mid-Wales there's a middle-aged radio dramatist banging her head against her desk and mumbling "tea towels...brilliant...why didn't I think of that?"</sup>

tags: Boris Johnson, Radio Four, writing