I’m referring to the way the Green Machine is changing our lifestyle, and ever more will change our lives. The problem I have with it is that it is not being applied rationally but more as a political football, the means of drawing attention to the person rather than the problem, and is so selective as to defeat its own object. In our domestic sphere we are being cajoled to turn off lights, buying food transported by air is costing the environment, and so on, but they don’t turn off vast electrically illuminated advertising after say 10 o’clock, when most people are tucked up with their tellies. All this business about charging the gas guzzlers is more of the same and equally doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t take me to list all the other absurd new strictures that are being placed upon us, blamed on the Green Machine, but are in fact sleight of hand – we all know them.

My generation was born into a period of scarcity, and subsequently relived it, all of which we took for granted. There were some things we imported by sea, like oranges and bananas, but most of what we ate was home-grown, and consequently seasonal. We didn’t feel deprived, because we knew no better, the really exotic stuff was brought in in small quantities for the ultra rich, and some of it I still think today is not worth the journey. I do quite a lot of the shopping now, and to improve our diet I try to buy fresh fruit, and fresh vegetables, but the problem is that when I buy them they are almost invariably uneatable, because they are unripe. The ripening process therefore takes place in my house, and I would suggest that 50% of the time the material rots rather than ripens, the level of waste is very high, and the taste of those parts that are ripe is in no way the same as if the products had been picked off the tree or whatever. The only way to taste a proper tomato is to grow it yourself under glass in summer. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is not I who am looking for strawberries in January, it is the supermarkets who want to increase their turnover by tempting me to buy something that I hadn’t even thought of, and which in actual fact I don’t really need and is unripe anyway. The corollary of this of course is obvious, it is not that we, the population of Britain, who are demanding the air transported imports of all these exotic foods, it is the supermarkets who are thinking up ways of tempting us.

Our masters will soon be stopping people from forcing produce in tunnels, using artificial light to induce out of season conditions to meet the demands of the supermarkets. The average housewife doesn’t walk out of a house thinking I must buy a flowering cactus, she buys it because she sees it, and is tempted. In fact they are going to be stopping all sorts of things, mostly by taxation, including unnecessary flight transportation. If you add the effects of the Green Machine to those of personal security endangered by foreign bombers, our future is going to look a lot like what we had in the 30s. By now most of the readers of this blog will have got me weighed up as a traditionalist, so you won’t be surprised when I say that over the 80 odd years of my life, which I have enjoyed thoroughly, I believe that 1935 was the golden age. We hadn’t all the gadgets we have today, in fact we had very few, but I want to assure you that of all the restrictions I can see ahead for us and you after I’ve gone, you could do a lot worse than go back to the standards of probity, care, and personal responsibility, as well as the home cooking of seasonal food that is fresh and wholesome, and holidays that are not spent in the halls of the airports.

I stand gently leaning on my walking frame, with my rheumy eyes, and a mirror in my hand, I look first at the world and then I look at myself, and I wonder who’s the daftest. I wonder if we’re worse than the Frogs, the Huns, the Yanks, or those kind and selfless people who are coming all the way across Europe to help us, because we are unable to help ourselves any more. Just supposing the UK was the only nation on the globe, and the rest was all water, would we have ever reached the situation we are in today of falling apart because we appear to have insufficient labour to do the dirty jobs – ‘really darling, that job is beyond me!’. You know there’s nothing selective about having to do dirty things, when I was an engineer, with more letters after my name than you could shake a stick at, I still went up sewers, up to my waist in unmentionables, into covered sewage tanks, surrounded by the most awful smells, it was my job, I felt no degradation from having to do it. I really do think that we are an absolutely crazy and snobbish crowd. Let me give you another example of why.

When I was young my Gran used to make Scotch eggs, by wrapping fresh hard-boiled eggs in lovely pork sausage meat, coated in several coats of egg and breadcrumbs and then fried the whole lot in deep fat. Sophie made the same thing many years ago, for me and the kids. There was a fight for who had last bites. About a year ago I was in Tesco’s, I bought one for old times sake from the cold meat counter. When I got home I was firmly convinced, on my first bite, that the sausage meat was in fact reconstituted cardboard, and found the egg was actually detach from and roaming about inside the ball. Two days ago I was in Sainsbury’s, and I thought well this firm will probably be better – if anything they were worse, the egg was about the size of a Banty’s, roaming around like a lost soul in this huge void of brown coated cardboard. The question I ask is, what is happening to
us as a generation or indeed a nation, when they can actually put rubbish like that on the counter and expect to sell it? It occurred to me, they are made on an assembly line, with the cardboard shell in two halves, one half ran along until an egg was dropped in and then the other half was dropped on top and they were stuck together somehow – a million miles from the real thing.

So my thoughts naturally turned to the type of food that we are beginning to become accustomed to and think is the norm, because so many of us now have either neither the time, the skill, or the inclination, to cook good quality food in the old-fashioned way. Instead we get fobbed off with poor imitations of peasant foods, from all the nations in the world, not as they cooked them, but what the manufacturers think the suckers will buy. The fact that hardly a day goes by and there are at least three cooking programmes, and a few food programmes on television, means that we are still interested in the process, but rather than make wholesome food, we buy what other people think they can get away with. I am a very fortunate person in that my whole family are good cooks and in consequence we eat well and are well. It is time that people stop kidding themselves that they ‘get what it says on the tin’, to misquote an ad.

I suspect that part of the reason is that they have stopped teaching cookery in school, instead they choose to teach French, pronounced with English regional accents as the teachers are not trained language teachers, and the children will never use as long as they live, because it will have been forgotten by the time they finally reach the French coast.

Food Waste. The huge maw that we call the media, has to be fed with new material hourly, if not by the minute, with the result we get badgered by statistic after statistic often with no offered basis for these statements. One of them was that we in the UK waste more food than any other nation in the world. For a start I don’t believe it, I was brought up to think that everything in America was bigger than everywhere else, right down to lying, up to now I haven’t been proved wrong. On the other hand, I know that Sophie and I, as a very small unit, brought up to be sensibly careful, but not overly frugal, do waste food. This has worried me because I don’t like waste for its own sake, so I have decided the basis for all this waste is the loss of the corner shops. If you have to go a number of miles to do your shopping, you don’t want to do it every five minutes, and when you see the trolleys on a Saturday morning issuing from the supermarket, sometimes duplicated, and loaded to the gunwales, you realise that people are buying for the future, without a constructive thought of what the future holds; by the future I mean the following week. When Sophie was ill and I was doing catering, I budgeted for what I needed for about four days, planning the meals and buying accordingly, but then relatives took pity on me and turned up with packets, boxes, and plates of prepared meals. That was when I began to seriously waste food, and because this kindness was totally unpredictable there was no let up to the waste. On the wider horizon, waste is inevitable, because no longer do we buy all our produce when it is fresh. This particularly applies to fruit and vegetables. When I was a boy on holiday I went fruit picking, and we were paid by the wicker basket. I was picking Victoria plums, ripe ones, not barely ripe, coated in some sort of chemical that would ripen them over the period of time which it took to pack them, send them halfway round the world, and have them sitting on a shelf in a shop for a week. In my youth you went shopping en route from doing something else, because the shop was just round the corner and you could pick up what you wanted on the way home, so you were buying to eat, not as today, guessing what you might need, buying something because it’s on offer, and buying something that takes your fancy, over and above more than you would have wanted anyway.

If we’re going to start expanding with all these new government building proposals, let us give the corner shop the edge it needs to compete easily with a supermarket, and make provision for them in the middle of these building estates, and take us back to a time when we didn’t have to spend acouple of hours gathering up the provender, in fact, we hardly noticed that we were shopping,.

I’m writing about sleeping, not the sort of sleeping the Westminster civil servants do in the middle of a hot afternoon, when they can’t think of anything else to add to the Green Machine. I’m writing about the sort of sleeping that you, your parents, your grand parents, great grandparents and I have done over the last 90 odd years, how it compares with the duvet and its effect, in fact, on the environment. While those civil servants were so busy telling us about switching off neon indicator lamps for saving an infinitesimal amount of electricity, they missed one of the biggest, perennial, wastages of electricity and carbon footprint.

For most of my life I slept in a bed with a head and a foot, under and on sheets and blankets, and above me the inevitable eiderdown. In the very depths of winter I would have stone, or aluminium, or a rubber hotwater bottle, and the rest of the year, just by taking off a layer or changing the weight of a layer, or even taking off most of the layers, I was able to sleep comfortably, peacefully, with no worries about being overheated or cold. I suggest that in the coldest periods there were more layers of warm air and pockets of warm air in the old system than there are in the modern duvet. In the 30s I went on school trips to France and Switzerland, where I discovered the abominable bolster, that the huge, hard, stuffed encumbrance, that slouched across the top of the bed, and put such a strain on your neck you spent half the night awake. We discovered also the duvet, that continental, elephantine covering that was used from the Channel to Sicily. When you got under the duvet, you were totally lost, it was like entering a cavern, and if it started to slip, you were naked.

For some reason, round about the 60s, maybe it was the Flower People, we started emulating the continentals, some of our beds had no bottom end, we abandoned the traditional covering. The duvet, I grant you, did not have such gargantuan proportions, and at some point subsequently people realised that in the northern hemisphere it can get very cold in the winter and so everybody had to buy electric blankets. This whole diatribe started as the result of a few pensioners discussing the merits and demerits of the electric blankets they have purchased in recent years, complaining bitterly that there were areas, totally unheated. I have discovered for myself that this is absolutely true, the bed doesn’t stay warm like it used to, if you get up for an hour to make yourself a cup of tea or something, when you get back into bed you have to switch on the blankets to warm yourself up, then you either have to lie awake for ages until it reaches the right temperature, or you wake up to a strong smell of roast pig. And this is not only the problem, if you’re over 6 foot and tend to lie on your face, the extension of your foot coupled with the height, and the fact that you don’t like your head firmly pressed against the headboard, means that your feet inevitably hang out at the bottom and get frozen, or you have to curl up in the foetus position.

It therefore follows, although I haven’t done a survey, that most people today have one of these awful duvets, coupled with a huge area of electric blanket, and they are consuming electricity at the rate that makes turning off the neon indicator lights, as a comparison between a mouse and an elephant. But then of course, the civil servants don’t mention this wide extra use of electricity, because they wouldn’t want to do away with their duvet, after all it is the fashion, and they wouldn’t want to do away with their electric blanket, because they might lose sleep, and not be able to think clearly the next day, what they were going to stop us doing.

So the Green machine isn’t as efficient as they would like us to think.

I’m heartily sick of being badgered day and daily, to save the world. I suppose because I am writing this, I am also badgering, but I hope that I am treading slightly newer ground, and putting a more considered approach to the problem, than an awful lot of the stuff we are asked to swallow, by all those riding on another bandwagon, the Green Machine – the politicians, the journalists, the quasi-scientists, the manufacturers, the salesmen, and the sincerely concerned, many of whom have their own axe to grind.

I think the condition can be summed up by the understandable way in which vast numbers of Eastern Europeans, at some expense and great discomfort, are tracking across Europe to what they think is the source of a higher standard of living and a nest egg to give them a new start when they get home again. Now expand this principle on a worldwide basis, and you discover that nations with large, impoverished, populations have the same desire, but their approach is different. The introduction of satellite, communication, also means the introduction of advertising, TV and the introduction to a way of life many will not have seen before, and could not have imagined. Having seen it from mud huts in the jungles, the paddy fields, and in shop windows, there is an insatiable urge for self-improvement. This has presented itself in different ways. In places like Borneo it has meant hacking down the forests, burning and destroying, to provide farming, to earn money, to buy the products and attain the lifestyle that they see on TV. In places like India and China it is the governments who are raping the world to raise the standard of the elite in the first place, and then the rest of the nation. It is my humble opinion that until these aims are achieved across the globe, the Green Machine will basically be nothing more than rhetoric, a political football, the source of income for chancers, material for journalists, designers and manufacturers, with little hope of actually making very much difference, because the damage has already been done.

Instead of using the Green Machine as a basis for dubious increases in tax, of curbing our way of life, and all the things that I have listed above, there should be a serious worldwide policy of how we can internationally combine, to combat further damage on a sensible scientific basis, rather than these ad hoc tickles at the problem. Some of the proposed housing, for example, is so hideous in design, and yet being applauded because it is green, is one demonstration of the rush to be the first rather than the best.

When you’ve read this, of course you will consider it could be purely a gut reaction. Let me assure you, that while I know that I am a voice crying in the wilderness, I have in fact thought long and hard about the problem and am totally frustrated at the way I feel that I am being led by my nose, rather than by honest scientifically based, reasoned analysis, in-depth. Governments ignored the warnings given by scientists over decades if not generations. They are in power all the time the electorate is in a happy mood, so they find it difficult to feed their voters a really bitter pill. It is easier to appear to be caring, than to really care.

A lovely recent example, according to what I heard on TV yesterday, is the fact that our PM is prepared to give the Labour Party a free vote on the use of animal embryos as long as it doesn’t upset the status quo. Just how free is that?

The way in which the value of certain shares was lowered dramatically in order to make a killing on the stock exchange shows several things, the instability of the market, the worry of the individual, the level of criminality and sheer, uncaring selfishness. This in turn made me think of what the value of money is doing, or indeed not doing, to our society today. When I was a schoolboy in the early 30s, I could buy four aniseed balls for a farthing, off a man with a tray on his chest standing at the school gates. The farthing was one 960th of a pound. In those days the average labouring wage was three pounds a week, and because we didn’t have a nanny society, the labourer had to pay for his medicine and everything else out of that, but he didn’t have to buy his house.

I can’t speak for England, because I have only been there mainly as a visitor for the last 60 years, but in the 30s there was a level of poverty that today I believe is unimaginable, where people were starving, there was nothing like the numbers of charities there are today, and it was the communities that looked after themselves as best they could, with little help that I remember from the State. It is just as well today that the there are all these charities, because people like myself cannot believe how insular everyone has become. Some families are a tight unit, if they can’t keep together they at least communicate, but there are so many others that are scattered without that level of help, guidance and assurance.

This in turn made me think about poverty, and I mean real poverty, which I have experienced when, in the period of a year, my mother and I went from a house with six servants, to me and my brother being farmed out separately, and she taking a job as a live-in housekeeper. Being poor doesn’t necessarily mean being unhappy, or didn’t in those days, because poor people were the order of the day, brought to that condition by World War I. What I find interesting about people who are impoverished is that their pleasures are simple, because they must be, and that the people enjoy them even more, I believe, than the wealthy do with their expensive pleasures. The poor invent their own games and pastimes, which cost little or nothing, and they can all enjoy. Further up the scale, there is a pecking order, need I say more. Our government should provide the same sort and quantity of facilities in the towns and cities, that we had when we were young, so that the impoverished could use them for their own entertainment at no cost.

Over the years of our retirement, Sophie and I have found that our gross income, has dwindled year by year, in spite of being indexed, but then having experienced a wide range of pleasures in the past, and steadily finding that our physical endurance is also dwindling, our needs and demands are just about keeping pace with our reduction in income. We find it ironic that our grandchildren are earning several times more than we, but while we are comfortable, if not expansive, with their colossal mortgages, the increased cost of living as they do, and as we did in our day, they are finding it almost impossible to make ends meet, and they are not alone.

They say that comparisons are odious, but when you get very old, to some extent that’s what you’re left with. Take the coinage, in the 30s, for the average man in the street, it was divided into tenners, fivers, guineas, pounds, half crowns, florins, shillings, sixpences, threepenny pieces, pennies, halfpennies and farthings. I have always thought it was a pity that we lost our coinage. Today I wouldn’t give my great-grandchildren anything less than a tenner, as one of those gifts we give to children whom we don’t see that often. On the principle that the differential between the 30s and today is probably about a hundred times, the tenner would represent in the 30s a florin, or 96 farthings, and as a child it was rare that I would find more than a silver threepenny piece in my pocket. This in my view represents not only a devaluation of the pound, but a devaluation of the respect for a pound.

I was thinking further about the post office problem in connection with those who are incapable of having easy access to their weekly welfare money or old age pensions. Some are going to be mentally disturbed, some illiterate, some physically handicapped, and in consequence require the money to be collected by others. It occurred to me that an identity/credit card, specifically for this purpose could be provided to both those able to collect the money themselves, and those who had to have it collected by others. I have stood in the queue at the cash out of a supermarket and seen people paying by credit card for their goods and receiving cash as well as the receipt. I don’t think it’s beyond the capability of the government to provide a foolproof system whereby an individual can obtain money from a specified source, such as one given shop or supermarket, by the use of a specialised card issued to the claimant, or someone nominated by the claimant, with a shopkeeper rewarded commensurately.

Boiler Room Scams are now being discussed on the television, and I found it interesting, when I looked up ‘USA share scams’ on the Internet, that the FSA made it very clear that if you had been dealing with an unlawful trader, you’re on your own. On the television programme dealing with this, which was referred to as the ‘boiler room scam’, a representative of the FSA gave the impression that they were happy to try and deal with the matter after the event, but only to give warnings before.

You will probably think I’m stupid, for what I am about to write. The FSA has been sent a vast amount of information about the people who have lost their money, in an unbelievable amount, including one individual who lost a million, the whys and wherefores of why the money was lost are fairly obvious, preventing a recurrence is more important. I assume that those running the scams are able to tap into records of people buying and selling shares, or dealing in large quantities with banks in the form of savings. So to me it was logical that the FSA should investigate all those who have been involved in losing money in the scam, and look for common occurrences of their financial dealings that would indicate the sources of the information that has led to these scams, and lay traps for the people in the boiler rooms to step into. I got the impression, although I may be misjudging the case, that the FSA was just standing about wringing its hands

When you read this you will realise that I have insufficient knowledge of the running of a Post Office, so I can only speak from my own experience. Like most pensioners today I only use Post Offices to post parcels, post special letters, and buy stamps. I would say that I need their services on average about once a fortnight. In our district our post offices are all part of flourishing businesses, and there is no shadow of doubt that I can’t remember when I last went into one of them and didn’t have to queue and queue and queue. One of the things that seems to have slipped the government’s mind is that today there an awful lot of people, housewives, retired men, and up-and-coming entrepreneurs, who are using the post offices for sending away articles that were purchased from them on the Internet. Many a time, I have stood and watched one of these people, in the queue ahead of me, with two or three large sacks, receiving a receipt that looked more like a toilet roll, than the receipts I’m normally used to. The Post Offices that I use, I can only reach by car and are several miles away in different directions and the main post office is on the other side of town.

I think the real problem is the supermarket. Before the 40s, small shops in the villages, miles from anywhere, fertile ground for gossip, were visited daily, because in those days fridges were almost unheard of, and so the storage of food was an ever-present problem. This is what we old codgers grew up with, and we looked upon the village shop and post office as an essential part of our lives. We all had post office savings books, and there was no such thing as an Internet. So when I think of the whole problem, the people whom I am concerned for, today, are those who receive benefit of one sort or another, gathered on a weekly basis at the local post office, who live hand to mouth, and if they were to get money, as many of us do on a monthly basis, they would be in serious financial trouble inside a fortnight, because the amounts that they handle are so small, the temptations are so great, and they, therefore, are the ones that we should be looking after.

If the country as a whole has decided that it prefers out-of-town shopping at the expense of the small shop which contains a Post Office facility, that is a legitimate choice. The big outlets have now made the small corner shop, upon which we depended so much in the past, almost impossible, by buying in such vast bulk and having such a tremendous throughput. We still have some corner shops, but I find that they too are dwindling, and there is not always one in a given area which contains a Post Office. In general we can no longer walk to our post offices, which is an indication of how few there are already. To do away with even more, I believe is nothing short of a mean approach to the needs of the few of us who’d still depend on them. The government needs to take a reassessment.

I think that the whole matter should be rethought on the basis of regional, and especially local need, primarily, even if the opening times are not necessarily on a daily basis, but just several days in the week. I believe that it is essential that some small shops are given financial encouragement to either retain, or obtain a Post Office licence, on the principle that government is here for the good of the people as a whole, and that the rich, must subsidise the poor. To my mind a levy, as part of the overall thrust, proportional to the need, and proportional to the marketing damage done by the out-of-town shops, should also be placed on those out-of-town shops, which that by their very nature, in primarily selling foodstuffs, have done away with our corner shops.

I’m not so stupid as to think it will happen, but I might as well suggest it. Unfortunately I only have something in the region of 400 readers a day If only the newspapers would take up the fight, TV run a survey of public opinion after proposals similar to mine have been put to the voters, perhaps we’ll get somewhere. This government with its huge majority, its incredible debt and its inability to see the wood for the trees, is unlikely to do anything unless it is forced by public opinion, as it is scared stiff of losing the next election.

Political rethinking. On the 16.03.08, on the BBC programme, The Politics Show, David Cameron was talking as if he had just discovered the wheel. His point was that our financial situation, coupled with that of the world, currently, was such that no party, if it came into office, could guarantee tax cuts. At first I thought that this statement was not only a given, it has also applied for at least the last two years when our internal debt, let alone our national debt, has been allowed to grow beyond all reason, and more people than I have been screaming about this for even longer than two years. Then I started thinking more deeply. Just take one case, let’s take the rise in tax on fuel. The week before there was a big rise in the cost of fuel there was no mention by the government that it was running out of cash and had a need to raise another hefty tax. Then the cost of fuel went up, the VAT along with it, so the government now had a swingeing rise in taxation, because not only was the fuel going up in price, but everything such as transportation, that fuel affected, also increased in price and so the VAT went up again. The irony of this is that we are being taxed in this way by a number of causes, such as the rising cost of wheat and so on. If Cameron, unlike the Conservative Party, feels that there is no case for cutting taxation because we are in a parlous state, I find that there is a dichotomy here, some of the taxes have to be raised for the reasons he states, but these sideways increases are a different kettle of fish, if there was no need for the tax prior to these rises in prices, then there should be no need for the increased taxation after the prices are risen, so there is actually a case for some reduction in tax. Am I wrong?

Not another tax? Nine years ago I had a very serious hip operation which has since made it impossible for me to get in and out of standard cars with anything like ease. Once I had recovered from the operation I bought a Renault Scenic at a price higher than I would normally have paid because this allowed me to step up and step down into and out of the car, without a struggle. The car is now nine years old and has only done just over 45,000 miles, and yet as far as I understand I am in a higher tax bracket and in consequence not only is my motoring expensive, but now is even more so. I live in one of those hinterlands where public transport is alright for long distances but hopeless for shopping. As you know I am in my late 80s and therefore a pensioner, and in consequence still need the car, as I can only walk very short distances. I do not believe that I am the only case, but the Chancellor’s broad brush has taken no account of parents with squads of kids sharing the driving to school, and thus being green, and old idiot’s like me, who feel they have done their fair share for their country, all being penalised because he, the Chancellor, can’t balance the books.

MRSA etc, when alphabet diseases are debated on television, inevitably some person is shown shoving a colossal, two-handed, feather duster, about a yard wide, with fluffy edges, across the floor or along the walls. Away back in the 50s a wonder brush, along with a bottle of gunge, was invented for people to be able to rub over their cars and give them a quick clean, allegedly collecting all the dust as it went. They went out of favour fairly quickly because they were a seven day wonder, and in the long run were not efficient, and we all went back to using soap and water. When I see these broad mops being shoved round the floors of airports, railway stations, supermarkets and worst of all hospital floors and walls, I know from my long experience that those mops are only shoving the muck or germs from one place to another. When I was in hospital in the 30s with fractures, I had plenty of time to analyse the way in which the nurses scrubbed everything in sight including me. The fact that we didn’t have penicillin as a do all remedy for the hypochondriacs, went some way to us not having any of these alphabet diseases. I just wonder if the health service has bothered to carry out experimentation on a scientific scale, to discover if these hairy mops actually do what they are supposed to do

Unfortunately I didn’t hear the radio programme that dealt with this matter. I received it second hand from Sophie, but when I heard it, it was so obvious, I was amazed that I hadn’t realised it myself, as basic common sense. I can remember in the 70s we used to drive after going to a party and I have seen men who had to have their hand actually placed on the handle of the door of the car so that they could get in and drive home, which they did. Now, as we have seen the error of our ways, the pendulum has swung almost in a circle, crushing the pubs out of existence. ‘Not drinking if you are driving’ has been the greatest killer to social drinking. The fact that one member of a party has to be TT, has a knock-on effect to the rest. The fact that taxis are hard to come by at two in the morning has been part of this effect.

Drinking in Ireland is a serious business, drinking in England, in my experience, is generally a social routine. There is the lunchtime drink on Sundays which used to be a ritual throughout England in the 40s, when I was in the Navy. Public houses were clubs, had a steady clientele, where some even retained a tankard and a set of darts, behind the bar for the regulars. I remember taking Sophie into a pub in Hampshire, where I and my friends were playing bar billiards, and the owner came over and took Sophie off to join the group sitting round a fire, and put a sherry in her hand. Television films are forever using the pub for a social atmosphere in which to stage some discussion or other in a calm atmosphere. They do so because their viewers will be comfortable and relaxed from habit.

We are finding continuously that the tail wags the dog. In this case, because parents are not taking responsibility for their teenage children, or even younger children, the whole country, casual drinkers, pubs, even alcoholics, are being selected for special taxation, by a misguided government. I think it will have little effect whatsoever on children and young people drinking, or drinking to excess. If they have the urged, or in some cases the need, the young people will find a way of getting the money and getting a drink, while the rest of us will probably slow down on our drinking, stop going to the pub, and our whole way of life will be turned upside down because people either don’t want to, don’t intend to, or simply can’t control their children. If the government can’t control drug abuse, what chance has it got of controlling excessive drinking?

My eyes were opened by that one incident, in that English pub; to the calm, relaxed, friendly atmosphere that is the seal of the English pub, especially those in the rural areas. To see this all taken away, at a time when television, poor transport, and the rush of modern living is making us all more insular, when alcohol can be bought over the counter at grocery stores, and at prices far below those at the pub, an allegedly caring government should not be scrabbling for a few more taxes under the pretence that it is for the good of our young people, when any sane individual would know that it would take considerably a more than the increased cost of alcohol to achieve a result. Why does this government constantly try to hoodwink us, when we are now so apathetic and so weary of its perpetual changes, and above all sceptical? It is just possible, that alcohol like drugs, will be forced underground, and these young people will be drinking bath tub gin, that will blind them in the long run. If bath tub gin is not already available, it soon will be, as it is so easy and cheap to make, I saw it in the 50s.