Happy Hour

Those miserable sods in the House of Commons now want to abolish cheap booze and happy hour in pubs and clubs. I suppose they went us all to be like them which means we will, instead, have to have a misery hour.

I am currently finishing off Through a Glass Darkly, the biography of Patrick Hamilton by Nigel Jones. Hamilton wrote his finest work when hitting the bottle, at one point drinking three bottles of whisky a day. Drinking over £2000 of booze a year before the last war took some doing, quite an admirable feat in my view.

Bruce Robinson writer and director of Withnail and I, and others, got through numerous bottles of red wine a day to get the creative juices flowing. Dylan Thomas and many others were also extremely heavy drinkers and were none the worse for it. Apart from dying young perhaps.

If any of us wants to drink ourselves into an ealy grave that is our choice. Making alcohol more expensive only means that the desperate will cut down on other things, such as the government's dictat to eat 5 bits of fruit and veg a day, and die even earlier in even more squalor.