You'll Like This - Not A Lot, But You'll Like It

The art of conversation is something we excel at in The Tharp Arms and some of our late-night Saturday conversations can be extremely random, weird, wonderful and downright bizarre. Over the years that Ali and I have run the pub we have discussed most topics, lamenting the demise of the English football team, nodding sagely at the inexperience of Lewis Hamilton as he failed to win his first world title (even worse, forcing me to eat cheese the day Lewis didn’t, unbelievably, win Sports Personality Of The Year) and on to topics such as the existential matter of life on other planets and whether anybody has actually finished A Brief History Of Time, by Stephen Hawking.

On one occasion we even used some string, a spring, two bottles of Tesco furniture cleaner and several drawing pins to create a pulley system around the bar to emulate a counterweight that would allow a couple of guys to lift a big clock from its surroundings so that it could be repaired, and then went straight on to discuss whether Posh Spice can possibly be wearing knickers underneath those tight leather jeans she’s often seen in.

But last night was very unusual. As Oxford went on to give Cambridge a rather heavy drubbing on a rain-swept River Thames, the telephone rang and Barmaid Amy passed it across to me.

The screen displayed international and so, not unreasonably, I expected it to be a call from India. “Hello,” said this female English voice as I answered the call. “We’re a group of people in Venice who are wondering if you can help us.”

Intrigued, I encouraged her to go on. “We’re having a bit of a debate here, can you tell us: is the landlord of The Tharp Arms the nephew of Paul Daniels or not?”

It isn’t a particular secret, my relationship to my uncle. There’s a couple of photos of him up in the bar and when we moved in to the pub he came up and did a bit of an opening for us, posing for photos in the local press. It even mentions it on the pub’s website. But still, a call from overseas to try and clarify this did seem a touch unusual. If their Saturday evening in Venice was getting off early to discussions about pub landlords and their relationships to famous magicians, you have to wonder what they ended up talking about by the end of the night...

“Yes I am,” I confirmed for her and, when she repeated this to the group she was with, there were several triumphant shouts in the background.

Unfortunately, the call was cut off before I had chance to ask how the hell they’d got to talking about me and my uncle whilst enjoying a Saturday night in Italy. I’ve got no idea who they are, whether they’re locals to the Newmarket area who are holidaying abroad or somebody who was randomly Googling Paul Daniels and came up with the pub’s website and wanted to check it out.

So, if you’re one of the group that were enjoying discussions about British pubs and famous magicians last night, drop me a line and satiate my customers’ curiosities. We’re all wondering how that topic came about!

I relayed the story to several customers as the evening wore on, but none responded better than Little Dave, who chuckled to himself:

“Venice,” he laughed, as he bit in to his cheeseburger. “I’ve never been to Spain!”

An Open Letter To Alistair Darling

Is everybody fed up yet of hearing the pub trade witter on about how Alistair Darling is slowly raping it? I know I am, and I work in the trade. The only reason I don’t find it quite as tedious as the Paul McCartney / Heather Mills debacle is because I own a pub, and therefore I do still feel quite passionately about the whole subject of beer, village pubs and taxation.

I’d be prepared to leave the whole topic alone, resigned to the fact that even if The Green Party got in to power tomorrow they would spend the next ten years blaming Conservative for all the tax policies that New(ish) Labour couldn’t figure out how to better, but yesterday I listened to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 (which this week is being hosted by Matthew Bannister) and once again found myself having to control my temper. It was quite handy, because right after the half an hour on how village pubs might be a thing of the past was half an hour on anger and how it actually is an illness. It was probably what stopped me from throwing the DAB radio across the living room.

The pertinent bit of the show, however, was all about the demise of village pubs, and who should be to blame for it. Of course, everybody in the pub trade wants Alistair Darling hanged by his testicles for taxing us yet more, while everybody who drinks in pubs thinks that publicans are richer than Russian Vodka barons and that we’re all using this month’s budget as an excuse to charge more than £3.00 for a pint of beer.

Unfortunately it isn’t the 1980s anymore and so very few pub landlords are wealthy these days. If I were wealthy, I’d drive around in a Lexus RX400h and would buy Red Herring jeans, but instead I drive a 2000-model Jeep Grand Cherokee that likes to break down every other day and I wear Tesco Value denim. It’s my birthday next month and I’d really like a PlayStation 3 and my lawn mower needs replacing so I’ve sort of taken a liking to the Honda HF 2620. I would really like a copy of the full, 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary but it’s £750 and I don’t even have the full Sky package. Because I can afford none of these things.

So when I heard a DJ on the Jeremy Vine show say that all pub landlords should stop whingeing because they’re the richest people he knows, I hoped that the following segment on anger management would help because I was almost apoplectic with rage. I suspect that this DJ, who relies on pubs for his income, might find bookings in his calendar steadily dwindling following his comments on yesterday’s show.

It seemed, however, that the general public has little sympathy with the pub trade and is ignorant of the fact that village pubs do not make as much money as many would believe. We don’t have the volume of trade that a high street pub enjoys and we don’t get breaks on our business rates and we have to pay the same amount for our Sky licenses as a town-centre pub and so we’re all finding life a little difficult at the moment. Because of this, I’ve ended up writing a letter to Alistair Darling. I doubt it will carry much weight with him and I suspect his bank of secretaries will file it in the bin before it even reaches the personal assistant who attends to his eyebrows, but it made me feel better. If you’re interested in what the letter says, you can read it here.

More importantly, however, you could try supporting Samantha Hill of the Newbridge Arms, who has set up a petition lobbying the government to protect pubs from the onslaught of Supermarkets, or you can support the Morning Advertiser’s petition to resist calls to increase yet further the tax on alcohol. The links to both petitions are as follows:

Newbridge Arms' petition ... Morning Advertiser petition

I did try to set up a petition of my own, calling for the Chancellor to look at reducing tax on draught beer, separating the sales of ‘pub-sold’ alcohol from those of supermarkets and therefore supporting pubs in their sales of alcohol in a social and responsible environment. Unfortunately, it got rejected.

It must have been too scary for them to allow us to actually lobby the government on something so sensible.

Dad Of 35, Killed To Death

You read in the newspapers every day about a heroic father or brother who went out and told a bunch of teenagers sitting on the bonnet of his car to go and sit on somebody else’s car, only to end up with a knife sticking out of his belly. He even said please, but that’s what modern youth gets you these days. Or so we’re lead to believe by the daily papers, but we never expect it to happen to us.

As it’s the Easter holidays we decided to take the children to the cinema this afternoon, and then on to dinner afterwards. Horton Hears A Who, or some other Seuss-like film, was the chosen entertainment for the afternoon and we settled down with popcorn buckets larger than a small dog to watch the film. Malachy chomped loudly on his snack, Jacob fidgeted and whinged that he didn’t like his drink and moved from his seat to Ali’s lap and back again, and Ali fell asleep.

And all that happened before the trailers had finished and the movie began.

Leaving the auditorium a couple of hours later the boys and I had to wait while Ali went to the toilet and outside the cinema the real entertainment began. Two young girls, probably no older than sixteen, were screaming at each other and pulling each other’s hair and generally having a rather torrid girly fight. When we eventually left the cinema there was no sign of them, save for an abandoned shoe.

As we crossed to the escalator that would take us down to street level, however, we could see a huddle of young girls, one of them crying and clearly distressed; at the BHS end of the shopping centre was another track-suited young lady, also crying. In between were two young lads, stroking bum-fluff moustaches and looking a little uncomfortable.

By the time we reached the ground floor, one of the girls had got one of the lads and had dragged him passed us and out in to the open, and the story of what had happened became obvious: boy, still trying desperately to grow his first pubic hairs, had clearly been sleeping with this young girl, who was still desperately trying to grow breasts. Except he’d obviously been testing out his male prowess by sleeping with the other girl, too, and herein was the cause of the trouble.

The other lad was unsure whose side he should be on, as was the gaggle of girls – who were torn between laughing hysterically at the capers of their friends and trying to console the two cheated on girls. And then, which girl should they choose to console? It was such a dramatic dilemma only teenagers could have made anything of it.

None of this was of particular concern to us, but we did have an eight year old and a five year old with us and this group of school children were using some rather colourful language, the likes of which you barely hear over the bar in the pub. And, to be fair, you hear some pretty rum language over the bar. Most of the time spent crossing to the restaurant on the opposite side of the road was spent trying to get Malachy, an eight-year-old more inquisitive than a rampant Labrador puppy, to not take any notice of what was going on. There were several fucks and shits and quite a few references to sex and even a rather colourful alternative to the c-word, all of which Malachy wanted an explanation of as we tried to make our way to Chillis, and so I wanted to say something to this warring pair of lovebirds... but I didn’t dare.

I’m sure, when they’re not all het up about who’s sleeping with who, they are probably perfectly respectable, well-behaved youngsters from good backgrounds who would say please and thank you and be utterly polite to a passing stranger but, according to newspaper reports, they possibly might not be. Instead, they might be knife-wielding maniacs who would like to chop out your liver and serve it to their parents on a bed of freshly boiled testicles while filming it all on their mobile phones and, because of this, I was afraid to say anything.

He was barely seventeen and still trying to figure out which end of the razor to use; she was barely sixteen and had probably just worked out that sex lasts all of six seconds, you have to do something awful with your mouth and it all gets sort of messy. But I didn’t say anything because I was more worried that tomorrow’s headlines might read:

35-year-old dad of two, stabbed to death trying to stop kids swearing.

I'm Dreaming Of A White Easter

Did you know that, statistically at least, it’s more likely to snow at Easter than it is at Christmas – especially when Easter falls at its earliest possible date as it does this year, all bar one day. Despite this meteorological fact, bookies will still take bets on White Christmases rather than White Easters and Christmas carols all dream of snowy holidays. It just wouldn’t seem right with Bing Crosby singing about a White Easter...

Yet it’s still a bit of a shock to us all to wake up this morning and find that the ground is covered in a healthy layer of snow. Of course, the Met Office have been warning of this for some time, with their Early Warning pages predicting as early as Tuesday that we would need shovels come the weekend and that only Dennis Quaid would be able to save us, but few of us believed it.

So, I’d like to raise a glass to the guys at the Met Office and wish them a Happy Easter – for once, they got it right!

Who says global warming exists?

Formula One Returns To BBC!

I have just read perhaps the most exciting bit of news I’ve seen all year. It’s so good I actually think I might have wet myself a little bit when I saw the headline. The news isn’t that Jennifer Aniston has finally discovered I exist and wants to have babies with me, nor is it that Ferrari have decided to give me a brand new 612 Scaglietti absolutely free. It’s not even the news that a Macedonian court have found a bear guilty of stealing honey or that greeting card companies have voted to make Steak and BJ Day a genuine holiday that we can all enjoy without guilt or stigma.

Amazingly, it doesn't even have anything to do with Sir Paul McCartney punching Heather Mills squarely in her whingeing face, which I think we'd all like to see right now.

It is, in fact, the news that, after twelve years of advertising drudgery, Formula One is returning to the BBC, where we’ll be able to enjoy uninterrupted coverage of the world’s greatest motorsport.

Since 1996, Formula One fans have had to put up with ITV’s policy of deciding to show an advertisement break just as something really exciting is happening but, from 2009, this will no longer be the case. According to a man named Dominic Coles, who apparently holds the rather convoluted title of being the BBC’s Sport Director of Sport Rights, “fans will be able to enjoy uninterrupted, state of the art and innovative coverage from BBC Sport, across all of our TV, radio and new media platforms, for the first time since 1996.”

Whilst Bernie Ecclestone has said that he doesn’t have any complaints about ITV’s coverage and that the decision to return to the BBC is purely a commercial one, hardcore Formula One fans have long complained about the number of advertising breaks shown during races and their appalling timing through the events, which has lead to a number of fans to ask why the channel has received so many rewards for their coverage.

Me – well I’m as giddy as a school child waiting for Christmas Eve and, even though the first race of the 2008 season has only just happened, I now can’t wait for the 2009 one! As well as a return to uninterrupted coverage, rumours continue to build that for next season Formula One cars will return to using slick tyres for even better overtaking opportunities.

Now all the BBC need to do to recreate the whole nostalgic effect is to re-employ Murray Walker!

Paul McCartney and Heather Mills finally untie the knot.

I have to say that I’m not really one for reading the Entertainment and Celebrity Gossip and News pages that seem to adorn many websites and the centre pages of tabloid newspapers – unless, of course, the news relates to Jennifer Aniston, declaring her undying love for me. I couldn’t give a monkey’s if that muppet from Babyshambles has been caught snorting Cocaine on the bonnet of his car again and I really couldn’t care less if Britney’s being kept two thousand feet underground in a straight jacket or that Robbie’s giving up his vastly successful music career to go and live with aliens, but am I the only person in the whole world who really doesn’t seem to give a stuff about the divorce of Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills?

So they’ve had a bit of a falling out after a few years of marriage and have decided to split up and go their separate ways. They aren’t exactly the first couple it’s happened to – celebrities or not – and they sure as melting ice caps won’t be the last. So why, when I’ve switched the news on today, has it been the first story to hit me. Shannon Matthews still hasn’t been sent home to her mum, it’s five years this week since we (that’s the royal we, as in us following America) invaded Iraq, Paul Burrell apparently pinched a ring off Diana’s finger after she died, riots continue in Tibet and a corn flake the shape of the state of Illinois is currently selling for almost $1500 on eBay, but no – the top story is that Heather Mills has successfully managed to ring the miserly sum of £24.3million pounds out of Sir Paul McCartney at the end of their very bitter and tediously long divorce. Heather Mills will receive £14m for herself plus £2.5m to buy her very own house with. The settlement apparently also sees their four-year-old daughter being paid £35’000 a year by her rather rich Daddy, and he’ll also employ a full-time nanny to look after her. On top of that, I’m sure there’s also some other jiggery-pokery and magic numbers that just make no sense to mere mortals like us but it seems, at the end of it all, that Ms Mills is not too happy with having been set up for life. If Sir Paul McCartney were to pay me £17’000 for each day of marriage – for that’s what the divorce settlement equates to – I think I’d marry him.

Some discrepancy seems to have occurred between what the judge thinks the former Beatle is worth and what his ex-wife thinks. The courts have bandied a figure of £400m, Heather Mills has said he’s worth £800m – so she wants more money. Now, twenty four million quid is an awful lot of money; four hundred million is an awful lot more than that but, at the end of the day, McCartney made his money before he met Heather Mills and therefore she didn’t really have a hand in turning him in to the almost-billionaire that she seems to think he is.

Whilst Heather Mills said that she was “glad it’s over” and that she is “very, very happy” with the final decision, she also made some underhand remarks to reporters. She didn’t believe the courts treated her fairly because they don’t like to see people who represent themselves do well and, because her four-year-old daughter is only getting paid £35’000 a year, this means she will have to travel cattle class wherever she goes. Well, as she’s only four I suspect that she won’t be making the travel arrangements and I’m fairly sure that if she goes on holiday with her Daddy, Sir Paul won’t stuff her in the back of a Virgin Atlantic Jumbo Jet while he charters a private jet to the Galapagos Islands. I also suspect that a four-year-old will find it quite difficult to spend £35k a year, so I doubt she’s got too much on her mind that it’ll keep her awake at night. A 2007 survey showed that the average wage in the UK is just £23’764 a year, so Ms Mills’ moanings about her young daughter getting paid more than that might not do much to endear herself to the general public.

Given the circumstances, I think I’d cut my money and run, buy myself a nice little pad on the Mediterranean and slap a Ferrari on the driveway. And then I’d sit there, growing old and grey and fat while I wait for Jen to realise I exist.

A Plastic (Bag) Budget

I usually like to be jovial and upbeat when I write; I like to try and entertain and I like to be self-effacing with my humour where I can be. But today, all I can hear is the sound of a hammer, knocking another nail in to the coffin of the pub industry and recently I’ve been finding it a little difficult to raise a smile, let alone a glass.

Today’s budget, accompanied by the usual House of Commons brouhaha, showed that Alistair Darling really doesn’t have much money to play with. He mumbled on an awful lot about how things are better now than when the Conservative government was in place and how some of the financial traps the country is in are still the traps they set when they were in power. I find such comments a little upsetting and I’m disappointed to hear that after almost eleven years in power, if the Conservative policies were so awful, Labour haven’t yet found a way to fix them. He muttered statements about the environment and the poverty line and children and showed a little favour to motorists by freezing the price of petrol for a bit longer. He even offered a gratuitous incentive to new cars: from 2010, vehicles with CO2 emissions less than 130g/km will not have to pay road tax for the first year. This, of course, is a slightly pious offering because, should I wish to go and buy a more expensive car and the dealer is looking for a sale, they’ll offer to pay my road tax for me and so, at the end of the day, I won’t have to pay tax for the first year anyway.

In amongst the ramblings, the wagging of those John Tracy eyebrows and the platitudes to the Deputy Speaker, he also put 11p on a packet of cigarettes and, from Sunday night, 14p on a bottle of wine, 55p on a bottle of spirits, 3p on a litre of cider ... and 4p on a pint of beer.

At first glance it might not seem like much, but it’s a rise of 13 percent – and it’s also not the figure that will be seen by the customers when it reaches the pump. By the time the breweries have factored in their own increases in trading, transport costs and taxation, and then VAT has been added, conservative estimates put the price of a pint rising by 12 to 15 pence at the till. Worst case scenarios have that figure at closer to 20p.

And that’s quite damaging for the pub trade – especially those in rural locations who are heavily dependent on their regular trade, especially during the quiet winter months. It’s a sop toward those who think that the country has a drink problem whilst simultaneously helping the Chancellor fill the void in our country’s bank accounts – but it’s also likely to backfire. As the price of beer rises, people will use public houses less. I stated yesterday some figures that show how many outlets are closing at the moment, and this increase in beer prices will do nothing to slow that trend. All that will happen is that people will drink less in public and more at home – and the Chancellor’s income will be directly affected by the reduction in on-trade sales. CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, stated today that they felt this rise would be unlikely to affect supermarket prices, but pubs as small businesses, with high business rates and high running costs, will have little choice but to pass the increase on to the consumer.

Fear not, however, because he’s also slapping a tax on plastic bags from 2009 and this means that there will be an estimated 12bn less carrier bags around for you to carry your supermarket bottle of Blue Nun home in. So hoorah for Alistair Darling, saviour of the British Pub [sic].

Binge Drink Baloney

If you read the newspapers today – or watch the myriad of news channels and broadcasts available to us via digital television, or browse the news pages of the Internet – two stories will stand out more than any other.

They’re not stories about our beleaguered soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, or missing children or, indeed, the little titbit of news that crept out yesterday that last year’s summer floods were nothing to do with Global Warming; they’ve kept that very quiet. Instead, it’s the stories that Britain is literally cowering under attack not from terrorists or immigrants but, instead, binge drinkers. The other story is that tomorrow, somewhere in his budget, Alistair Darling – he of the Gerry Anderson puppet eyebrows – will put the price of beer up. Probably by quite a lot.

Darling, and Brown – and the Daily Mail – all seem to think that we’re a nation of obese alcoholics and therefore the best way to tackle such extreme beer consumption is to tax it. Obviously, it has nothing to do at all with the fact that since 1997 this Government has spent and spent and spent until there’s nothing left and now they need to find more ways to make money.

The other assumption that the Cabinet appear to be making is that publicans – the people ultimately responsible to the customers for how much their pint of beer or glass of wine is costing them – are wealthy and can therefore probably absorb a major price hike. They seem not to have noticed that gone are the days of publicans driving around in Jaguars and Rolls Royces dressed in a sheepskin that would make Arthur Daley proud. Today, I drive around in an eight-year-old Jeep that passes its MOT and keeps running by nothing more than sheer luck and my battered corduroy jacket is almost as old as the car.

Estimates on how much money Darling is going to put on alcohol vary wildly depending on which publication you read but, by the time you account for the increase in taxation, the increase in transport costs in the past twelve months and the increase in the cost of wheat, barley and so on, the price rise could be as much as 20p on a straight-forward pint of lager or bitter. And that doesn’t account for the higher alcohol beers, or the bottles of alcoholic pop that are synonymous with the younger crowd. In some areas of the country the price of beer is creeping ever-steadily towards £4.00.

Official figures show that a binge drinker is somebody who consumes roughly four pints of beer or a bottle of wine in one night which, to me, seems frankly ridiculous. Everybody I know would fall into the category of binge drinker if that was the case. If I go out for a meal with friends, I would probably enjoy a nice bottle of wine throughout the evening. If I were to meet friends in town for an evening, I would probably drink four pints of lager – over a period of four hours, that’s not that much. I certainly wouldn’t advocate driving after such a volume of alcohol, and it’s not good to do it every night of the week, but I would hardly consider myself a binge drinker based on such consumption; and I’m certainly not obese.

Equally, being a publican, I have yet to notice binge drinkers leaving my establishment, heading out in to the street and then immediately knifing a passing taxi driver. I’m not saying that violence doesn’t happen, but I suspect I could go out in Newmarket tonight for a few beers and not feel in the least bit as if somebody is going to put a bottle in my eye.

By focusing attention on the apparent violence and health risks attributed to having a pint or two, Gordon Brown’s team are hoping to validate their decision to hike the price of beer, wine and spirits in tomorrow’s budget. But there’s another report they should be keeping an eye on.

According to CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, in a report out this week they state that 57 pubs are closing each month. That works out to be almost two a day. I’m aware of five pubs that have closed since Christmas. As supermarkets make alcoholic drinks cheaper – not to mention easier for younger people to buy – more and more people are drinking at home. This has the knock-on effect of forcing publicans out of business and the slightly less healthy aspect of reducing the social ability of our nation, not to mention increasing their ability to drink grossly more alcohol than might be good for them because there’s nobody around to tell them when they’ve had enough.

There are many calls in the press today for Alistair Darling to leave the alcohol tax alone or, even, to reduce it, but I suspect that they’ll go widely ignored. I only hope that when the government start earning this extra cash from their tax hike they put some of it aside to create a benevolent fund for publicans. There might be a few out of work soon who’ll need that sort of help...

Whatever Happened To The Drunken Sailor, and other politically incorrect stories

I’m not ordinarily one for school plays, assemblies, recitals or anything else that means that I have to sit in a gym hall surrounded by primary school children on chairs that were designed either for the bottoms of six-year-olds or crack-addicted supermodels. It might sound a little callous, but by the time I’ve tweezed my 35-year-old butt in to one of those tiny chairs a twinge in my coccyx reminds me that I did some damage to it by not being able to do stunts properly on a BMX when I was in my teens.

This means that I stop concentrating on the show taking place at the front of the hall and start fidgeting in a vain attempt to relieve some pressure off my aching bottom and, in turn, this means that my wife starts tutting, sighing and hissing at me to sit still so much that by the end of the show she’ll moan at me that it’s my fault she missed all of it.

Today was Jacob’s first ever appearance in public and apparently it’s written in the Magna Carta somewhere that I must attend such events in my five-year-old’s life. Whining and wheedling and saying “oh, do I have to?” more repeatedly than my eight-year-old does when told he must eat his cauliflower got me nowhere and, resigned to thirty minutes of my bum cheeks going numb, I made my way in to the gym hall with all the other parents.

These days you aren’t allowed to take photographs of your own children in such environments in case you might inadvertently take a photograph of one of his or her friends and then show it to that child’s mother. Such photography is bad and so the teachers do it for you instead and then charge you for a copy of the same photograph you could have taken instead. This is apparently called protecting our young from the bad stuff in the world and is the politically correct thing to do. This morning’s show required the children to be dressed in pirate outfits. (Inwardly, I’m smiling slightly at the irony that pirates themselves weren’t necessarily politically correct...) During the show the children are required to sing an old sea shanty, once known as Sailor’s Holiday, today we know it best as Drunken Sailor.

You know the one I mean: “What shall we do with a drunken sailor...” and so on and so on. Except that, apparently, it’s politically incorrect for five-year-olds to say the word “drunk” and so there they were, reception class children, singing “What shall we do with a sunken sailor...” Well, nothing, obviously – because he’s sunk. It sort of spoils the rest of the song. If a sailor’s sunk then we can’t put him in a bab and beat him senseless. We can’t put him in a longboat until his sober, because he’s not drunk, he’s sunk. We can’t put him in a bed with the captain’s daughter – because, oh my word, he’s no longer drunk so he could probably do something very naughty. Nor can we give him the hair of the dog that bit him, because he’s not allowed to drink, and we can’t soak him in oil ‘til he sprouts a flipper because that makes absolutely no sense at all.

I have news for the school – and any other politically correct official who wears hessian knickers instead of a skimpy g-string: Jacob lives, plays and grows up in a pub. He understands drunk. What he doesn’t understand, however, is the cotton wool you’re trying to wrap him up in.

Of course, I don’t know if they changed all the other lyrics to suit the revised opening line, because the woman behind me had decided that it was far easier to let her two-year-old squeal endlessly in my right ear throughout the show rather than keep the child quiet, and now I can hear nothing at all because my eardrum is shattered.

French Mayor Discovers Elixir of Life: Just Don't Die

You have to love the French, don’t you? Sure, they make great wine and Paris is apparently the most romantic city in the world but then they go and blot the copybook by putting garlic in their food and eating snails. The country is full of beautiful architecture and beautiful women who know how to dress both seductively and demurely at the same time, but then they all light up cigarettes and fill the decorative rooms with plumes of carcinogenic smoke. Travel from one end of the country to the other and, within just a few days, you can visit picturesque vineyards, learn the art of making cheese, go skiing in beautiful mountains and then relax on the sun-drenched beaches of Saint Tropez.

They like to stick up for themselves, too. If the politicians introduce a law that the French denizens don’t like, they simply go on strike. The farmers will block the motorways and the truckers will block the ports and the pilots will taxi out to the runway and then sit there, with the air conditioning switched off, so all the passengers start to sweat. Pretty soon, Nicolas Sarkozy has to prise Carla Bruni’s lips from his underpants and repeal all new laws introduced and the country will go back to doing what it’s always done. It reminds me a little of that old joke about which body part is in charge...

And yet they still allow Citroen to go on making cars.

Best of all, though, they’re great for mad laws. Whilst an Italian mayor might once have grabbed the headlines for banning ladies of a larger stature from bathing topless on his beaches, Gerard Lalanne – mayor of Sarpourenx – has this week banned people from dying in his village.

The tiny community in France’s Bordeaux region is home to just 260 people but apparently the cemetery is overflowing with corpses, leaving little or no space for new graves. In a desperate attempt to resolve the graveyard’s overcrowding issues, Mayor Lalanne posted an ordinance in the council offices that stated that anybody who did not already have a plot reserved in the village cemetery but who wished to be buried in the village was forbidden from dying.

To add hilarity to the amusement of such an edict, Lalanne also added that anybody who disobeyed this new law would be severely punished. Sarpourenx’s mayor turned seventy this week and, whilst his odd commandment might not have the truckers and farmers blockading France’s main trade arteries, he has apologised for not finding a more positive way of dealing with the matter. He’s also hoping to stand in this month’s elections for a seventh term in office.

Whilst immortality might not necessarily befall the residents of Sarpourenx, Gerard Lalanne’s threat of severe punishment might make them think twice about dying on his territory. He hasn’t stated what the penalty will be for disobeying this new directive, but it's bound to be a fate worse than death...

Tragic Magic In Handy Backup Supply Shocker (Part 2)

Last month I was lamenting the fact that I’d purchased an external hard disk drive to backup my growing music supply, and that the appropriate part of the power supply for this hard disk drive appeared to be missing upon opening the box.

Of course, it would have been helpful if I’d opened the box on the day I purchased it, as I would probably have been able to save myself an awful lot of trouble, frustration and, ultimately, embarrassment. (If you missed the story, you can read it by clicking here.)

In short, however, what happened was that I purchased the Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 in November and then didn’t bother opening the box until last month, when it looked like the computer powering music to the pub might be about to die a rather horrible and very final death. (It didn’t and, in fact, seems to have made a rather more than miraculous recovery from whatever was ailing it on the morning of February 8th.) Upon opening the box I discovered a kettle-style lead that didn’t appear to fit the actual disk drive itself.

PC World were unwilling to help because, as far as they were concerned, enough time had passed since the purchase of the item that I could well have actually lost the component that should have been in the box and they didn’t appear to believe me when I said that I had only just opened the packaging, three months after making my emergency purchase.

Since then, of course, I’ve been desperately trying to find ways to make this external drive work so that I could backup my music supply. Slaveboy Adam tried various other power supplies for me, all to no avail, and I scoured the Internet looking for reasonably cheap alternative power supplies, all which came back rather expensive. So I didn’t bother buying them.

On Monday, however, Big “999” Shaun came to my rescue with a multi-purpose power supply procured from Argos. The idea is simple: choose the power connector that fits your device, connect it to the multi-purpose power supply, select the voltage you want from a range between 3 and 12 and plug in to the mains. (Make sure you get the polarity correct, mind you, or it could all go up in a mini mushroom cloud.)

Following this relatively simple lesson in electronics, I plugged the device in and hey presto! The power light lit up. The hard drive clicked and whirred. Something buzzed. And then the computer reported that it didn’t recognise the hard drive device when I plugged it in.

In temper, and because I couldn’t think of anything else rational to do at the time, I picked up the original Maxtor packaging and threw it at the wall.

And that was when the other, missing half of the original power supply fell out of the box.