Enjoy the Golden Age - while it lasts!

More than an advertising
slogan - a threat!

I recently read an article about a long-gone brewery, Gales of Hampshire, and was reminded of how I used to enjoy their beer when visiting family in the South. On one occasion in the 1980s, I was taken to a pub with a row of six handpumps, each serving a different Gales real ale. In those days this was an extremely rare sight and I said to the landlord, “A pub crawl without leaving your bar stool!” He replied that many had tried to drink them all but few had succeeded.

This incident came to mind when I was chatting recently to staff in a local pub that had ten handpumps serving real ale, and I thought how a bank of six handpumps, which had seemed extraordinary more than 30 years ago, was quite unremarkable today. I said that many years ago I had been a student at a college near Warrington where our beer choices were confined almost exclusively to mild or bitter, either from Greenall Whitley or Tetley Walker, and that their pub now had a greater choice of real ales than the entire town of Warrington back then.

Unlike other facets of life, for real ale there is no Golden Age to look back upon nostalgically. Fifty years ago (before my drinking career began), breweries were switching to mass-produced keg beers and many were phasing out their real ales, which at that time were mostly just mild and bitter. CAMRA, founded in the 1970s in response to this trend, is generally recognised as having saved real ale in this country. While we regret the closure of many old pubs – sadly, quite a few locally (Southport and West Lancs area) - and the loss of some favourite old brews, for real ale drinkers the Good Old Days are now. We can help keep it that way simply by continuing to enjoy the great variety of British beers now readily available.

Did I manage to try all six beers in the Gales pub? Of course. And for the record, the real ale scene in Warrington is much better nowadays.

This is one of a series of articles that I write for the CAMRA column in our local papers, the Southport Visiter and Ormskirk Advertiser. Some previous articles are here.

We've been here before - and will again

Although music is an important part of my life - it's one of the reasons for this blog - I'm not too surprised that, until last night, I'd never heard of Ariana Grande; after all, I am not what might be called her target demographic. I can of course relate to the enthusiasm of going to a concert by a favourite performer, and for those young girls, the evening should have left them feeling good and providing them with fond memories for the rest of their lives, even if in time they had grown out of the music. With 22 dead and 59 injured, last night will certainly stay forever with those young women and children for the worst of reasons.

Like the Bataclan massacre 18 months ago in Paris, the murderers deliberately targeted people who were out enjoying themselves. I have no doubt that this evil attack was in retaliation for our actions in the Middle East. Yesterday's victims cannot be held responsible for the deaths, injuries and major political and social disruption caused by Western governments and Russia through proxy wars, invasions, and policies of regime change, but on the other hand, the civilian victims of our interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc, aren't to blame either.

Defiant statements that terrorism will not change our way of life and our values cannot disguise the fact that we are particularly vulnerable to such terror attacks, as the IRA proved a generation ago. Nowadays it's even easier: if you have the stomach for it, just drive a car at high speed into a crowd.

The sad fact is that, unless we fundamentally alter our approach to international affairs and stop trying to be the world's police force, there will be more attacks like this, with more innocent deaths followed by more essentially similar defiant statements. We're in a vicious cycle and I see no signs that we are making any efforts to get out of it. British prime ministers love putting on their serious face and posing for the world's press next to the American president in front of the White House: Tony Blair loved it, and as we saw recently, so does Theresa May. While strutting on the world's stage and talking about taking 'difficult decisions', they can continue pretending that Britain is still a world power.

The major powers have been meddling in the Middle East for a hundred years now since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, and the region is in about the worst mess it has ever been in as a result of all that interference. We need to recognise that we cannot do any good there, especially as nowadays you can have the most advanced, well-trained and well-equipped armed forces on the planet, only to find they are incapable of preventing a deranged individual from planting a home-made bomb or driving into a crowd. The fortune we spend on defence did nothing to protect those young concert-goers yesterday.

I can't imagine the grief that some families are suffering today, or the frantic worry of those who don't yet know what's happened to their loved ones. My thoughts are split between them and the sickening certainty that, in the predictable absence of any serious soul-searching about our role in the world, we will be going through all this again in the not too distant future.