Confessions of a Wino

Interest rates artificially low.  Share prices rising.  Inflation a constant news item.  Retailers gloomy.  The price of luxuries like clothing and food are under threat.  Irish banks bailed out yet again.

Could there be any clearer signals that the double dip is on the way?  When it comes to recession theory, I firmly believe in the BIG W.  The other big W in my life belongs to Bacchus.  But how much longer will I be able to subscribe to the President’s Cellar?  Pretty much the only wine I buy from the Sunday Times Wine Club these days, and the only circumstance in which I relinquish the responsibility of choice, delivers 6 secret bottles every 6 months at about £20 a head.

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It’s a bit like Audrey II, the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors.  My liver is taunting me to feed it some alcohol.  But whilst resisting the siren songs of Bacchus is the easy bit of my new year detox, my lily-livered response to caffeine addiction has been unmitigated capitulation.  Early foreplay with Earl Grey has now escalated to full frontal intercourse with Ceylon Orange Pekoe, through Queen Anne and even onto (gasp) sturdy robust Assam, the foundation of builders’ tea, in which well brewed cups, a teaspoon can stand as erect and proud as a pleasure dome on the road to Xanadu.  Rogering my central nervous system senseless.  Mmmmm feels good.

So whilst I have no contemporary wine experiences to write about, perhaps I ought to catch up with some old notes from 2009.  Yes, I’ll do that right now.  Oh hang on, I have to exercise first.

Where is the sense of individual responsibility in society these days?  My parents and grand-parents all lived through at least one world war, enduring hardship and shortage.  When something went wrong in their lives, their first reaction was to set about putting it right using their own endeavours.  I am not saying that governments and corporations should be absolved of negligence, nor that they should not take sensible precautions to increase safety for us all, but the balance of responsibility has shifted too far.  Matt Rudd writing in The Sunday Times agrees.  In a simple day out with his wife and toddler he counted a whopping 289 warnings/instructions.

If parents can’t be trusted to educate their kids to the point that they understand that coffee “may be hot”, or that smooth floors “may be slippery when wet” then the world has lost something.  In today’s litigious society (it starts in America, quickly migrates to Ireland, and lands in the UK shortly afterwards) the first thought when we have an accident is “who can I sue?  How much money can I make?”  So the inevitable result is a world full of nannying warning signs that guide us, cajole us, restrict us, instruct us but rarely inform us.

The warning on my bottle of Bacchus 2006, however, was clear and stark, “Made in England”.

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