Yum!

Jen made us sesame prawn toasts yesterday. It's one of our favourite meals. It's supposed to be a starter dish, but we tend to make a lot of them and eat them as a main course. They're far nicer than any you will eat in your local Chinese restaurant. Seriously, try them!

Oh, and I made lemonade. Fantastic!

Uncongenial

Our nanny government seems to enjoy nothing more than protecting us from ourselves by banning stuff, so doesn't it do something useful this time and ban amplified music in pubs?

Times: The louder the music in venues, the faster you drink

Loud pop music in bars makes people drink more and down it more quickly, a study in France has shown…

The results, published online in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, show that the louder the music, the more swiftly the drinkers finished their beer, ordered more—or left.

It is entirely possible, Professor [Nicolas Guéguen, Professor of Behavioural sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud] admits, that they just found the atmosphere uncongenial, so accelerated their drinking and left.

Remember when you could actually hold a conversation in a pub? It's getting increasingly harder to do so. It's time to reclaim our bars from the alco-pop-sipping teenagers who only go there to get blind drunk. An amplified music ban would help achieve this—and protect us from ourselves by decreasing our alcohol intake.

Come on, Gordon, you know you want to!

And, in related news:

Liverpool Echo: Cains owners: We'll fight to save our beer

… The Toxteth [Cains] brewery yesterday admitted its future as a going concern was in jeopardy after a "perfect storm" conspired against the 158-year-old business…

[Y]esterday their six monthly figures made for painful reading: £4.6m losses; higher raw material and energy costs; and the effects of the smoking ban all took their toll.

My emphasis added. Let it not be said we didn't see this coming. For the record, Cains is one of my favourite pints.

Horsey women

A horsey woman rode past our house the other evening. You get quite a lot of them round here. Either that, or it's the same one going round and round again. To be honest, it's hard to tell because:

  • they like to look down on you from their horses, but I'm damned if I'm going to give them the satisfaction of looking up at them
  • if you do sneak a sly glance, they all look the bloody same: jodphurs, funny teeth, plaited hair, pokers up their bottoms

I must admit, I find this women riding round on horses malarkey a bit distasteful. In the olden days, people rode horses to get to other places. Fair enough, I'll have that. But we've got cars nowadays; what possible reason could they have for riding around on top of a huge horse? I think it's rather sordid.

And, if they're just doing it for a bit of fun, why do they look so utterly bloody miserable all of the time?