As a consequence, when I popped in for milk this evening I found myself browsing in the wine aisle and I have to say it was a bit of a shock. I hadn’t realised that wine had got so expensive. I actually felt quite relieved that my new year’s resolution to drink more has failed miserably (about 2 or 3 pints in 2011 so far I think).  I guess it doesn’t help that my favourite wines are not at the bargain basement end of the price structure.  Not that I am into really ridiculously-priced fine wines: just Sancerre, Fleurie, Bourgogne Aligote, Brouilly and stuff like that, but they all seem to start around the £8.50 mark now.

I didn’t dare even look to see if they had any Nuit St Georges.

Fortunately I don’t think I am in any imminent danger of needing to buy wine, unless Auntie Joan ever decides to pay a visit of course.  I think I still have a few bottles in the bin cupboard cellar.

Having been thwarted there, I turned over and saw something called the Magicians, which I liked.  I am a bit of a sucker for magic tricks so even having Lenny Henry in charge couldn’t spoil it for me.  It was a while before I realised that this is a sort of pro-celebrity magic show, because I didn’t know who any of the celebrities were, and one of them, a street dancer, seemed so natural I just thought he was half of a magic double-act.

Other than that, I saw a couple of Celebrity Masterminds, including one where Clive Sinclair turned out to be not such a genius after all.  There is still Sky News with breakfst, but I’m not sure that counts.

So a slow start.  Maybe it will pick up when Sherlock and Psychoville return, but somehow I can’t see me being wedged into the sofa with a crate of beer watching X-Factor by the end of the year.

I over heard something in the first pub that made me ponder a bit though.

When I got there I was up at the bar and found that service was slow because there was only one person behind the bar.  Maybe we should have told them that we had a lot of people leaving today.  Anyway, a couple of middle-aged ladies came in and one said to the other “which side do you think the queue is?  Where is the end of the queue?”

Obviously they are not seasoned pub-goers because it struck me that there never is a queue in a pub: it is just a free-for-all.  How did that come about?   As a nation we have a well-deserved reputation for being inveterate queuers with an unwritten queue etiquette at least as complicated as the rules of cricket and yet inside pubs the concept of a queue does not exist outside of the toilets.

It is not so much a matter of who was there first as who shouts the loudest, has the sharpest elbows, catches the barman’s eye, waves their tenner the best or is most attractive/scary.  Behaviour that would cause a riot of tutting in the post office is standard behaviour at the bar.  Anywhere else in the country you would never stand waiting to be served while one newcomer after another gets their order in before you.  I wonder how that became the norm in pubs?

• Temperatures
• Pressure
• Consumer resistance

I can’t believe that nobody has thought of it so either it is technically not possible or there is a marketing decision that nobody would want to buy it.  Do any of my more alcoholic visitors have any ideas or opinions?

I am a few working days away from having been at the new company for two years.  In that time I have not had a single day off sick – not even when I went into hospital at two in the morning on a Thursday night, and it would be good to actually reach the arbitrary two-year mark.  On the other hand I do feel like crap with a sore throat, temperature, dizzyness, etc. and I wonder if I going into work for the last there days will mean I keep the symptoms for Christmas. Again.

When I slept most of Saturday I thought it was just a reaction to going out for four nights in a row, including two trips to London and more than my normal amount of alcohol.  By now I think I can stop blaming it on the maotai.

Its not all bad though.  After West Ham were robbed by Villa yesterday we were saved the ignominy of dropping into the bottom three when Man City lost, and because Spurs lost too we stay on the same points as them.  Some small consolation.

Just in case it all takes a turn for the worse I went out today to get Jayne’s presents instead of waiting until Christmas Eve as per normal.

I like beer and I like chocolate but a combination of the two does nothing to tempt me.  I like leeks and I like trifle, but that doesn’t mean that I would be queueing up for leek trifle.  What next?  Bacon & egg ice cream?

The Intrepid Fox was always an amazing place, full of all sorts of rockers, punks and goths plus a few suited office workers having a quick pint on the way home. The interior was plastered with assorted posters for records and concerts and the music was a bit more ‘real; than the average pub jukebox. Back in the 80s a few of my friends were goths and they introduced me to the place. Long after they had all moved away from London I was still going there from time to time.

There are various reasons given for the decline in the pub trade. The most plausible seem to be increasing rent and other overheads and the absurd cheapness of supermarket beer. A good point: when a pint costs £2.50 or 58p in a supermarket, plenty of people will choose a take-out over an evening out. The smoking ban is also cited. Although a lot of people are tempted to go out to pubs more now that they are not smoke-filled, the Intrepid Fox was the sort of place suited to smokiness.

A few pages later there was an increasingly rare example of good news: Eurotunnel have announced their first ever profit and expect to be offering dividends next year.

I’m sure there is no connection at all between those two stories although… alcohol prices in supermarkets are extraordinarily cheap and it has been suggested that many offers are actually loss-making marketing ploys to get people through their doors, and the cheapness of drink must surely have an impact on the binge-drinking and underage drinking problems. If, somehow, prices were raised so they were not so cheap relative to pub prices I do wonder if we would see fewer pubs closing or higher profits for Eurotunnel.

Having a drinks licence suspended for 28 days might sound a bit lenient, and really it should have been 90 days, but it must represent a substantial revenue: enough even for a company like Tesco to notice in their smaller shops and certainly enough to make smaller off licences decide that flogging booze to kids isn’t worth the risk.

Of course it was. Everyone was still in the pub! I was half-expecting to see crowds of bleary-eyed sots crawling out of the pubs this morning to go straight into work after spending 48 hours solid propping up the bar.

It was all a bit of an anti-climax really, which is more or less what I was half expecting and half hoping for. Although not a great drinker myself, I can remember times when I was working in Holland that I would go out for a meal at 10pm then decide to go into a bar afterwards for a biertje or zwei. It was good to not feel rushed about it all.

Some places here don’t really seem to have a clue about continental style grown-up drinking. A colleague told me he found several places open but refusing to let anyone new in after 11pm, which seems a bit pointless.

There are a few places which I suspect will adjust well to the new licensing regime and take the ability to open all hours in their stride – Brixton and Brighton for example. But they already have a lively after hours scene to start with. Coming out of a late concert this year I walked and drove through Brixton some time after 2am and the place was livelier than Crawley at 10pm. I even got stuck in a traffic jam on Brixton Hill!

Its a shame I don’t particularly enjoy drinking much now, what with living halfway between Brixton and Brighton…