Beer Compurgation

  When I were a lad this was all fields  In fact, I lived that experience a little as a child. Our estate backed on to a lot of fields. They all had nicknames that may or may not have been devised by our gang - inventive titles such as The Sandhills and The Backfield. Some were for making dens, others were for playing football. We were always, in some capacity, in a field somewhere not far from the house.   Before I'd even entered my teens, they were all gone: replaced with mock-Tudor housing. Our only football field was the local primary school pitch that was, technically, out of bounds and so our final days involved being chased away by caretakers and police as we tried to complete a peaceful game of Knock-Out-Wembley. Our childhood was ending and the lack of free space represented that.    None of that would matter to the children who took up residency in those mock-Tudor villas, as childhoods were changing and belonged to various sc...

      It is the fourth week of the UK’s experimental appropriation of Bart Simpson’s “Do-What-You-Feel” Festival. Keeping yourself and others safe is now a choice rather than a requirement. “You have no idea how long we’ve waited for this” says the nightclub punter interviewed on local news, possibly living in a different universe to the rest of us who are all working to the same timescales.   They called it “Freedom Day” because everything in this country must now sound as though it is woven into tapestry. It was so named to appease those that have fought restrictions at every turn, making the lives of those whose livelihoods involve implementing them hellish. The sort of people who would have you believe that their passion for the likes of Wetherspoons and Samuel Smith’s is down to a humble demureness – and yet the last 18 months has shown their true and honest deep contempt for the hospitality staff that work in those venues.   It is those at...