I Predicted Riots

Following three nights of mayhem, mainly in London, our not-so-Glorious leader comes fresh out of a Cobra meeting to declare:

“We will do anything necessary”... what does that mean Dave?

I have to agree with one thing he said; it is ‘Mindless criminality’ indeed. On waking on Sunday it felt quite a bit like travelling back in time to the ‘80’s but after 3 days, it is apparent that the riots have more to do with getting free stuff than making a political statement. One of my nephew’s friends commented that he felt ill at the burring of a Gregg’s (in Peckham) and another friend commented on the amateurishness of looting Primark – indeed, 4 quid hoodies are not for the discerning rioter, although at least you can chuck them away after if using them as a disguise. The saddest thing I’ve seen is that furniture shop being razed to the ground in Croydon – survived 2 world wars including the blitz, probably one of the oldest buildings left in that soulless town – tragic!

So Ravey Davey says there will be 16,000 coppers on the streets of London tonight. “You will feel the full force of the law”. Eek! I bet the kids are quaking in their boots. And will the “full force of the law” be meted out by the likes of PC assistant deputy dawg commissioner (formerly known as PC plod until yesterday).

What Dave doesn’t get when he says to them “...You are potentially wrecking your own life too” is that it’s already wrecked, thanks to the likes of him.

I was going to go into a tirade on the causes of disenchantment but there’s already some good analysis out there.

For example: http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html

Your starter for ten...

I have 2 messages in my junk folder - 1 from Mary Mbogo of Liberia and 1 from princess Anita Justin Yak of Sudan – I was a bit disappointed at first that they weren’t love letters as I am longing to do the wind-up thing and threaten to go over and marry them. But hey! Mary says that she has an inheritance of US$8.500,000.00 but doesn’t say what my percentage of this I will get for helping her. Princess Anita doesn’t say how much her fortune is but promises me 20% - GCSE Maths question: which offer shall I take up and why?

Here are the letters in a table for comparison purposes:

Dearest.	Dear Beloved,
I got your email address from the yahoo tourist search while looking for some one whom i will call mine,I will really like to have a good relationship with you, and i have a special reason why i decided to contact you. I decided to contact you because of the urgency of my situation here ,I am Miss Mary Mbogo Edwards 24years old girl from Liberia the only daughter of Late prince,Mbogo Edwards the deputy minister of national security under the leadership of president Charles Taylor who is now in exile after many innocent soul were killed,	Let me first introduce myself to you, I am a citizen of Sudan but currently staying in Burkina Faso. My name is Miss Anita Justin Yak, 24years old originated from Sudan. I got your E-mail address/profile through my internet search from your country national chamber of commerce when I was searching for a good and trust worthy person who will be my friend and I believe that it is better we get to know each other better and trust each other because I believe any good relationship will only last if it is built on truth and real love,
My Father was killed by government of Charles Taylor ,he accuse my father of coup attempt. I am constrained to contact you because of the maltreatment i am receiving from my step mother. She planned to take away all my late father's treasury and properties from me since the unexpected death of my beloved Father. Meanwhile I wanted to escape to the Europe she hide away my international passport and other valuable travelling documents. Luckily she did not discover where I kept my father’s File which contains important documents.	My father Dr. Justin Yak Arop was the former Minister for SPLA Affairs and Special Adviser to President Salva Kiir of South Sudan for Decentralization. My father Dr. Justin Yak and my mother including other top Military officers and top government officials had been on board when the plane crashed on Friday May 02, 2008. You can read more about the crash through the below site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7380412.stm After the burial of my father, my uncles conspired and sold my father’s properties to a Chinese Expatriate and live nothing for me.
So I decided to run to the refugee camp where I am presently seeking asylum under the United Nations High Commission for the Refugee here in Ouagadougou,Republic of Burkina faso. I wish to contact you personally for a long term business relationship and investment assistance in your Country. My Father of blessed memory deposited the sum of US$8.500,000.00 in Bank with my name as the next of kin. However, I shall give you more information of my inheritance on confirmation of your acceptance to assist me for the transfer and investment of the fund.	On a faithful morning, I opened my father's briefcase and found out the documents which he have deposited huge amount of money in one bank in Burkina Faso with my name as the next of kin. I travelled to Burkina Faso to withdraw the money so that I can start a better life and take care of myself.
As you will help me in an investment, and i will like to complete my studies, as i was in my first year in the university, when the crisis started. It is my intention to compensate you with 40% of the total money for your services and the balance shall be my investment capital. This is the reason why I decided to contact you. Please all communications should be through this email address only for confidential purposes. As soon as I receive your positive response showing your interest I will put things into action immediately. In the light of the above,	On my arrival, the Branch manager of the Bank whom I met in person told me that my father's instruction to the bank was the money is release to me only when I am married or present a trustee who will help me and invest the money overseas. I have chosen to contact you after my prayers and I believe that you will not betray my trust. But rather take me as your own sister. Though you may wonder why I am so soon revealing myself to you without knowing you, well, I will say that my mind convinced me that you are the true person to help me.
I shall appreciate an urgent message indicating your ability and wilingness to handle this transaction sincerely. i am staying at the female hostel. Awaiting your urgent and positive response.Please do keep this only to your self please i beg you not to disclose it till i come over, once the fund has been transfered.	More so, I will like to disclose much to you if you can help me to relocate to your country because my uncle has threatened to assassinate me. The amount is $7.2 Million and I have confirmed from the bank in Burkina Faso. You will also help me to place the money in a more profitable business venture in your Country. However, you will help by recommending a nice University in your country so that I can complete my studies. It is my intention to compensate you with 20% of the total money for your services and the balance shall be my capital in your establishment. As soon as I receive your interest in helping me, I will put things into action immediately. In the light of the above, I shall appreciate an urgent message indicating your ability and willingness to handle this transaction sincerely. Please do keep this only to yourself.
Yours Love, Mary.	Sincerely yours, Miss Anita Justin Yak

Britain Isn't Working Re-visited

Today the much-publicised Government’s initiative The Work programme officially starts. I believe it will fail, and I also really hope it will fail, for three main reasons:

1. I spent the best part of 3 months doing a load of what turned out to be pointless and tedious work to get the organisation I work for included in the Work Programme. Although politically I really didn’t want to, I felt we should try to get in on it so we could get funding for the work we do with young unemployed adults. The contracting system was a ludicrous, protracted and bureaucratic process that must have cost millions in terms of how much time the so-called prime contractors and potential sub-contractors (including us) spent on it. In our region, there were 14 potential winners of the contracts, of whom only 2 would be successful. We approached all of them and jumped through their often ridiculous hoops in order to get on their list of potential sub-contractors should they be successful in actually winning the contracts – we got on 5 of them which isn’t bad going I guess, but none of these 5 got the contracts, which were eventually awarded to Best and Ingeus Deliotte. I must admit, the thought of effectively working for the likes of G4S or Serco did stick in the throat and a part of me is relieved that we’re not a part of it, but now what also sticks in the throat is that we have failed to be in on the paid side of offering services to the unemployed, and yet the Job Centre have no compunction in asking us to do stuff for nowt under the other ‘Get Britain Working’ measures – see below.

2. The Work programme was originally lauded as being one single, straight forward programme for helping unemployed people back to work but it isn’t. There are still a plethora of initiatives, including a raft of measures under the ‘Get Britain Working’ banner, which those of us lucky enough (sic) to remember the 80’s will recognise.

3. Do we really want a situation where people who can’t really work or really don’t want to work, are made to work? I know this government does – I’m surprised they haven’t re-introduced the workhouse! Anyway, this last one is the main reason why I think the Work Programme will fail, especially as people have to be in a job for 2 years before counting as a positive outcome – who knows if they’ve got a job in 2 years’ time these days? I don’t know if I’ll have one next year never mind anything beyond that!

So, onto the other so-called ‘Get Britain Working’ measures. The list reads (click on them for blurb off official site):

• Work Clubs
• Work Together
• Work Experience
• New Enterprise Allowance
• Enterprise Clubs
• Sector-based work academies

See what I mean about the 1980’s? Oh yeah! And apart from the Enterprise Allowance due to come out later in the year where you can get up to £2,000, none of the others have any money attached to them. That’s right! They expect providers to deliver them for free! And what’s worse, some already are! Big Society in action eh? It’s the first step down the slippery slope for many of us, especially in the not-for-profit sector; losing our jobs due to cuts in government funding and then being expected to do it for nowt. When will these collaborators stand up and say no?

Actually, there is a fourth reason why I am hoping for failure – I want the whole lot to come crashing down and the government itself with it.

Easy Way to Stop Smoking?

A critique of Easyway to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr
I hesitated to start writing this critique because I don’t want my views to be taken the wrong way. I don’t wish to dissuade people from reading the book – anything that stops people smoking has to be a good thing doesn’t it? I don’t doubt the good intentions of the author or the sincerity of the testimonials.
I started reading the book with the best of intentions. It had been recommended to me by a couple of people, independently, but both with experience of working for a drugs charity so I reckoned they knew what they were talking about. After several failed attempts to stop smoking, which have included going ‘cold turkey’, using nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) and Zyban, I thought it was worth a punt. I found the book easily enough on Amazon and parted with my fiver gladly. It then sat unread for a few months but eventually, assaulted by a bad cold at the beginning of November and dreading another winter full of viruses and infections, I thought it was about time I gave it a whirl.
I really, really, really, want to give up, and took my reading of the book seriously. If I wasn’t sure that I had grasped what the book was getting at in a particular section, I would re-read it before moving on. There were a lot of things that rang true for me and I thought this could be the one thing that gets me to kick the nicotine habit.
Even when I was two thirds of the way through and I was starting to get annoyed with some of the statements and assumptions that I didn’t agree with, I persevered thinking that the penny would drop at some stage soon and I would be a non smoker!
Well, blow me but the epiphany never came! After my cold, I got a horrendous throat infection and was even more determined to stop. I had cut down drastically – just two cigs on one particular day, and sped up my reading to get to the end of the book so that I would be able to give up completely (one of the instructions is not to give up before finishing the book). And holy smoke! I got to the end and try as I might to focus on the stuff that made sense and convince myself I didn’t need cigarettes, I am still a smoker.
So what exactly is my problem with Easyway? As I said before, I don’t passionately disagree with it on a fundamental level, but it is just too simplistic and I also find it incredibly judgemental (although it purports not to be; it’s like listening to a lecture from the most evangelical ex-smoker in the history of the universe). There are also some basic statements and assumptions made as though they are fact which I just know are not true.
Before I go on about them, in the interests of balance, I will first put forward the things I agree with:

Nicotine is an addictive drug – no shit Sherlock; I don’t need a book to tell me this.
Fear – it is true that thoughts of giving up fill us with fear and dread; fear of failure, fear of withdrawal symptoms, fear we won’t ever enjoy anything again, fear of our weaknesses etc.
Stress – there’s a lot of sense in the argument that nicotine addiction causes stress. It’s awful being stuck in a three hour meeting without a ‘comfort break’ (mind you, these meetings would be awful anyway. Who wants to be stuck for half a day talking about pointless shit in a square box with a bunch of suits in any circumstances?)
There’s no such thing as one cigarette – with a few exceptions of people who claim to have tried it, didn’t like it and never did it again, this is largely true.
And now for the things I don’t agree with:
Nicotine does not have physical withdrawal symptoms – yes it does! I can attest to it. Everyone is different but for me in the past, withdrawal symptoms have included headaches, sore throats and back pain. An osteopath once explained the latter to me as nicotine changes the signals to your central nervous system so withdrawal of the drug can cause pain.
Brainwashing – most smokers know they smoke because they are addicted. They know all the arguments for and against. They may blot out the evils of tobacco but they know they exist. In a way Easyway is just trying to replace the so-called brainwashing with another kind (there is overuse of the phrase ‘get it into you head’). Nothing wrong with that per se, but what to hang it on? Where was my Eureka moment where everything fell into place and I knew I would never smoke again?
Boredom – If we smoke because we are bored, are we always bored? What rot! The only time I smoke out of lack of something to do is if I am in the house on my own during the day with not much to do. At all other times I am adequately occupied thank you very much.
You don’t need will power – how on earth can you say the EasyWay doesn’t require will power? Every time you feel the urge to have a fag and don’t have one, you are using will power, what else do you call it? Just because you say to yourself ‘Yippee! I don’t need cigarettes anymore!’ doesn’t mean the urge to smoke has gone – you still have to fight it.
NRT is no use – whilst taking the point about replacing one sort of nicotine for another and making pharmaceutical companies rich, if this method works in the sense that it stops you smoking, surely this is better than continuing to smoke. Granted, it hasn’t worked for me but it has helped me cut down a lot in the past and I am sure it does help some people to stop smoking altogether. I can’t find any definitive research but some claim it has a 25% success rate and others say it increases the chances of giving up smoking by as much as70%. Not fantastic stats. but worth a try surely.
Casual smoking is just as bad as regular smoking – while it’s obviously better not to smoke at all, smoking occasionally is surely better than smoking regularly. There is some spurious argument in the book that if casual smokers enjoy smoking why don’t they do it all the time and if they don’t like it, why do they do it at all? That’s like saying if you like a drink why don’t you do it all the time? It’s called controlled drug use dude! In other contexts, this would be lauded, not criticised.
Heroin addicts are criminals – while it is technically true that using heroin is illegal, this is not a helpful analogy. Due to the availability of heroin in prison, lots of criminals are heroin addicts but that’s not quite the same thing. There is also a good argument to de-criminalise heroin along with all other drugs as this would reduce a lot of the social problems associated with it.
I could go on, but I will just finish by saying that I also found the book quite monotonous, repetitive, unfunny (as in totally lacking in humour) and long-winded in getting round to the final message which is basically to just give up or you are crap and stupid.
Still work in progress for me I’m afraid.

Abbey follow-up. Sort it out!

A few weeks after I last wrote I was dismayed to receive my bank statement and about £4,000 had gone out. This has now been sorted out and I have the money back but what a palaver!

Firstly, I can’t believe they queried one tiny transaction of about £14 and let 2 huge ones go out from some obviously bogus Australian outfit. (Having gone through my statement carefully, it looks like there were a couple of small dodgy transactions in fact. I gather this is quite common as they’re testing out to see if you notice before hitting you with the big ones).

Secondly, why is the fraud dept. closed after 5 in the evening and at weekends? I wasn’t aware criminals kept regular 9-5 hours.

Thirdly, why is it impossible to speak to someone who is actually based in England? In the event, I decided to ring the local branch who said (as I expected) that all they could do if I went down there was ring the fraud dept. themselves. After some chat, the woman said she’d ring them for me on Monday morning and assured me it would get sorted and agreed they were idiots letting those transactions go through just after they’d queried me on some piddly ones which I had made

Please Abbey - sort out your customer service!

Abbey customer service – a frustrating story

Whilst buying some stuff off Amazon.co.uk on Tuesday evening, I was not aware that my purchase were actually going through as 3 separate transactions until I had completed the check out procedure. An hour or so later, my personal mobile rang (which is unusual as I have a works mobile which is the one I use most often and only my partner uses the personal number when he knows I won’t be home). On answering the call, a robot told me that this was a security call from Abbey and I was very confused as to why they had used this number and not my landline for a start, and then the robot proceeded to ask a couple of security questions and I started to wonder if this was a scam call, but the questions didn’t result in me giving away incriminating personal information so I held on. Then it asked me if I could verify the last 5 transactions on my card. The first amount they reeled off meant nothing to me as (I found out later) it was a third party company using the Amazon marketplace and the amount included postage which I wasn’t expecting. I pressed a button to talk to an actual person, who turned out to be in Bangalore or somewhere and I told him I didn’t understand why I had got this call nor why it had come through to a mobile number I barely use. He said that as I was suspicious, I should hang up and ring the freephone number on the back of my bank card. I did this and was given a number of options by another robot, none of which matched my query. They gave me another number to ring and so I rang that and again was not given any options that matched my query and the robot told me that I had made an ‘invalid choice’.

I got my bank statement out and checked the number that was on this for telephone banking and eventually got through to another person. I tried to explain to him that I had been making quite a few purchases on my card in addition to that evening; after all, my partner’s birthday was coming up and I was going on holiday soon so I had been buying presents and clothes – what’s weird about that? He started to ask me to verify specific transactions some of which I could, but one or two I couldn’t, again because I didn’t recognize the actual company names or exact amounts where postage had been added. I asked him to hold on a minute while I checked on my computer. I went to my e-mail account and found that 2 transactions had been declined. I told him this and he just said yes that was the bank’s doing. I tried to explain these were small amounts and again tried to explain that I had been buying stuff. Also, most of the transactions were for small amounts. Because I couldn’t confirm exact details of one or two small transactions, he said my card had been stopped and I had to ring the fraud department. I rang them and they shut at 5 o’clock. What madness is this? Don’t they expect fraud outside normal office hours?

The next day I was going to go to the bank first thing but guess what? On Wednesdays they don’t open until 10.00 by which time I had meeting commitments at work so had to wait until lunchtime. It did get sorted out, but after half an hour of the lady in the bank making calls and I had to speak to them myself again and was still being asked the same stupid questions to verify relatively minor transactions. I understand the bank wants to prevent fraud but this procedure seems ludicrous to me when I could show that I was in possession of my card and had been buying stuff, as I say, mainly small transactions. Sort out your customer service, please, Abbey!

I'll be back!

it's been a while since I did this blog mainly due to lack of interest... I have now (belatedly) got into facebook and now flock so got inspired to start again and give this social networking lark a bit of a go! Will be back soon!

World Famous in Hebden

Last night Transglobal Underground played at t'trades and I was looking forward to meeting up with our mate Tim who plays with the band, but he wasn't sure if they were staying over because some of the band had jobs the following day. When they got to Hebden, there was a kids party on so they couldn't get in to set up and went t'Shoulder instead, then Tim came here and we had a chat and a cup of tea, before he went to get ready.

The gig was sold out, which was something I hadn't considered so it was a good job we were on the guest list. The place got packed and really hot, and we saw quite a lot of people we knew and some people from outside Hebden even – just like the olden days.

The band soon got the crowd whipped into a frenzy (it doesn't take much round here!) and there was a sweaty hour and a half or so of spiffing music and bad dancing. Afterwards, we chatted to Tim some more and said our goodbyes as he had a long drive back to London and then back to Paris on Monday, and ended up chatting to a couple of other band members outside as they were loading the van. It's a shit business!

Anyway, I managed to mention Phil's music projects as he himself was reluctant to do so – Tim said send us some links so if Phil doesn't, I will, He has contacts as he does film music and all sorts of other things now, including belly dance music strangely enough! Also told them about The World on Your Doorstep and to spend more time here next time, now they have seen how much people love them.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at how popular they are as they are jolly good and really interesting and genre-defying, but when you've known someone in a band from when they had their first single which you bought to help them get in the charts (and subsequent Coca Colatm advert) it's strange to see them 15 years later in the small northern town you now live in. I was also a bit worried that no-one was going to come out, especially as it is shit weather this weekend. So I was really pleased for them, and for us too because now they might come back.

Who do you trust?

The event most worthy of note this week has been the debacle of the missing data of 25 million British people, floating around on 2 CDs somewhere between the Revenue and Benefits office in Tyne & Wear and the National Audit office in London. Good grief! It looks like what happened is that the Audit Office wanted some names and addresses, but it was easier to just copy the whole of the database rather than do a query. This is probably because all this IT stuff gets outsourced (costing us taxpayers billions by the way) and no-one internal actually knows how the database works, so they would have had to get someone else to do it.

No-one knows where the data is, and police have been searching for it, and it could turn up behind a desk somewhere I guess, but my theory is that someone has taken it home thinking one day they can make a lot of money this, but then got scared, and/or possibly waiting for the fuss to die down before doing anything with the disks. There's always the chance that it will mysteriously re-appear when they think nobody's looking. I wonder if they've realised that they could bring down the whole UK banking system – Northern Rock? peanuts!

One consequence of this state of affairs has been some backtracking in plans to introduce ID cards, requiring a national database – the argument being that we can't be sure the data would be safe. Well der! Personally, I have never been naïve enough to believe that our personal data stays in one place. I know that companies buy and sell it so they can use it for marketing purposes or whatever. The situation is not helped by the fact that UK government has a history of continuing to pay companies to create these ridiculously unreliable IT systems (see health service for details) instead of getting someone who knows what they're on about to do it. Will they ever learn?

A Night of the Unexpected

We had an interesting night in Huddersfield on Friday, as we went to see what this Festival of Light was all about. This entailed some French performers called Plasticien Volant putting on a show called The Pearl, starting at St Peter's gardens and parading through the streets with a growing array of large flying sea creatures including jellyfish, seahorses, octopus, a whale and some kind of snake, chasing a pearl through the streets to St. George's square, where said pearl ended up in its shell. There were loads of people lining the streets, some intrigued, some puzzled, and some downright scared by the strange Europeaness...Well, it is a bit weird for Huddersfield but it probably happens all the time in places like France and Canada. At the end of the performance, there were fireworks being let off from behind the station, which was nice.

We made a quick exit to beat the crowds out of the town centre, as we had tickets for a Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival event at Bates Mill called 1 Night of the Unexpected. When we got there, there was some what I call bing bang bong music going on, so I distracted myself with a cheap beer and took the piss. my neek partner told me to stop wingeing and accused me of not getting it. Err! I do understand that two tunes were going on at once; I just hate that shit. Thankfully, things got better, with a very interesting violin performance, a fantastic laser show and someone getting toy cars to play records – a cross between spinning plates and scalextrics. There was also a funny DJ who played old random scratched 7” singles, and a woman doing industrial drumming – ah! That took me back to the '80's!

We also experienced a very interesting installation with a Luddite theme (now I got this straight away and hardly anyone else did – including a couple I knew who had just arrived and looked puzzled, and loads of eggheads who just stood there watching people twiddling knobs). We stayed almost 3 hours altogether, then some more awful bing bang bong music started up, this time of the jazz variety so even worse than the brass type, and we made our escape.

All in all, we agreed we had had a very entertaining night; it was certainly different. The HCMF audience made me crack up though – mainly university bods and students, on the guest list of course, chattering on about the last thing they went to rather than actually listening to and watching what was going on in front of them. I wondered how many of these experimental musicians had research grants at us tax-payers expense to pay for their expensive Apple laptops and lasers. Hmm! (sound of me stroking chin and looking pensive!)

nice work if you can get it

A few items in the local paper have been getting us riled this weekend. The first is to do with bidding for some lottery money to do up the park. I would like to know why on earth the council needs £90,000 for this! All the park needs is a tidy up and a few better items in the kids' playground (and getting rid of the stupid skateboard park would help to discourage the wannabe chavs).

The second item involves the local council wanting to stop people complaining about their services. Well, if they actually offered any visibly decent services in return for the extortionate amounts we pay in council tax, people wouldn't complain would they? I have been trying to contact them this week to report a non-working street light. The number I have from the council's own services directory is out of date, and a message which is barely audible gives you an alternative number to ring. I had to listen to the damn thing three times until I could make out the new number! No wonder people get pissed off.

Which brings me to the last item to hack us off namely plans by aforesaid council to spend £100,000 to improve their image, including £30k on a Reputation Manager. They wouldn't need one if they were any good! Still, nice work if you can get it I suppose!

Night of the Tranny Vampires

Last night was our annual fireworks display. We went out and met up with a friend and got a pint before finding a spot on the Marina. We had a laugh with the cheap sparklers we had bought earlier – 3 out of 6 were little better than burning sticks! I said next time we were getting Chinese ones, none of that British rubbish! The firework display was a bit earlier than normal but it was really spectacular! It could have been the best ever! Some of them were like sparkly snow and I wished I'd remembered my camera as I could have had this year's Christmas card piccie now.

Town was predictably heaving and our friend didn't want to go in any crowded pubs afterwards so we went to the White Swan and sat in the garden (even though she had slagged it off earlier for being awful but I don't really know why). I quizzed her about not inviting us to the special night at her local, the Hare and Hounds to celebrate a new tenure. She said it was weird as they were dressed up and the landlord was wearing fishnets and a Dracula cape. Transvestite Vampires in Old Town – excellent! Spooky rural goings-on suspicions confirmed yet again! We predictably started making up Hammer-type film plot lines.

Our friend went home early on the pretext of having to see to a neighbour's cats and so we went to our local. Another friend was on her way to see her daughter and niece at another pub but asked if we'd still be there in an hour. I said I wasn't sure, but we were – unfortunately. On her return, she was full of tales of woe, including her best mate having lung cancer, her daughter self-harming, her sister having an eating disorder and her ex turning out to be a trannie. I must say, the last of these seemed trivial and who cares as long as no-one gets hurt. We said he should move to Old Town!

however, I guess your best mate dying is rather heavy, but I could do without knowing at the end of an otherwise amusing and entertaining night – selfish I know but I really wished we had gone home earlier as originally planned. On the other hand, it is a traditional drinking day and the highlight of the local calendar so it is inevitable that you drink more than you should and stay out later. We seem to be doing this less often now so I guess the odd binge is okay (despite what our nanny state government say).