And the conversation turned to the idea of how exactly would you expect the results of the battles to be announced? What would happen if the result of the battle wasn’t actually in? Would you have the broadcaster reading out something like:

Greece vs Persia (Second leg, Thermopylae). Pools panel, away win

And then if you had a pools panel to decide ancient battles, what other sorts of results could you have?

Atlantis vs Sparta. Match abandoned, waterlogged pitch

So as well as these daft little things, when wars are comprised of a series of different battles, you’ll pretty much find that whichever side wins the final battle wins the war. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that they will have won most of the battles in a particular conflict (although they may well have done). So we decided that instead of the victors of a war being determined by who won in a strictly military sense (i.e. had troops left at the end), we should decide who won a particular war by means of producing a league table.

So here are the results from the English Civil War… (using commonly accepted ‘winners’ of each battle, or a draw where no clear winner; particularly decisive victories are shown as such). The results of the battles I have listed show that the Civil War was remarkably close, finally being decided on goal difference…

Despite getting off to a tremendous start to the season, and at one stage opening up a 30 point lead over the Parliamentarians, the Royalists struggled badly towards the end of the season, and were pipped at the post by the Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians. This terrible run for the Royalists, which brought King Charles I only three victories in the final eighteen fixtures is believed to now leave Royalist manager King Charles I facing the axe.

Results of each individual ‘match’ are available below the fold…

1. Parliamentarians 1-3 Royalists (Powick Bridge)
2. Royalists 2-2 Parliamentarians (Edgehill)
3. Royalists 2-3 Parliamentarians (Aylesbury)
4. Parliamentarians 0-2 Royalists (Brentford)
5. Parliamentarians 0-0 Royalists (Turnham Green)
6. Royalists 4-0 Parliamentarians (Braddock Down)
7. Parliamentarians 1-1 Royalists (Hopton Heath)
8. Royalists 4-0 Parliamentarians (Seacroft Moor)
9. Parliamentarians 1-2 Royalists (Camp Hill)
10. Parliamentarians 0-2 Royalists (Stratton)
11. Royalists 1-0 Parliamentarians (Chalgrove Field)
12. Royalists 2-1 Parliamentarians (Adwalton Moor)
13. Parliamentarians 4-5 Royalists (Lansdowne)
14. Royalists 5-1 Parliamentarians (Roundway Down)
15. Parliamentarians 0-3 Royalists (Bristol)
16. Royalists 1-2 Parliamentarians (Gainsborough)
17. Parliamentarians 3-1 Royalists (Hull)
18. Royalists 0-3 Parliamentarians (Winceby)
19. Parliamentarians 4-1 Royalists (Gloucester)
20. Royalists 2-2 Parliamentarians (Newbury — 1st Leg)
21. Parliamentarians 3-0 Royalists (Alton)
22. Royalists 1-5 Parliamentarians (Cheriton)
23. Parliamentarians 1-0 Royalists (Nantwich)
24. Parliamentarians 2-3 Royalists (Newark)
25. Royalists 0-3 Parliamentarians (York)
26. Parliamentarians 0-4 Royalists (Bolton)
27. Royalists 2-1 Parliamentarians (Cropredy Bridge)
28. Parliamentarians 5-0 Royalists (Marston Moor)
29. Royalists 3-0 Parliamentarians (Lostwithiel)
30. Parliamentarians 1-1 Royalists (Newbury — 2nd Leg)
31. Royalists 1-8 Parliamentarians (Naseby)
32. Parliamentarians 1-0 Royalists (Langport)
33. Royalists 0-2 Parliamentarians (Stow-on-the-Wold)

English holidaymakers are turning to drink on their breaks with the average adult consuming eight alcoholic drinks a day, a survey suggests.BBC News: English Turn To Booze On Holiday

This struck me as noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, the sheer amount. Eight drinks per day would amount to 112 pints over the course of a fortnight’s holiday, which is surely a little excessive. I mean, I’ve been known to take a real ale or two in my time, but that is way out of my league. Unless maybe they mean people average four pints per day, which would be eight units. That sounds a bit more plausible…

Secondly, by my reckoning I only had about fifteen alcoholic drinks in total when I was on holiday (although I did have more than half of these in one evening), so I am “owed” another 97. I’m not sure whether or not I’m allowed to spread them out over the rest of the year, or whether I am somehow obliged to have fifteen drinks a day the next time I am on holiday in order to even it out…

But the figures just seemed too high to be right. And I couldn’t find the actual survey results anywhere (although plenty of media sources appeared to have regurgitated the press release), so I thought I’d contact Know Your Limits (the NHS site behind it) myself to see if I could find out more.

Disappointingly, I wasn’t able to get my hands on the data itself, which reduces my confidence in the data — if the results aren’t available to double-check, we’re asked to simply assume that no mistakes have been made anywhere in the calculations. They might be right, but as far as I am concerned, anyone wanting to throw statistics or survey results at me needs to provide access to the data (or at least a tabulated format of it) if they want me to trust it. They don’t have to hand the results to me, but they ought to be available if I want to go looking for them.

If they provide no way for me to check it, I am not going to put too much stock in the results.

Anyway, when I contacted Know Your Limits, they did say that while they were unable to extract the results for me (if I understood right, it was part of a larger survey) but they were able to provide me with the original copy of the press release, which had a bit more information on it.

This clarified some of my original questions. Firstly, it was indeed 8 alcoholic drinks per day, not units…

With the typical summer break lasting ten days, that’s 80 alcoholic drinks over one holiday; 80 pints of beer is equivalent to 227 unitsSummer Drinking National FINAL

…bloody hell, that is rather a lot. They also managed to break down the drinks consumed to some extent:

beer lovers consumed an average of five pints a day. Wine drinkers lapped up four standard glasses of wine each day, while spirit drinkers admitted to having five mixer drinks, such as vodka and coke, each day. Drinkers also admitted to downing four other alcoholic drinks, such as strong cocktails or shots each daySummer Drinking National FINAL

But it was a couple of other bits that really surprised me. Firstly, a bit saying that about a quarter of holidaymakers admitted to drinking more than three times more than usual. Now let’s play about with the stats here. The sample size was 3,500 or so, of which 1,611 ‘qualified’ (adults who had taken a summer holiday this year).

If 1,611 averaged eight drinks per day, that’s 12,888 alcoholic drinks between them. If the highest drinking 27% (those drinking 3x their normal amount) managed 16 alcoholic drinks per day, that’s 6960 drinks between those 434 people. Leaving everyone else still averaging over 5 alcoholic drinks per day, 35 pints — or 70 units — per week.

Surely this can’t be right, otherwise we’d be having thousands and thousands of people returning from holiday each year with a barely-functioning liver. Although this would go some way to explaining why people keep talking about alcohol-related disease costing the NHS vast quantities of cash. I’m still finding a lot of the stats quite difficult to believe, though:

one in five people (19%) surveyed in the ICM poll pledged to take two days off drinking a week;Summer Drinking National FINAL

Am I to understand from this that 81% of the adults surveyed are going to be having an alcoholic drink at least six days a week? Again, surely this can’t be right — I will generally get myself out once or twice a week, so there are usually at least five days in a given week when I don’t have a drink. I accept that I’m probably slightly unusual in the sense that I practically never drink in the house, but still, I find it difficult to believe that most adults are drinking virtually every day…

Which is why I’d feel a lot more confident in the stats if I could actually see the raw data and/or the ‘weighting’ which they say has been applied to it (although I have been told that the weighting was based on a more accurate population survey so shouldn’t have thrown this out), but even so, without being able to see the actual raw data, I cannot bring myself to entirely trust the statistics derived from it, although I can accept that it was at least a reasonably large sample size.

So while I’m disappointed with Know Your Units — a health site really ought to show the information they are using to back up their claims with, particularly when they are as astonishing as this — I’m pleased with the person I was dealing with at Know Your Units for providing the help she did (she went out of her way to answer questions about the stats and the data, although she didn’t have access to the data itself), and I’m also pleased to discover that they’ve got a tetris-style game based on the number of units in drinks. Whether or not it actually helps anyone learn the amount of units in a drink remains to be seen, but it’s a larf…

And then of course, there’s one final thing: the recommendation of how much people should actually drink. They seem to have backed away somewhat from the ‘x number of units per week’ approach, instead now going with:

The NHS recommends women should not regularly drink more than 2-3 units a day (around one large glass of wine) and men should not regularly drink more than 3-4 units a day (two pints of beer) . [...] ‘Regularly’ means drinking every day or most days of the week.Summer Drinking National FINAL

So my understanding is what what they are saying is that if (as a man) you drink more than two pints most days, this is bad for you. Which led me to wonder about the ‘binge drinking’ measures, as while it’s unusual for me to drink more than twice in a week, I might well have more than a couple of pints each time…

There is no consistently agreed measure of ‘binge drinking’. More than eight units for men and more than six units for women on any one day is used as a measure of binge drinking in the population, but individuals vary and the vital thing is to avoid drinking to intoxicationKnow Your Limits FAQ

So this tells us two things: firstly that virtually that the majority of British holidaymakers are going to spend their entire holiday binge-drinking (again, I find this implausible: what about the non-drinkers, people with small children who drink less?) as an average of eight drinks will be well past eight units, but also that there’s no specific measure of binge drinking — basically, it’s saying you can go out and have a nice time, but don’t get too pissed. In other words, if you go out and drink reasonably sensibly a couple of times a week, that’s pretty much okay.

Well, I’ll drink to that…!

A gentleman on a bicycle was handing out fruit, and people were happily accepting it and wandering inside. Odd. So naturally curiosity forced me to investigate further and very shortly I was the proud owner of a rather manky looking pear.

A rather manky looking pear, that is, with a sticker on it which read “I ♥ Kopparberg”. The theory was that you eat the pear, then hand over the sticker to someone inside the bar, who would give you a plastic cup containing a small amount of Kopparberg in exchange for the sticker.

There were only two problems with this: firstly, they’d managed to get the most manky and unclean looking pears I’d seen for some time, so I didn’t really fancy eating ‘em (although the idea that these unpleasant looking pears might have been the ones used to make an alcoholic drink did not concern me in the slightest). And secondly, when they said a small glass, they did mean a small glass.

I mean, that must have been approaching almost a quarter of a pint. Could they not just have given you a free bottle? Having said that, it was quite a pleasant drink. I’ve had perry quite a few times before (normally at the Newcastle beer festival) so I have got stuff to compare it to, but it wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t as strong (in an ‘amount of alcohol’ sense) as the beer festival standards, and it was maybe a bit fizzier than I would generally have gone for, but other than that, it was fine.

It was available in the bar in two varieties: normal and red. The ‘normal’ one I tried was presumably the Kopparberg Pear, and from looking at their site, I guess the read one had to be Kopparberg Mixed Fruit (apple cider with raspberries and blackcurrant added).

I ended up having only three free drinks of Kopparberg (two pear, one mixed fruit). I’m guessing I was only supposed to have one, but as I’d quite enjoyed it, I wandered over to ask them how much it actually cost, contemplating purchasing a bottle, but was told that it was free. So I said ‘well can I have one of each, then?’. Shy bairns get no sweets, as they say…

I can’t honestly say that the mixed fruit one would appeal, but as I’m quite fond of a perry, I’d be tempted to try it again some time. I’d be even more tempted if they could make it a bit more ‘real perry’ (knock the ABV up a bit, take out some of the fizz, and so on) as opposed to something seemingly more pitched at the Woodpecker/Strongbow fizzy cider kind of the market. As obviously, similarly to liking real ale, I also like real cider.

But while it might not be one that I’d take as a regular tipple, I’d certainly suggest to people — particularly people who I think are likely to like it — so if you’ve not already tried it @ciderlass, you might want to give it a go.

And obviously Kopparberg have got themselves a Facebook presence: seemingly whenever you’re promoting anything, you need to be doing it on Facebook as well as on the web generally. People are going to talk about you on Facebook, so you might as well be there where you can listen and contribute to the conversation.

However, there are three things that they could — and in my opinion should be doing as well.

1. They’re asking people which is their favourite. This would be an ideal opportunity for a competition. The best description of why you like a particular one gets you sent 8 bottles of it — one winner every day for a week or something?
2. They don’t appear to be on twitter. For someone launching a campaign which is taking in social media, it seems to be a bit of a miss
3. Most importantly, they have not sent me a great big box of their ciders to, ahem, review. This is obviously a simple oversight on their part…

Particularly that last point…

To set the scene: the article talks about drugs used as a legal ‘high’ — stuff like Salvia, amyl nitrate and isobutyl nitrate, which do not fall under the Misuse of Drugs Act — and talks about how they can be dangerous and how the authorities would like to see them banned. However, it’s the quote from the MHRA (not to be confused with MRSA, by the way) which rather puzzled me:

The MHRA says because they have a physiological and potentially harmful effect on the body, they can be considered a medicine.BBC Magazine: High, Above the law

Let’s just recap: because they are harmful, they can be considered a medicine. This rather suggests that something which is not harmful cannot be considered to be a medicine; and therefore that all medicines must be harmful.

I’m not entirely convinced that this was the message they had been hoping to get across…

Whereas had they just said “because it has a physiological effect on the body, it can be classed as a medicine” that would have made a little more sense. After all, we don’t want medicines which are invariably harmful, do we?

We’d surely prefer medicines which are invariably beneficial. That would be marvellous. Indeed, I’d be prepared to drink to someone who could come up with that: a medicinal compound which would be efficacious in every case, so…

We’ll drink a drink a drink to Lily the pink the pink the pink, the savior of the human race, for she invented medicinal compound most efficacious in every case.The Scaffold: Lily The Pink

(Aside: when you’ve got a sixteen stone drunk, aggressive looking bloke belting out this song at you, and blocking off your only exit from the pub, it tends to stick in your memory somewhat. Ah, but that’s The Station for you…)

There’s currently an event on in NewcastleGateshead (the gestalt entity formed from Newcastle and Gateshead councils to promote events across the two) called EAT! Newcastle Gateshead, which is not, as it may initially sound, a command to consume the region, but is instead a festival of food.

This started on the 2nd May and runs onward until the 17th, but it was on the 2nd that we decided to go. There was a free event on in Baltic square called IncrEdible North East which basically involved a lot of stalls selling different foods, some storytelling activities, some sporting and nutrition things, and other exhibitions.

Add this to the fact that there were exhibitions on at the BALTIC mill art gallery that I wanted to see, and we seemed to have the perfect family day out plan. Visit the food thing, visit the art gallery thing. Two birds, one stone. What could possibly go wrong?

Well… we got there, parked in the car park, and headed down to the market square: me, the GLW and the kids BTP and SWP, where we had arranged to meet up with Grandma J and Grandad B. They had got there ten minutes earlier than we had and so had already picked up a leaflet to see what was available.

As we headed over to find one of these leaflets for ourselves, the GLW noticed a football related thing, where Newcastle United coaching staff would talk to kids about proper nutrition. This was aimed at primary school children, but at the upper end of it (i.e. ages 8-11) but as they weren’t too busy, they were happy to let BTP (5) go in, although his little brother was a bit too young.

No problem: we took turns ‘keeping watch’ outside the tent, while the rest of us went wandering off with SWP across the millenium bridge and back again; finding oversized jigsaw type things where you have to put the cuts of meat back onto the wooden animal (yeah, it seemed odd to me too), and, in my case finding a stall from the local Allendale Brewery where they were handing out little glasses (very little glasses — about half a mouthful) of their beers in order to try and entice people to buy some later.

Of course, I wouldn’t fall for a ploy as simple as this, and the fact that I bought a bottle of Allendale Black Grouse and a bottle of Allendale Curlew’s Return later on was entirely coincidental.

BTP’s half hour of listening to soccer coaches impart useful nutritional advice (“you shouldn’t eat ice-cream every day” — as if he’d get the chance!) also came with a couple of opportunities to win Newcastle United related prizes and he was absolutely delighted as he came buzzing out with an inflatable Monty Magpie that you can place over your hand and wear, presumably at home games for those children who have a Dad is willing to be seen next to someone waving one of them about.

Anyway, he was absolutely thrilled with this and we were just wandering away when one of the ladies from the tent came running up to me and said “didn’t he tell you he’d won a pair of match tickets?”. That’s kid’s priorities for you: £60 of free football tickets impresses no one: £1 worth of inflatable magpie and you’re over the moon…

So far, so good, eh?

Next it was the BALTIC itself. Sarah Sze’s Tilting Planet exhibition had been very much enjoyed by @infomixer, so that seemed worth a visit.

It was an art installation, using junk items as the raw material (empty water bottles, drawing pins, matchsticks, bits of paper and so on). It really was quite impressive. There was a variety of colour, of different items juxtaposed together; it was interesting llooking how the things were put together. And I’d managed to avoid questioning why they had been put together until I read the blurb on the wall outside.

…Sze’s expansive sculptural vocabulary uses these items constructively to precisely build structures that defamiliarise our preconceived ideas of these objects

BALTIC: Tilting Planet

And at that point the whole thing came crashing down on me. Yes, it’s interesting. Yes, it’s different. Yes, it shows you can create different shapes, patterns and sculptures which are pleasing to the eye out of commonly discarded things. But this really is nothing new.

The bloody Wombles (thieving, tax-avoiding buggers or no) had this corner covered in the 1970s with their “making good use of the things left behind, the things that the everyday folk leave behind” shtick. And it’s not high-falutin’ high concept art. It’s interesting, it’s clever, but if you feel the need to use phrases like “sculptural vocabulary” and “defamiliarise” to describe it, then it’s just a pretentious arty circle jerk.

I still enjoyed the art: it’s just the pretentious wank surrounding it I objected to.

The next exhibition was…

…which was a selection of different small exhibits concerning the natural world, or that of the Victorian naturalist. There was a video of a naked woman in a lake full of jellyfish (pretty jellies, and a woman with no clothes on both fine independently, but I’d not have considered putting them together), a video of some giant tortoises shagging (or “playing”, if there are kids within earshot), some various paintings, a rowing boat with a video display of what a rower would see rotating around it (quite bizarre but actually quite captivating).

On the next floor down, there was a strange styrofoam sculpture called “Overhang” simply made out of large styrofoam blocks stacked together in a way which looked like it was liable to collapse under its own weight at any moment but was surprisingly still vertical.

And then, on the last floor, was The Gainsborough Packet. This is a 9 minute long folk song with accompanying video inspired by a letter a John Burdikin wrote to his friend Pybus in 1828. Folk music is not, really, in any shape of the word, my thing, and so I had the intention of watching it for about a minute — just to be polite — and then wandering off.

Only after a minute, I thought that I might as well stay for one more minute, and everyone else was staring intently at the screen also. And then some seats became available, so we sat down. And sat, enthralled through the rest of the entire performance, as the artist Matt Stokes (who created the thing) and the singer Sam Lee (who, as the singer, was somewhat essential to the the song) related the tale of John Burdikin to his friend Pybus.

It was bloody brilliant. And The Guardian enjoyed it too. The only drawback is that it is only on at the BALTIC until the 10th May, so you’d better get a bleeding shuffle on if you want to see it. On the other hand, it is also being shown at 176 in London until the 28th June, so if you’re at that end of the country, you’ve got a little more time to pop along.

And, obviously, this is where part of this post title comes from, as the song contained the frequent refrain, “what do you think of that, my friend Pybus” (or possibly “that, then,”).

And that was the BALTIC. Brilliant: you won’t always like everything you see there, but there’s generally something you’ll like, and it’s generally something different that you wouldn’t tend to see elsewhere…

We’d timed our trip to the BALTIC extremely well: we left the BALTIC just in time to see the Millenium Bridge start to raise up…

This is quite an impressive sight, watching an 800 tonne 126 metre span glide seemingly effortlessly through about sixty degrees of arc.

There’s not really room here to include all eleven photos of the Gateshead Millenium Bridge gradually opening and the fishing boat (part of the Eat Me! Drink Me! festival thingummy) come through underneath it, so I’ve instead just included one where’s it’s only just opening, one where it’s half open, and one fully open here, although if ’tis your sort of thing to watch the Millenium Bridge opening, more of the photos can be found in my Flickr ‘Newcastle and Gateshead’ set.

After this, we popped along to the stalls again to buy some Sea Bass for tea, along with some Beer Bread, the beer highlighted before, and pick up a couple of ice creams for the kids before heading home. We had considered getting a squirrel to eat, on the basis that none of us had ever eaten a squirrel before and as it was claimed to be a grey squirrel (although in the packet with the fur removed it wasn’t really that easy to tell) then I’d be doing my bit for the red squirrel population, presumably. Only by the time we went to someone else had got it.

Then there was just time for a quick pose on the Gateshead Millenium Bridge with four other bridges in the background, and then it was time to go home…

…so, it pretty much turned out that nothing went wrong and we all had a lovely time…

After talking about the Newcastle Beer Festival on this site and on twitter, I discovered that I had picked up a new twitter follower called @beermerchants. As they are importers of beer, and they are on twitter, I asked them the question: which breweries are on twitter?

They provided me with a list, but it has a very American slant, when I was specifically looking for UK based real ale brewers.

So I have decided that I will start my own list: if you know of any other twittering brewers of real ale based in the UK, let me know via the comments and I’ll add you to this list. Meanwhile, if any of the brewers would like to send me beer to ahem “review”, or invite me on brewery tours, do feel free to contact me!

Here they are:

Ale

Ciders

Current brewery count: 21 ale brewers, 2 cider brewers. Last update 23 September 2009.