Monthly Archives: May 2010

This Week: Top Five Inexpensive Wines

by Ben Kritikos

Let me start by saying I don’t know much about wine besides that I like drinking it.  And I drink a lot of it.

Good.  I feel I’ve firmly established myself not as some kind of nag champa-burning, crossed-legged vino guru, dispensing advice through a veil of mystery and facial hair; but simply as a bloke who can tell the difference between a bottle of rotgut motor oil that may take the enamel off your teeth and something worth spending £7 on.

At the age of seven, I started going fishing with my dad down at the local jetty, overlooking the harbour where flocks of Canada geese would congregate to snooze, shit and occasionally pluck a fish from the water.  I remember the smell of the tackle boxes (I was lucky enough to have my own, with two or three colourful lures and some sinkers); the wriggly, writhing brown worms with pincers at one end — and my dad’s can of beer.

At some point, probably when the fish weren’t biting, he let me have a sip.  It was my first taste of alcohol.  I didn’t like it.  Looking back, I think the reason I didn’t is because my dad was drinking Budweiser.

At 13, I managed to furtively gulp a few glasses of wine at a dinner party while my parents weren’t looking.  It was the first time I got drunk.  My face turned red and hot, and when I looked in the mirror all I could do was laugh.  The buzz didn’t last too long — I was asleep in less than an hour.

The next morning, I realised that I’d fallen in love — with wine.  The wine I’d swilled wasn’t even any good.  In fact, it was plonk.  But somewhere behind the overtones of car tire and eau de oil refinery I could faintly detect a hint of Something Else.  To this day, I find that the various Somethings-Else haunting the shadowy burgundy recesses of a good wine defy description.

At 21, I had the good fortune to work at a very good wine and liquor shop in Boston, where I learned a great deal about booze through the most direct method available: tasting.  The shop held weekly wine tastings; and not only were the staff allowed to taste the wines, we were required to.

Rather than feel like an ignoramus because I couldn’t describe “noses” and “bouquets”, I found myself vindicated.  The owner, an elderly Jewish man with zero patience for uppitiness, used to wink at me and gesture to a crowd of yuppies huddled in purposefully, visibly solemn appreciation.  “While they’re busy describing it,” he’d say, “I’m busy drinking it.”

Taking a leaf from the owner’s book, I drank wine abundantly, using my staff discount to try out things I couldn’t otherwise afford.  I came to particularly love Bordeaux, and white wines from the Alto Adige region in Italy.  My appreciation of Bordeaux increased when I met my best buddy S, who just so happened to work in a family-owned wine merchant in south County Dublin.

Drinking wine can become an expensive hobby.  If you don’t work in a wine merchant where you get a significant discount — or have a mate who does — it can be tricky navigating your way through Vinoland with empty pockets.  In fact, it’s almost worse than knowing nothing at all; once you know what good wine tastes like, it makes crappy wine fairly intolerable.

That said, there are very drinkable wines available for not very much money.  While I would always prefer to buy a good bottle of wine at around the£10 to £15 mark to guarantee that what I’m getting isn’t some mass-produced bottle of grape Coca Cola made by starving children in a factory full of fire and sulphites, like some beverage-producing inferno — it’s not always possible.  Sometimes I’m broke.  Chronically broke.

These are my top five cheap wines that you can drink and enjoy without subsequently eating toast for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rest of the week. Continue reading

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This Week: Top Five Ways The Baby Boomers Fucked Up Our Future

Image by Sky Thompson

by Ben Kritikos

“The world is what you make it,” they’re constantly telling us. At what point did I make a world where people listen to Michael Bolton?

Baby boomers seem to have a sense of entitlement to personal freedom. They’re like that kid standing next to his Dad who gestures the horizon with a swooping arm, saying, “One day, this will all be yours”.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this mentality of entitlement; but in combination with unparalleled wealth and freedom, it has produced a generation of spoiled brats.

My grandparents’ generation endured some of the most horrific events in human history, including the second World War, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, and the crushing of the American labour movement. I’d wager that millions of WWII veterans vowed to protect their kids from these kinds of horrors.

The generation known as the Baby Boom were the largest generation in the history of humankind. This massive blob of ego-positive kiddies grew up shielded from reality, being spoon-fed a narrative about reality that placed them squarely in the driver’s seat. The hitherto unknown postwar health and prosperity instilled the boomers a heightened sense of self-importance.

Just look at the 60s and the way people still talk about it as though it were the apex of human history. When did being young and self-indulgent — only to disavow principle in favour of a high income — count as a cultural achievement?

Now that the baby boomers are approaching pensionable age it is time we, so-called Generation Y, have to live in the aftermath of their unmitigated personal freedom. And they’ve left us with a disaster. World War III isn’t imminent, but ecological disaster could be. Housing and third-level education are all but unaffordable. It’s almost impossible to find a job, and when you do it will almost certainly be mind-numbing. Then, to add insult to injury, there’s Kenny G.

But apparently all of us are spoiled because we had Nintendo and iPhones. Yipee. Continue reading

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New Year Resolution: Part 4

by Ben Kritikos

April came and went, trees exploded into sensational bursts of green, flowers bloomed, and I often found myself on a little bench in Regent’s Park enjoying the sunshine. When it was raining I stayed in and read Stella Gibbons’ Nightingale Wood.

Fans of Cold Comfort Farm won’t be disappointed. While Nightingale Wood hasn’t got the masterful comic punch lampooning over-sexed authors of the rural British novel like its famous predecessor, it is a witty, sometimes acerbic novel, full of astute observations about class, gender and an ever-present reminder to do with our lives what we’d really like to.

Nightingale Wood is the story of Viola, a young widow who finds herself penniless. At the merciless charity of her dead husband’s family, she moves into their dreary home where any semblance of joy is crushed by a strict adherence to stuffy old British formality. As in Cold Comfort Farm, nobody actually benefits from the unspoken collective agreement to be unhappy.

Mr Wither, the patriarch, is a penny-pinching old despot who wouldn’t allow a single fault to go unnoticed. Mrs Wither and her two “spinster” daughters lead lives of “quiet desperation”. Viola is generally regarded as common — a shop girl of no good breeding. It’s a modern (well, 1930s) version of Cinderella, with the brutality and insanity of WWII always lurking in the background.

The grayness of Viola’s boring existence is coloured only by a fairytale Prince Charming in the form of Victor Spring, a local millionaire with all the dignity and virtue of Goldman Sachs. That Victor Spring is somewhat vapid and uninteresting — indeed, like most of the lead characters — is hilariously fitting for the time and setting, and did nothing to dampen this reader’s enjoyment of the book.

Nightingale Wood‘s pages glow with sympathy for characters struggling to get what they want; yet an underlying emphasis on fairness and clear-mindedness roots this novel’s feet firmly in the ground. With a somewhat-happy-somewhat-realistic ending, this is no Hollywood style romcom.

Stella Gibbons did not accrue the esteem of her feminist contemporaries. With her humourous depictions of all types who take themselves ever-so-seriously, it’s not hard to understand why.

That’s not to say that Stella Gibbons was a Barbie doll.

Gibbons paints men in light I wouldn’t describe as favourable, often characterising them as darkly cunning or even downright duplicitous. I’m talking about protagonists here. The author portrays men with a not-so-subtle wariness.

In fairness, I suppose the history of literature is peopled with men who misrepresented, misunderstood, mischaracterised and often maligned women in the pages of their verbose and hefty tomes. In light of this, Gibbons’ wariness is nothing short of generous.

*

Anna’s been trying to get me to read the Harry Potter books for yonks now. I finally cracked, and we’ve got the first two in our possession. True to the spirit, we’ve been reading it aloud to each other. I would recommend this method of reading to anybody who’s got a partner who is literate.  It beats the crap out of watching telly — which, incidentally, we don’t do because we don’t have a telly.

I totally loved Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, and we’ve been squeezing in any available minutes to read The Chamber Of Secrets.  I didn’t read them when I was kid (they didn’t exist when I was a kid) and so I feel like I’m making up for lost time.

To tell you the truth, I never had an interest in Harry Potter until I saw J.K. Rowling’s address to a group of Harvard graduates. She is most definitely my new hero, and a perfect example of the kind of amazing writer whom I may have overlooked had I not endeavoured to exclude men from my reading lists this year.

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Election Special: A Progressive Coalition?

by Ben Kritikos

Now that Gordon Brown has announced that he will resign as Prime Minister, he has potentially put a bomb under the bums of Tories hoping to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

Like many left-leaning people living in Britain, I’ve been pulling my face off slowly with the anxiety caused at the thought of a Tory government unleashing its Lord Of The Rings-style darkness over this country, plunging it deeper into … well, something resembling the 80s.  And I don’t mean musically.

The much maligned first-past-the-post system by which a government is elected in Britain has vomited up a hung parliament.  With no party able to constitute a parliamentary majority, we’re faced with the likely possibility of a coalition government.

But the nature of that coalition is as yet uncertain.

At the time that I write, the Liberal Democrats are in negotiations with both Labour and the Conservatives.  However, with Brown’s imminent resignation, Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems should be tempted to abandon their potential pact with the devil, and form a progressive coalition.

A Labour-Lib Dem coalition would not form a majority.  For this reason, any prospective coalition would include other smaller “progressive” parties such as Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National Party, and Norther Ireland’s SDLP.  Caroline Lucas, Britain’s first Green MP (and my personal hero) could also be approached to join and bolster any potential coalition’s voting power.

A working parliamentary majority would need 323 votes.  If all the above parties agreed to form a coalition with Labour and the Lib Dems, they would narrowly achieve that majority — albeit with almost no room for breakaway votes.

While such a governing cooperative may not be ideal, it would be no less stable than a Tory-led coalition with the Lib Dems, who have both ruled out backing each other on key policies such as (ha ha!) electoral reform, defense and the European Union.  Despite all David Cameron’s talk of concessions crafted to woo the Lib Dems, the two parties harbour fundamentally divergent visions of Britain’s future.

The Lib Dems know this.  They also understand that many who voted for them did so with a view to keeping out the Tories. Gordon Brown failed to sufficiently communicate to the electorate why they should vote Labour, and is duly accepting the responsibilty of that failure by resigning.  So too must the Lib Dems understand the responsibility that has been placed on them: a coalition with the Conservatives is a betrayal of those who voted Lib Dem to keep them out.

William Hague will argue until the cows come home that a Labour-Lib Dem coaltion would put an unelected prime minister into 10 Downing Street; that because the Tories garnered the most votes the electorate have essentially made their choice; and that only a Conservative-led government would have the moral authority to rule.

On the contrary, the Conservatives came well short of a majority.  They garnered 10.7m votes — less than the number of people who didn’t bother their arses to go to the polling station and cast a ballot.  That hardly makes David Cameron an elected prime minister, let alone give him any moral authority.

Even less so do the Tories’ winnings constitute a prefence of the electorate: most Britons voted for progressive parties.  So a progressive coalition would best represent the preference of the electorate.

Will the Lib Dems form a coalition of progressive parties, including a Labour party without Gordon Brown as leader?  Or will the Lib Dems dash the hopes of many of those who voted for them, who truly believed Nick Clegg that it was time we were done with two-horse politics?

One thing is certain: this election has forced both Labour and the Conservatives into a state of desperation.  It’s quite humourous to watch them both brought down a peg or two, wheedling the Lib Dems like desperate drug addicts — their addictions to power goading them to make ever more concessi0ns, ever more entreaties.

Let’s see what happens.

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This Week: Top Five Beers

Image by Sky Thompson

by Ben Kritikos

Beer is the oldest prepared drink in the world.  The ancient Egyptians drank it, and even made lovely pictures of themselves enjoying it.  Some of the oldest existing laws in Germany are laws governing the production of beer.  It’s likely that Europeans take laws governing the production of alcoholic beverages more seriously than the laws regulating investment banks.  I know I trust a brewer over a banker any day.

Beer dates back to the 6th millenium BCE.  The earliest Sumerian writings contain references to beer.  A prayer to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing, also served as a recipe to help them remember how to make the beloved bubbly bevvie.  It’s something you wouldn’t want to forget, naturally.

"So how 'bout that Pharoah, eh? A sarcophagus like that, at the taxpayers' expense! That'll be three twists of flax, when you're ready." "You said it. These kings are all the same -- a misplaced sense of entitlement, is what it is. Do you do cash back?"

Pretty amazing when you think about it, but the invention of beer predates the invention of sewage systems; one can only imagine the effect this must have had on Sumerian high streets of a Saturday night.

Beer in what is now the Middle East is a far cry from the frothy stuff of pints down the pub.  Most commonly, “beer” is understood to be pale lager; it is the most popular beer in the world.  There’s no accounting for taste.

If you’re anything like me (a dubious state of affairs, admittedly) you find lager almost entirely dispensable, except with a curry.  While a good lager is a thing of joy, I prefer more robust beers, generally speaking.

Don’t get me wrong, though — if you’re buying, I’m drinking. Continue reading

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