How does gravity effect you ?

John Furlong, the bloke in charge of the Winter Olympics doesn’t like the way his event is being publicised by the British media.

Well boo f***ing hoo.

It wasn’t the British that stopped members of the public from seeing the Olympic Flame, or us having broken down machinery, or us denying access to practice to non-Canadians in the vain hope we might finally win something on home soil. We were too busy organising p**s-ups in breweries, a skill Mr Furlong might want to learn.

Britain simply doesn’t do the Winter Olympics. We only watched it in the Eighties because Nottingham’s own Torvill & Dean were guaranteed the gold, before selling their collective souls to reality TV.

Let’s face it, Britain doesn’t do winter, let alone winter sports. A quick glimpse of the exclamation mark filled weather forecasts over the last three months will tell you all you need to know about our ability to cope with cold weather. And just because you have twenty foot high snow drifts every winter doesn’t make you more ‘manly’ than us, it just means you were born in the wrong place.

Each event of the winter Olympics seems to revolve around degrees of effect that gravity has on the participant. How quickly will you slide down this track, how quickly will you bounce down this slope and how stoned do you have to be to strap an ironing board to your feet & slide down a hill with three other equally wasted stoners. There’s an element of skill in the Bob Sleigh, apparently. The driver steers the sleigh round in the same way our Nottingham Tram drivers ‘steer’ the tram.

These aren’t sports, they’re f***ing holiday activities, something rich families do of a winter in some packed valley at the foot of a mountain range you need elephants to cross. And we don’t have elephants.

These chalet villages are like a f***ing cold Butlin’s holiday camp. So EXACTLY like a Butlin’s holiday camp.

But why stop at winter holiday sports, why not go for the summer market as well ? Why don’t they include the Donkey Derby, a Knobbly Knees competition (Gold, Jersey, 1985) or Open the Box in London 2012.

You’ve got to feel sorry for Marion Rolland, four years training, travelling half way across the world, probably paying Ryan Air some stupid tax on those ridiculous skis only to fall over after five seconds, the Olympic dream up in a cloud of the wrong type of snow. But there was no need to make out like she’d injured herself, get up you numpty, you’re s**t. If she’s got any sense, she’ll not be paying the airline ski tax on the way back, leave them there, duck.

So all events are c**p at the Winter Olympics.

Except for the female Skeleton Bob, obviously, that’s cool.

Why I’m kind of against LocAle

LocAle is a CAMRA scheme that’s effectively two fold, to encourage local pubs to stock local beer to encourage local production and secondly to lower the carbon footprint of beers delivered all over the country. Quite how this second goal is achieved when local beers travel to big distribution chains to then get delivered back again, I don’t know.

After the mergers & monopolies report in ’89, the big winners were the breweries who instantly tied in with one of the big boys for a mutual ‘swap-shop’ type deal. Sudden every Charles Wells pub stocked Newcastle Brown while S&N pubs started serving Bombadier. The limited choice on offer to the drinker was suddenly ever so slightly less limited.

One outcome of the LocAle scheme is that pubs tend to veer towards the more popular local beers. Castle Rock, and in particular, the seemingly ubiquitous Harvest Pale, have done remarkably well out of this. So well, in fact, that Castle Rock now have to brew some of their beers in far-away Burton. Do these still class as LocAle ? Was the scheme devised to help small / medium sized breweries grow even bigger rather than the true local micro-breweries ?

The other more noticeable impact on the drinker is a lessening in choice, rather than an extension. The Horse & Groom in Basford, for example, still stock a wide range of beers from all over the UK, but have to advertise specially for their Yorkshire & Coastal beer festivals. Special events aside, ideally these non-LocAle beers should be on regular rotation rather than just for the odd special weekend. Smaller pubs, and those with maybe only one hand pump, who stock a LocAle beer will therefore never stock any thing outside our immediate area, and most likely, nothing except from Castle Rock or Nottingham Brewery for example.

The latest SIBA beer festival at the CanalHouse highlighted a wide range of quite frankly stunning beers from all over the UK, all styles, strengths and colours. Yet the majority of these will be unheard of outside their regional areas, with now less opportunity to get local pubs trying them out for fear of upsetting their local CAMRA branch they’ve worked so hard to impress.

Like the beer orders of ’89, the bigger breweries find their way through the legal, and possibly more importantly, moral meaning of the legislation. Maybe then the LocAle scheme needs to be revisited before the only chance of drinking ‘foreign’ beer is by travelling away from home, away from the LocAle pubs and increasing rather than decreasing the carbon impact.

The mardy bogger

Ah well, we didn't exactly need the cricket scoreboard at Pride Park on Saturday, Forest simply didn't turn up to the party and went home with exactly what they deserved, a 0:1 reverse.

It does beg the question, and to paraphrase Sir Alex, if Derby can play that way against us, then aren't they cheating their fans by being pish for the rest of the season.

Well, that's a question for Robbie Savage, the second most odious creature currently listing D***y C****y as his employer.

The first ? Step forward Mr N.Clough, once Forest hero, now so completely out of his depth that he feels the need to physically attack fellow managers from behind.

Tut tut tut Mr Clough.

Good job they didn't lose, eh, or it could've been far worse.