Oh joy, the new Scottish booze legislation comes into force today. Supermarkets are reorganising their displays, pubs are spending thousands of pounds on applying for new licenses (which, in the case of North Lanarkshire, mean some 25 pubs won’t legally be able to sell booze from today due to delays in the application process. Council says don’t worry, cops say WE WILL BUST YOU) and staff will require mandatory training to make sure they don’t encourage drinkers to have another drink. Imagine it! Pub staff asking if you want another drink!
Apparently the move, which makes my life that little bit more annoying by preventing me from buying wine or beer when I do my normal 8am shop (you can’t buy booze before 10am now, which I’m sure will prevent alcoholism) is about “rebalancing” Scotland’s relationship with booze. There’s another bill along on Thursday which will flout EU law by trying to impose price controls on booze too. Rebalancing, again.
Which reminds me of a story.
Barney is a decorator, and he cracks me up. A while back he was telling me about a woman whose house he was working in, or trying to work in: she had one of those really yappy little dogs, and it was driving Barney daft. She did apologise for the dog’s incessant barking, and said she had no idea why it was so hyperactive.
“Oh, I know why it is,” Barney said. “It’s out of balance.”
“Balance?”
“Yeah. Sometimes their wee heads get out of balance, and they become really bad tempered. Easy to fix, though.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“How do you fix it, then?”
“Well, what you need is a little bit of metal. Lead’s best. And what you do is, you put the lead into the dog’s ear and that rebalances it.”
“My goodness! So how do you get the lead into their ear?”
“With a FUCKING GUN!”
I can’t help thinking some of our elected representatives would benefit from a similar procedure.
Comments
0 responses to “Perhaps it’s Scotland’s politicians that need “rebalancing””
After all these years in Scotland, it’s still quite striking to me how the starting point for any piece of Scottish legislation is “How many public sector jobs will this create?” Look for “Licensing Education Liaison Officer” posts being advertised soon.
…for that matter, it’s like when you are purchasing a box of aspirin and a box of paracetamol at the same time, and the woman behind the counter raises her eyebrows and asks “Why are you buying these both? You are aware that…” her government-prepared speech on overdoses begins – and during all of this, the person behind you in the queue is a junkie doing the methadone dance to chipmunk techno on his mobile.
Aaaagh, that drives me crazy.
The thing is, it’s not going to work. I had no problems buying a few bottles of Domestos at 8am – and it wasn’t just normal Domestos, it was the really concentrated stuff. Two for £2!
The overdose thing really pisses me off. Not allowed to buy more than two boxes of painkillers in one go, as if having to go back into the shop and queue up at the tills three times instead of once will bring so much cheer into someone’s life that they’ll change their mind about that suicide they were planning.
>The overdose thing really pisses me off.
I second that. You used to be able to buy a carton of 50 generic paracetamol for about 25p in boots, now you have to buy comparatively expensive packets of 16, and deal with inquisition if you buy more than one…
This is ludicrous. Owning 50 paracetamol didn’t suddenly make me consider suicide, if I had been considering suicide the 16 a packet limit is no deterrent at all.
>“How many public sector jobs will this create?â€
One of the things I really don’t miss is that. When I worked for a techy company in Scotland *so* many of our customers ended up being some sort of public body, down here – even though I do slightly different stuff – I’ve never so much as come across one customer that was a public body.