I'm so proud...and drunk..and skint...but proud

Pint of Harp mate
school was a bitch today...

What would you spend ₤47,000 on? A flash car? Put it towards a holiday home in Donegal? Invest it for the kiddies future? Well if you are from Belfast you will probably piss it down the toilet or throw it up outside the pub! Nice.

A report published by the alcohol awareness and rehabilitation website Perry Clayman Project has revealed that people in Belfast spend ₤47,000 on booze over the period of their lives. This is more than anywhere else in the UK. Cambridge came a piss(ed) poor second with a paltry spend of £40,939. Wimps.

The top ten pished cities

1. Belfast
2. Cambridge
3. Leeds
4. Leicester
5. Manchester
6. London
7. Sheffield
8. Bristol
9. Aberdeen
10. Cardiff

Makes you proud eh? We may not have won our bid for European City of Culture but we won the fight after. Now when you think about how many God botherers there are in Belfast who prefer a big pint of Jesus to a pint of harp(ic) it really means that the rest of us are spending even more than the ₤47,000. The next bar to my restaurant had a "healthy" queue outside it at half ten this morning which is testament to the reports findings.

But don't rush to condemn us too quickly. What else was there to do over the last three decades? We only got some decent shops in which to spent our beer tokens, sorry I mean money, in a few years ago. A wander round Belfast "City" centre a few years back would have lasted but 15 minutes, unless you were captivated by the C&A range of smart casuals. And what past times we indulged in as a people were no good unless you were off your mind on a bottle of Buckfast or a four pack of Special Brew. Have you ever rioted sober? I think not!

All joking aside, when you consider that earnings in the North of Ireland are amongst the lowest in the UK this report isn't good reading. My boss was chirpier today though as he greeted the booze hounds who keep him in BMW style.

Does that mean I work in a very successful industry? Should I be getting paid more? Am I sober now?

The joy of Stereotypes

not necessarily
Granny-stabbing-hubcap-stealing-tracksuit-wearing-scumbags

I love a good stereotype. They are easy and save you from having to be reasonable. In a way stereotyping is the less bloody equivalent to spraying the room with machine gun fire, at some point you are going to hit someone who deserves it. For example if you say everyone from Liverpool is a "Granny-stabbing-hubcap-stealing-tracksuit-wearing-scumbag" chances are you will malign a few innocent souls but on the whole you have will nailed your point.

Now, not everybody from Liverpool is a "Granny-stabbing-hubcap-stealing-tracksuit-wearing -scumbag", there are a fair few like that, but it would be unfair to describe everyone in that way. Those (very) few innocents are guilty by association. Just in the same way as not all Scottish people are tight fisted gets, and not all Welsh people enjoy a fiddle with a sheep. Some people let the side down and the rest get tarred with the same brush.

But not all stereotypes are negative. For example "all black men have huge schlongs", "all Asians are good at math", and "all French women are hot". But even these positive stereotypes have their problems. For example what if you are an ugly French woman or you're black and you're small?

And then we come to the Irish. Oh my. Wikinerds has a wonderfully enlightening list of Irish stereotypes.

* alcoholism
* dislike of the British
* often has red hair or freckles
* whimsical
* high birth rate
* Leprechauns
* dirty
* musical
* cops
* Catholic
* the color green
* beat their wives

Now when I first read this I thought it was rather amusing. But then I went all Celtic Tiger-ish and decided that it was out of date to say the least. In the North of Ireland we all love each other now and 30+ years of sectarianism and tribalism has been solved and put to bed by the wonderfully tanned Peter Hain. I don't even switch the TV off now when the British national anthem comes on! That's progress! So to say we hate the British is now defunct as a stereotype. And with the recent influx of migrants your average Irishman has moved his hate/bile on to them. This annoys the shit out of me considering that the Irish inhabit every corner of the world.

But the alcoholism bit really wound me up though. I've worked in England and have seen them crazy kids go for it on a Saturday night. We have seen Ireland become a slick, modern country with huge growth over the last ten years. Some of the biggest companies have bases here now. Bags of spuds have been replaced with bags of money. The economy is amongst the best in Europe. We are all fucking minted, apparently. Now you can't do that if your pished.

Well you say that, but apparently you can. The last report on Alcohol Consumption by the European Commision shows that the Irish spend more per head on booze that anywhere else in Europe. Each household spends nearly €17,008 on alcohol each year. What? That's mental! That is apparently 3 times more than any other country in Europe and ten times more than the Greeks. It's fifty quid a day! Fifty quid a day on booze?!

So with that in mind it is clear that some stereotypes are indeed true. In fact as I type this I am as drunk as a, well, as drunk as an Irishman. Even the cops here like a good drink. Even the cops who feature in Safe Driving adverts.

Fuck it we are still the greatest lovers. I'm off to down a bottle of Gin and beat Little Miss Manuel*.





Who's laughing now?

*no Little Miss Manuel's were hurt in the making of this blog.