Now that I’ve stopped being an alcohol dispensing machine

Now that I’ve stopped being an alcohol dispensing machine, I can stop to reflect on recent events for this blog. I work as a barman in Birkbeck College, and I do day shifts which are usually quite light on custom, except in the first week of May 2008. When exams finish people want to piss it up big time, and on a couple of days this week I was the only Bar Associate, (my distinguished official job title), in the place and I had to facilitate my fellow students in the task of drinking the bar dry over about 3hrs. Mind you, all the customers were very nice, and I guess most pub bar staff work about this hard usually, it just came as a cruel and unusual shock to me.

My usual practice of mucking about with websites, blogs and keeping up with email correspondence in between serving the odd latty now and then, has been disrupted, which is unfortunate because the Green email lists that I regularly keep an eye on have both been busy with controversies. One over the recent NUT/UCU/PCS (teachers, college lecturers and civil servants), strike, where one correspondent dragged his coat by suggesting that school teachers were overpaid and not deserving of Green Party support. As if that weren’t enough petrol on the fire, a population policy working paper is being prepared for the next Green Party conference and one draft suggests, among other things a government set target population for the UK and the use of child benefit , (or rather the withholding of it), to restrict family size. A can of burning worms, which has somehow got to be dealt without enabling the mainstream media to portray GP as misanthropic nutters.