Sorry, Prof: it may well be fatal, but mine is still another pint

I yawned on Sunday when I glanced at the story in the press digest I receive each morning, After all, it was hardly a surprise to learn that I am more likely to die of cancer if I drink more than two pints of beer a day.

But then I looked at the piece more closely. It was actually suggesting that the safe limit, for those of us who do not actively fancy a horrible death, is two pints of beer A YEAR.

Death. This is what it looks like.

Actually, it said “drinks”. So it might have meant halves. Let’s not get carried away.

This joyless appraisal, according to the Sunday Express, came from one Professor Peter Anderson of Newcastle University, whose dinner party guests are presumably not encouraged to bring a bottle.

His prescription is for the European Commission to step up the marvellous work it has already done on cigarette labelling, and plaster all drinks bottles with warnings that they cause cancer.

As if rapacious pub companies, cut-price supermarkets, the drink-driving crackdown and smoking ban were not enough, the few remaining rural pubs would presumably be forced to display on their pump clips: “Old Badger Ale, 4.0% ABV. Oh, and it will GIVE YOU CANCER.”

Somehow, I cannot see this providing a boost to sales.

Now, life is a continuous process of risk assessment and it is important never to lose sight of the important fact that even those who never drink or smoke, and subsist entirely on organically grown lettuce leaves, still die eventually. Quite possibly of boredom.

I also write as one who has consumed significantly more than two pints of beer a year for the last 44 years. In fact, I would still be in serious trouble if the suggested limit had been two pints per day, as I originally imagined.

But if we all took to heart every bit of the health advice with which we are bombarded by science each day, we would surely be afraid to eat or drink pretty much anything at all.

Even breakfast is a minefield. Bacon and eggs? Don’t be ridiculous: cured meat is a proven carcinogen, cholesterol blocks your arteries. Cereal with milk? A great cue to worry about “Frankenstein” GM maize and all that fat in dairy products.

I have little doubt that if alcohol were a newly invented product, it would struggle to make it past the regulators and onto the market. But since it has been around for many hundreds of years, it is perhaps more appropriate to accept that it is going to remain part of our life and assess how much serious harm it really does.

Oh yes, it now fills our city centres with the revolting spectacle of mass drunkenness almost every night of the week, and keeps our overstretched A&E departments busy dealing with the fallout.

A typical night in the Bigg Market

Will slapping health warning labels onto bottles of lager have any impact whatsoever on this? What do you think?

It would surely be more productive to focus on recreating the sort of sensible licensing laws that were designed to deal with this sort of problem in the first place, and which our politicians have bafflingly spent the last 15 years or so dismantling.

As for Professor Anderson’s report, I have been giving it a great deal of thought as I have spent the last two nights in small hotel rooms in Berkshire and London with two over-excited small boys making their first visit to the capital for a packed programme of royalty, dinosaurs and toy emporia.

Hampton Court

Changing of the Guard

Duke of Edinburgh's 92nd birthday gun salute

Natural History Museum

I have considered, on the one hand, the fact that they are both under four and I am pushing 60, and really ought to make an effort to stay alive as long as possible to fulfil my paternal responsibilities.

On the other hand, there is the stress associated with taking the two of them out anywhere in public, particularly now that the older boy has taken to pretending that he does not know me when we are left alone together, and I look so much like a silver-haired candidate for an Operation Yewtree investigation.

And the firm conclusion I have reached, with my sincere apologies to the Professor, is that mine is most definitely another pint.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Pensions: the ideal excuse for an evening in the boozer

My father left school at the first opportunity and saved for a pension all his working life. He retired at 67, invested all his savings in an annuity, and dropped dead at 73.

Which was sad for his family, but good news for the pension system. Because it helped to boost the profits and share price of his insurance company, which in turn increased the worth of its major investors: pension funds.

This may sound too good to be true, like an entire community supporting itself by taking in the neighbours’ washing, but it all worked pretty well so long as people considerately died not too long after they stopped working.

The essential problem today is that too many of us are living too long. Not only that, but our careers are being shortened by spending longer in education, taking gap years and expecting paid leave to be a parent. How can we possibly aspire to retire early, too?

Frankly it’s just not on. Unless you are a successful entrepreneur or have clawed your way to the very top of the greasy pole in business, you have no hope of saving enough to fund decades of comfortable retirement during less than 40 years at work.

While if you’re employed in the public sector, sadly the rest of us just can’t afford to maintain your current pension arrangements, either. Terribly sorry and all that, but you’re going to have to soldier on for longer and boost your own pension contributions, too.

Unless, perhaps, you are willing to enliven your retirement with dangerous sports or other risky pursuits that stand a chance of reversing the relentless upward trend in UK life expectancy, which is currently increasing by three years every decade.

A truly astonishing statistic, given that one cannot open a newspaper without reading how global warming, superbugs, obesity and drink are going to do for as all any minute.

Talking of risk and drink, a 65-year-old non-retired friend of mine recently climbed 23,000-odd feet up Everest, helped along by a supply of fine wines and vintage Cognac. I have not dared to ask how he feels about the recent advice that people of his age should drink no more than 1.5 units of alcohol a day.

www.justgiving.com/icelandeverest

 

That is about half a pint of beer, or less than a standard pub measure of wine. Surely all part of the health professionals’ relentless drive to prove that the only safe limit for booze, as for cigarettes, is a big, fat, round zero.

This is quite a laugh considering that some of the biggest drunks I know are doctors, while nurses are fiercely locked in combat with ballet dancers for the title of most dedicated smokers.

The arguments for reducing our intake of booze are always presented as being for our own good. Cut down on it, and we could all live longer lives. Well, possibly. Then again, they might just SEEM longer. And haven’t we already established that living ever longer is not necessarily an unalloyed good?

Ah, but we would also be healthier and thereby help to achieve that sacred goal of saving the NHS money. Except surely not, in the long run. Because until someone invents a foolproof way of ensuring that we all go to bed in perfect health one evening, then pass away peacefully in our sleep, sooner or later we’re all going to die of something unpleasant and probably lingering, in which the NHS (or its Cameron-Lansley privatised successor) will almost certainly feel obliged to get involved.

It’s a conundrum. My own advice is that we should all discuss it further in the course of a long an evening in the pub. Which will help a threatened local amenity, cheer us up, and might just help to pull the whole pension system back from the brink.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Hann Perspective: My Mission

The camel has been famously described as a horse designed by a committee, so the duck-billed platypus was presumably the product of many long sessions around the whiteboard by wildfowl consultants “thinking outside the box”.

Er, what was my mission again?

The trouble with most corporate announcements these days is that they are similarly constructed through the collective efforts of those with too much time on their hands. Even though I make a living of sorts out of ghosting the things, I often find myself longing for the days when a Chairman’s Statement was just that: an autocrat’s personal and sometimes colourful account of how he (and, let’s face it, it was nearly always a “he”) saw the world.

Mission statements seem particularly inclined to suffer at the dead hand of the committee. When someone first came up with the idea back in the 1980s, I was all for it: a few simple and well-chosen words on the first page of an annual report that would allow the reader to grasp in an instant what the company did and how it intended to prosper. Once a name like “Jones the Butchers” on the cover would have provided a bit of a clue, but after the branding consultants had transformed that into Arriva, Aviva or Aveva, some further help seemed appropriate.

Then the groups with no ear for English and absolutely nothing better to do set to work, trying to come up with something inspirational and memorable that would bring a warm glow to all their “stakeholders”.

I recently wrote a brochure describing a technically complex business in what I thought were simple and accessible terms. A couple of attempts were required to correct my initial misunderstandings, but if I say so myself the third draft was as near to a good read as anything on this particular subject was ever likely to be.

Then the final version destined for the printers came through and I found that the inevitable committee had been at work, randomly inserting passages of total gibberish, laced with incomprehensible acronyms and couched in jargon that only an industry expert with a PhD in gobbledygook could hope to understand.

Few things seem harder than writing plain English. Researchers (presumably organised into a committee) recently came up with the breakthrough of rewording medicine labels, because the previous warning to “avoid alcoholic drink” apparently led to many people carefully skirting around the licensed aisles in Tesco, but cheerfully washing down their medication with a large tumbler of Scotch.

Now that will be replaced by “do not drink alcohol while taking this medicine”. Which, as any hardened boozer could have told them, will be taken to mean that you should not swallow the pills with the whisky, but that there is no reason not to have just the couple before or immediately afterwards.

Corporate statements can be short and pithy, for example “Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Which at least makes sense, even if it isn’t half as memorable as the informal company motto “Don’t be evil”.

Alternatively, they can be succinct and laughable, like Royal Mail’s “Our vision is to be demonstrably the best and most trusted postal services company in the world.” No mention there of their real mission of making deliveries ever later, collections earlier, and scattering red rubber bands in their wake.

My telephone and broadband provider proclaims that “BT’s mission, our central purpose, is to provide world-class telecommunications and information products and services, and to develop and exploit our networks, at home and overseas, so that we can meet the requirements of our customers, sustain growth in the earnings of the group on behalf of our shareholders, and make a fitting contribution to the community in which we conduct our business.”

Strangely this makes no reference at all to outsourcing virtually all customer contact to call centres in India, programmed to respond to complaints with assurances that you don’t have a problem at all; and to advise those with no broadband to seek help online.

And that, fundamentally, is the problem with mission statements. They don’t matter one jot if your organisation has not embraced the fundamentals of delivering excellent products or services through the efforts of well-trained and committed people.

I have read suggestions that the committee approach to producing a waffling mission statement is a great way of team-building, but if that’s what you’re after I’d just send them off to one of those places where they will be challenged to get across a lake with two planks, an oil drum and a ball of string.

And if you really must have something on your website about what makes your company so great, why not slip a few quid to a needy professional writer? Do contact me if you need some suggestions on where to look.

Keith Hann is a PR consultant who amazingly makes a living mainly from writing English – www.keithhann.com

Originally published in nebusiness magazine, The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.