Diane Abbott on Andrew Marr

I've been asked to write something nice and supportive about Diane Abbott after seeing her on the Andrew Marr show this morning. She truly is my favourite choice for Labour leader, but only for narrative purposes, it would make the story of British politics rather fine.

Also on Andrew Marr was Iain Duncan Smith, I though he looked very much like a 1950's statesman, which was kind of a cool anachronism, although he's pinched his body language from Tony Blair.

Anyhoo, that Diane Abbott, whilst she was being interviewed I couldn't take my eyes off her hands, the way she was constantly picking at the nail on the third finger on her right hand, all through the interview, regardless of the words coming out of her mouth, just pick pick pick.

Whilst IDS was doing Tony Blair hand gestures, Diane was just pick pick pick.

IDS's body language tutor must have said in one lesson, emphasize points by using your hand, grasping motions, open gestures, rolling gestures, gestures, gestures, gestures. Drumming in the lesson. Diane must have missed that lesson. Probably busy with diversity training.

I've listened intently, dragging my eyes away from her nail-picking and it seems the over-riding message of her leadership bid, it isn't policies or dogma, its just that she's not white or male, so my narrative reason for supporting her is entirely reasonable.

Not that her reasoning is that reasonable. She may not be male or white, but she is an Oxbridge graduate, so she's just like all the other candidates and miles away from the vast majority of Labour supporters. Not to say that an Oxbridge candidate can't represent a non-Oxbridge constituency, just that it forever cancels out any argument about who can represent the views of who.

Back to her policies, I'm not sure what they are, although when on the Marr show she was discussing public sector cuts with Iain Duncan Smith, Iain Duncan had said something along the lines of how up north public sector wages had squeezed out the private sector so factory owners were finding it difficult to employ quality staff at a price they could afford, with the subtext of if there were public sector cuts up north, the folk could easily find new employment, albeit with lower wages.

Diane Abbott's response was that in her constituency the public sector was the biggest employer, the last factory in Hackney closed twenty five years ago, if people in the public sector were made redundant they wouldn't be able to find new jobs and hence increase the burden on welfare.

To my jaundiced ears it sounded like her constituents are unemployable wastes of space who only have their jobs so that they don't show up in job seekers allowance claimant figures. And they might as well just be paid to dig holes and fill them in again, anything to keep them off the dole.

All the more reason to sack the lot of them.

That said, if what Diane said was correct, then maybe their pay could be cut drastically, as there's little private sector employment to compete with, and so Hackey could provide better value for money for the taxpayer than Iain Duncan Smith's northern masses.

But no no, Diane's line was they Hackney's public sector workers shouldn't face cuts as they're unemployable, almost as if giving them jobs is charity.

**UPDATE**
That's just Diane Abbott's portrayal of her Hackney public sector constituents. Me, I think they're probably very employable but are currently trapped in a public sector wage trap. They'd be able to fulfill their creative potential and self-actualisation far better in the private sector, but taking a hit on their wages is just too much.

Her point about the last factory in Hackney closing twenty five years ago show a contemptibly poor understanding of manufacturing. it doesn't take a factory to make a factory, give me a dozen lads, a few soldering irons and an RS Components catalog and I'll give you a world-leading cutting-edge manufacturing company.

Faulty CaterCheck 3 Thermometers

I did resolve as a New Years Resolution to "crush my enemies mercilessly", and now at last I have found an enemy, namely the CaterCheck 3 thermometer from Comark.

I feel a little bad writing this blog post, the designers and engineers don't deserve this. Maybe they work incredibly hard for very little pay, designing the waterproof enclosure, the circuitboard, the display layout, spending weeks testing it, before a manufacturer elsewhere assembles hundreds, or thousands on a production line, minimum wage or lower workers spenind days hunched over their workstations, soldering and screwing them together. Or maybe its all automated, barely improved since version 2, the designers and engineer's role having evolved into the innate Dilbert-like cubicle existance, surfing the internet aimlessly for hours avoiding the being caught by the boss's, collecting their adequate paycheck every month, not quite appreciating how lucky they are.

I'm going to assume that this blog entry is going to figure quite highly in the google results when you try searching for "CaterCheck 3" and although I'm procrastinating, this is about how failure-prone they are. If it makes you feel any better, this blogpost may also serve as a googlewhack tripwire, someone in the management chain here, investigating faulty units will find my blog, read my previous moany blog entries and after very little investigation and ruminating, I get dismissed from my job.

These thermometer probes are used in the catering and food production industry, at my factory we have a dozen or so of them, they're probably very popular. And they knacker.

We start off with loads of them, working fine and a few weeks later only two work properly and those are the one's I use every day.

The screen is blank, it doesn't switch on. Or the display fills with characters then goes blank once more.

On closer inspection, there's condensation on the inside of the screen. Blotting the battery compartment shows that its moist in there too.T

Maybe my colleagues have been misusing them. Dropping them in waterbaths, or leaving them on radiators. It is quite a moist and humid environment in here, its kind of understandable.

But very frustrating.

Drying out the stack of faulty CaterCheck 3 units doesn't work. Opening up the battery compartment and using blotting paper then replacing the batteries, that doesn't work either.

I've tried unscrewing all the screws I can find but that doesn't open up the casing, so there's no drying out of the moisture in there.

The one month failure rate here is about 80% and sure there's probably warrantees and a service plan that gets them fixed, but its still incredibly frustrating.

That feeling of helplessness, that these thermometers, so vital for our paperwork and statutary obligations, that they fail so quickly and are impossible to fix with a screwdriver and absorbant tissue.

Maybe there's a better model that is more resiliant? I dunno, its not my call to spec out and order these things. I just have to use them. I just have to wade through and ever-growing pile of faulty units to find the one that works, to do my job.

New Year's Resolutions status update

So, after a week, how have I been getting on with my New Year's resolutions:-

• Play a gig in London
  Haven't even touched my guitar this year, but I did promise my girlfriend I'd write a song about her.
  
• Find a job
  Updated my CV once and had a look at reed.co.uk
  
• Build my own audio pre amp
  Had a look on Maplin and RS com for that preamp kit they used to sell.

• 100+ pageviews a day here
  Did it for a few days, but it's kind of tailed off now. Having said that, average views has gone up from 70-ish last month to 85 this year.
  
• Reduce my debts by more than 50%
  Jesus wept, the other day my gas got connected again, and I ended up spending £8 on one day's worth of heating. £8, that's like two hours work for me. So I'm going to have to wear my warm clothes in the house more and turn the heating off.
  
• Mercilessly crush my enemies
  I did a bit of a project plan for this, but have failed to identify any realistic external enemies.
  
• Run 10K in less that 25 minutes
  Its a bit cold out, but I did see my running shoes in my wardrobe the other day.
  

New years resolutions

For 2010 I hereby resolve to:-

• Play a gig in London in front of people who've paid to come in
• Find a new job with better hours that's a bit more career-orientated rather than just rent-paying
• Build my own audio pre amp
• Draw more traffic to this blog (+100 pageviews a day)
• Reduce my debts by more than 50% (£3,500)
• Mercilessly crush my enemies
• Run 10K in less that 25 minutes

They're not particularly ambitious resolutions, and a little project planning will see them through. I'll to keep you informed with monthly updates.

Saviours of the British economy

A piece on the BBC about how the economy hasn't shrunk by quite as much

The rate of contraction of the UK economy in the three months from April to June has been reduced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Gross domestic product (GDP) has been revised to a fall of 0.7% from 0.8% compared with the previous quarter.

The year on year decline has been revised to 5.5% from 5.6%.

The article has some rather fancy-pants graphs of GDP showing that what we're suffering from right now is worse than what we suffered in early nineties. Anyhoo, I'm not concerned by it, I'm concerned with the line that says...

The ONS said the revision was due to better-than-expected output from the manufacturing, energy, wholesaling and motor vehicle sectors.

What did that better than expected output look like on the job front? Well, here's a graph sprung forth from my google docs spreadsheet of job vacancies

So we can see that from April to June, the manufacturing and motoring sectors did grow, as you'd expect in a busy sector. Manufacturing seems to have declined a bit in July though, and motoring has just kind of leveled out in August.

I only started tracking jobs in the energy sectory in August, so its not too helpful, just showing a decline. Admittedly just checking jobs listed on one website isn't the most authoritative means of collecting numbers, but its better than nowt, and the April-May-June growth is validated.

Parential Leave Rights

Last week the London Blogger's Meetup was sponsored by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, they wanted to open up new ways to engage with people, be it blogs or twitter or forums or whatever.

My take on it was if they want to listen to what I have to say to them, my message would be a very clear "Please cease to exist, please stop using tax-payer's money".

Days later I read in t'Guardian that many of their directors were resigning cos they didn't like the direction the organisation was going. Cool, maybe somehow they had heard my message.

Alas, the commission is still in operation and I read more of their doings in the Guardian this morning.

Concluding that it was time that "policy-making enabled men to play an equal part in parenting", the EHRC proposes that the first 26 weeks of a baby's life would remain dedicated maternity leave for mothers, but with higher rates of pay, so that they would receive 90% of pay for the entirety of their maternity leave. Fathers would still get two weeks of paternity leave at the birth of their child, but this would also go up to 90% of their pay.

Beyond the first six months of maternity leave, the commission proposes three blocks of "parental leave", which could be taken any time before the child's fifth birthday, each of about four months, one block dedicated to mothers, one to fathers and one either could take.

The first eight weeks of each of these blocks of leave would be paid at 90%.

Danger!!

We already have Government Advisor Sir Alan Sugar saying that

... he would be less likely to hire a woman of child-bearing age. Explaining that the law was "counterproductive", he said: "If someone comes into an interview and you think to yourself 'there is a possibility that this woman might have a child and therefore take time off' it is a bit of a psychological negative thought."

So it follows that if the parential leave rules extended equally to men, then men of child-rearing age would similarly be at a disadvantage.

Raedwald has it

One of the other consequences will be that employers will tend to employ men and women beyond their childbearing years, or those who can be classed as confirmed bachelors or spinsters. Half a percent of GDP may be peanuts in this age of fiscal profligacy, but the costs of parental leave to a small enterprise can often be crippling. The public sector will take the proposals up willingly, but with the longer term consequence that single men will earn more and occupy higher positions than married men.

In other words, the changes are likely to improve overall the employment conditions of every group other than young would-be parents.

If I ran a company, a small manufacturing organisation perhaps, where you could easily track that one person working one day produces for the company just enough wealth to pay to employ themself and cover overheads, following the direction of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, that one person working is going to have to generate enough wealth for the company to pay for more staff who aren't working.

Hmm, is this going to drive down wages?

Say a worker for a company generates wealth for the company equivalent to twice his wage, so he gets paid, the boss/admin function gets paid and the overheads and material costs and tax and all that, and the woman currently on maternity leave.

If the company now has to pay for a bloke on maternity leave too, a bloke who previously was a good worker, but is now not generating wealth for the company but still getting paid, then the remaining working chaps are going to have to cover for him and generate wealth for the company equivalent to two and a half or three times their wage, just so the company stays in business.

We can't afford to employ more people, so there's only two ways it can go, the workers who are still working have to increase their productivity by a huge chunk and keep the same wage, or get a wage cut and maintain the same productivity.

Neither of these options are particularly easy to implement, aye we're always striving to improve productivity using engineering skill and technological innovation, that's standard practice, so the only thing we can do different is cutting wages or not increasing them for a few years and keeping them low.

Sorry reader, I'm not in a very productive industry, my guys only generate a few times their own wages in wealth. We can't put up prices or we go out of business, we can't afford to employ more people cos they're going to get pregnant anyway.

Equalities and Human Rights Commission, tell me how I am supposed to afford to pay staff 90% pay when they are not generating any wealth for the company?

Daily vacancies update 26-FEB-2009

Carrying on from yesterday's post about job vacancies in the UK based on how many jobs Reed have, here's today's graph, still going downwards.

Its a fall of 1.19% from yesterday and 4.49% from seven days ago.

Extrapolating up for all vacancies in the UK, there's about 444,495 vacancies now.

Good luck.

Job Vacancies

I am unemployed. I was made redundant about three months ago, for the first month or so I was applying for as many jobs as possible, on loads of websites, and every week rifling through the database at the job centre, engineering jobs, media jobs, marketing, temp, admin, just anything really, but nothing came of it.

I had dozens of GCSEs, a few A-Levels, a degree, a decade of experience in the electronics manufacturing industry, in depth knowledge of London and Glasgow indie music scenes, and about 25 years worth of creating stuff on computers. None of these things seem to be helping me find work.

A few weeks ago, in Prime Minister's questions there were around 500,000 job vacancies in the UK, down from 600,000 he was quoting a few weeks earlier. I dunno where he gets his figures from, are they accurate, how much rounding is there, how up to date?

That was a fortnight ago.

I've been tracking the number of vacancies each day on Reed.co.uk, which I guess could cover a quarter of all vacancies in the UK.
Their total vacancies have fallen by about a 5% in the past ten days. In fact, it looks like the loss of jobs available is accelerating. Its getting harder and harder to find work, its getting a whole lot worse.

With a bit of extrapolation, from uncle Gordon's figure of 500,000 vacancies a few week's back, now we're on 450,000.

Playing both sides

A few years back, during the crazy university days I went along to the National Union of Students conference in Blackpool, representing Strathclyde university where I was studying manufacturing engineering. I believe in the British manufacturing industry.

So at the conference when there was a debate about whether the NUS should campaign against British arms manufacturing, I remember standing speaking to a few thousand leftie students, defending those manufacturers, their jobs and what may have been my career.

Almost ten years later, there was a comment on this blog the other day from some organisation who are holding a demo outside a factory in Brighton which makes parts used in Israeli missile arrays. The organisation would be using the list of Gazan dead that I compiled on this blog.

I feel sorry for the guys in the factory who have to be subjected to it in just doing their job.

Back in Glasgow, one of the suppliers for the company I worked at also made armour plating for tanks. They made vital parts of the hi-fi products we made and it would be a real pain in the ass if a bunch of hippy peaceniks put them out of business.

Aw man, did I do that?

Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Wealth creation re-visited

Aw man, there was some discussion on anorak years ago about wealth creation, and adding value, I think and at some point, having established that as a manufacturing engineer who takes cheap components, connects them together and sells them on for a price higher than the original parts, I am definitely in the business of wealth creation, I asked if anyone else on the messageboard worked in wealth creation. The the closest thing to it was someone who worked for a charity, getting donations from companies to pay for the retraining of the unemployed or homeless.

I don't see how moving money from one pile to another really counts as wealth creation. But there's a great spectrum and degrees of what is or isn't.

Since then I've changed my thinking a wee bit. Musicians are the ultimate wealth creators. Say you've got a pub with an acoustic guitar in the corner and people just chat amongst themselves, no one pays to go it. If you have a band playing, you can charge a fiver on the door, the musicians have made the pub experience more valuable by making music out of silence. And furthermore, if you have Leonard Cohen playing in this pub, you can charge £80 on the door and the place would be packed, Leonard Cohen is adding that much more value, and creating so much more wealth, with the same raw materials.

Anyhoo, the wealth creation debate has popped up on the blogsphere, starting on Coffeehouse covering Pete Osbourne pointing out that “not a single member of the Cabinet has ever occupied a wealth-creating job.”, Iain Dale wading in, and Tim Worstall correcting him and all manner of other blogs chipping in.

So, my take is that there's a whole spectrum, from lawyers and politicians who consume wealth, teachers and charities who kind of create wealth, manufacturers and rice farmers who add value and time to raw materials and at the pinnacle, musicians who conjure it out of thin air.

You need a mixed bag of talents in government and it would be nice if someone there had actually done it.

Bailing out the UK auto industry

Aye, following on from yesterday's rant about uncle Peter thinking about bailing out the UK auto industry, can we just make cars like this. They would be so cool.

It can't be that hard to build in real life rather than just photoshop.

More at The Big Picture

Lemmings

Just across the street from my desk there were some chaps re-laying a roof.

I thought it was really cool the way they had two ladders, one for going up and one for coming down, so when folk were bringing tiles up, they'd never crash into each other or have to wait for someone to get out of the way.

But when I was videoing it, they occasionally didn't use the one up one down system.

Ah well.

SQL queries

Oh woe is me, I know more about SQL than anyone else in the building, and I'm stuck. It can't be this difficult can it?

Can it possibly be the case that there is a minimum IQ below which SQL is witchcraft, and that this IQ level is something like the 99th percentile? That less than 1% of the world's population are smart enough to comprehend SQL?

There's my table:-

It says that on this date, for this part number, a quantity of this many were 'O' (ordered) or 'I' (received at goods in).

What I want is a wee query which tells me how many of each part number are still on order.

I can do this:-

Which neatly tells me how many of each part I've ever ordered and how many of each part I've ever received at goods in. I just can't figure out how to subtract one quantity from the other.

I'm stuck.

This isn't a puzzle like a Rubiks Cube where there is definitely a solution, this is a mystery where is possible that there is no way I can ever know the answer, no way I could ever have gotten to this stage in my life with the knowledge of how to find the answer, no way to save the company, and destined to have ever shorter and shallower relationships with women until the day I pass away.

Having sufficient SQL knowledge isn't in the usual Manufacturing Engineer's skillset, if I'd spent sufficient time learning SQL to have the answer, I wouldn't be a manufacturing engineer, I wouldn't have this job and so this problem would never have come about, etc.

Any help with these problems greatly appreciated, will pay for dinner.

*UPDATED*

I'm getting there slowly, in small bite-sized chunks

This is my query for listing parts ordered:-

SELECT "PARTNO", SUM( "QUANTITY" ) AS "QUANTITY ORDERED"
FROM "INVENTORYOP"
WHERE ( ( "FLAG" = 'O' ) )
GROUP BY "PARTNO"

And this is my query for listing parts received:-

SELECT "PARTNO", SUM( "QUANTITY" ) AS "QUANTITY RECIEVED"
FROM "INVENTORYOP"
WHERE ( ( "FLAG" = 'I' ) )
GROUP BY "PARTNO"

Now I just need to somehow put them into subqueries and subtract one from the other, aye?

Database admin

I want to hire me a database consultant, I can afford about £20 a week, and whether thats for two hours or one hour, I don't mind, just as long as this database monkey knows their stuff and can either tell me what to do, or do it themselves.

I have wee questions all the time, and I think it'll be money well spent.

This database monkey could be anywhere in the world, doesn't have to be local.

Example #1:-

I have one table, PART NUMBERS, with just two columns, part number and part description
Then I have another table, PART SUPPLIERS, with loads of columns, part number, supplier, supplier description, supplier part number, price, MOQ, manufacturer, manufacturer's part number, and many more.

Should I start another table for PART PROPERTIES, like whether they are surface mount, stored in tubes or reels, capacitance, tolerance, resistance, inductance, etc, which will all be fixed to the manufacturers part number (if I have it) or just our part number?
Or do I just add extra columns in the PART SUPPLIERS?
If I start adding extra columns, this could go on for miles.

Example #2:-
I have a table called BOMs which lists how many of each part is used in each subassembly. Some of the sub assemblies are mechanical, some are packaging and some are PCBs

I have another table called COMPONENT LOCATIONS, which lists where on each PCB each component is used.

I can run a neat SQL queries which counts how many of each component is used on each PCB, and then I manually update the BOMs table from this.

It was be really cool if it automatically updated the BOMs table, every time I changed a component on the locations table. I have no idea ho to do this.

And to complicate matters, it would be neat if each change was time-stamped.

Manufacturing engineering problem of the day #1

Take a look at the three JEC JS-608R rocker switches below.

Rocker switch (a)

Rocker switch (b)

Rocker switch (c)

Whilst they all say on them that they are JEC JS-608R rocker switches, only one of them is actually a JS-608R rocker switch, the others are something else. I dunno if they are fakes, or just from a different batch, but they're crap, we can't use them. Using them would be a bad thing.

Here's the spec drawing for it


Now, can you see which of the photies is the correct one?

Yeah, me too. Now I've got to go through our stock of them and segregate the crap ones. And then figure out how we got the crap ones.

Soul

Have signed up to SoulMates on the Guardian websitey thing. Kind of like bowing to pressure, I have my doubts.

My profile is here

My cow orker suggested that getting to the top of the most popular profiles list is something to aim for, so feel free to have a look, call your collegues over and get them to have a look too.

I had to resist the urge to just write about killing people, killing lots of people, in the 'why shoul people get to know me' and 'perfect match' descriptions. I fear being arrested as a murder suspect.

Run

Never able to say no when asked, I appear to be going to a gig in Nottingham tonight. Sure the bands are fun, but that town has bad vibes for me.

So I was there by my computer, poised with razorblade in hand (metaphorically) when my flatmate's voice came blasting through "Chris, would you like to come jogging with me, Alec and Fiona?"

An hour and a half later I was stretching off round Regent's Park. The first bit of exercise I've done in about eighteen months, not including horizontal jogging. And you know, it wasn't bad. According to my flatmates, I'm just naturally fit. Personally I think its just that I don't complain about muscle pains and don't pay any attention to my phyiscal limits.

Its the advantage of not having noticiable changed in the last fifteen years.

This one dumb Easter weekend in the nineties, I tried walking the 55 mile boundary round Bolton in a day, made about 42 miles before nightfall. So when I got back to school and some teacher, possibly called Mr Frost was bragging about doing a ten day coast to coast walk, I pointed out I could probably do that in two days.

Zee, what happened, where are you now and can we go for a coffee and catch up?

Over on the nuddy chicks site, the poll about what to do when a girl says she'll let you know later in the week, the clear consensus is to jump out of a window, although it seems just waiting and taking the initiative and calling yersel are both valid options, that whilst not the most popular, would still be acceptable.

I gotta find a gig to go to tonight or some club full of people I'm no scared of. I think I have Saturday and Sunday night's tied up, slaughtering a few more French students, or going to Gresham Flyer gigs. But Friday night, party night, I need something.

Rain rain go away

I don't know about you, but am thrilled to have gone up another two Technorati authority points. I blame London blogger Krista and Shanna from Year of the Books

Ooh, I could be on TV tonight, on The Culture Show, where Trev got me interviewed. I, for one, am filled with terror and anticipation. If a successful career as a talking head on the more sophisticated of the BBC's output doesn't get me the girl, I don't know what will.

Still no idea who these people reading my blog are, but they're getting a tad obsessive, may I recommend using a RSS feed reader, rather than actually visiting the site several times a day. Try this feed and this feed. Or try asking me to come over for a coffee and to watch Dr Who.

The one thats shameless, shameless

Went to London Bloggers Meetup.

Arrived on my own without usual meetup companion Aref-Adib and as a result sat on my own in a corner for the first half hour or so, scribbling notes about the sponsored goodie bag.

Berocca make vitamin drinks and engery tablets, the goodie bag contain a fine branded glass (about 400ml), one branded biro, a tube of the Berocca effervescent tablets (orange flavour) and a pad of branded post-it notes.

I'm sceptical about the effervescent tablets, one side of the pack says "Taking more than your recommended daily intake may be harmful", the other side of the pack says each tablet contains 860% of your recommended daily allowance of some of the vitamins.

It is a fine branded glass they provide and the branded post-it notes make my mind boggle at the possibilities. But the warnings and information on the packaging are a bit ambiguous. Its like if a pack of razor blades says how sharp the blades are and then warns you against cutting yourself.

Anyhoo, Jaz and Lisa both recommended taking the stuff, so I have done. The fizzy bubbly goodness has burnt my lip, but I think the goodness will do as a surrogate breakfast for me tomorrow morning. It is orange flavour so I think it counts as one of my five daily portions (along with two cups of coffee, bacon roll and microwave meal).

I am well healthy me.

Met the following bloggers:-

Andy from the marketing blagger
Chris from qwghlm
Andy from Distributed Research
Jure from Zemanta
Lisa from u-handbag
Krista from Londelicious
Julius he's an event manager
Jaz from ShinyRed
Tom the Flashboy from The Metro

Also I think I glanced at:-

Carmen from Green is Not a Colour
Annie from the Going Underground
Peter Marshall from My London Diary

Mouth

Still in agony, woke up twice last night in pain after turning on the wrong side.

Work is okay, but i did get overcome with emotion and had to go and cry in a quiet corner after we managed to get some stuff done on time.

Over on Facebook, Rosie reckons if I change my profile picture I won't remain single for much longer, suggesting first I use a photo of me and my niece, and then an arty black and white one of me playing guitar.

Four hours later and it hasn't had any effect on my singularity, but I do become sad reading facebook.

Over on the nuddy chicks site, after the phenomenal success of my first venture, I'm looking around at work to find a post-it pad to do a quick "YOUR ADVERT HERE $2/week" image of the side column. If you know of anyone who'd want to advertise their wares to around 14,000 people all over the world every week, email me.

Went out last night to meet Rowan and Mark and go on the London Eye, the damned thing closes at 8pm at this time of year so we went to a pub, watched the football and I drank that Fruli's strawberry beer. Its like CAMRA alcopop.