Merry Christmas

Make mine a double

Cancel Christmas? What would poor Tiny Timmy think? But that seems to be what many companies have decided this year. Christmas parties have been cancelled, down-sized and called something completely different this year as entertainment budgets have been slashed. These are belt-tightening times in more ways than one. Even if businesses do have the money, they don’t want to be seen to be spending it. I suspect the thinking goes along the lines of… ‘how bad will it look if we throw a huge bash in December, only to fire half the people at the party in two months'.

While reports of empty restaurants and half-hearted parties reach us we can count ourselves lucky that there was no such scrimping for the LondonTown party which was a beatboxing and Bearlesque night to remember. For the uninitiated, think cuddly, bearded, bear-like men with their bellies out and you’re halfway there. At the same time, the feeding frenzy on the high street has been branded ‘obscene’ by certain sectors. Some shameless shoppers have been seen snapping up cut-price Transformer toys like vultures dining on the carcass of crumbling companies (RIP Woolies) and slashed down sales.

All this points to the deepening economic meltdown. Just what we didn’t want for Christmas. And, with the pound-euro ratio looking very bad for us Brits right now, thoughts of holidaying in Europe this summer are being abandoned.

Still, that hasn’t stopped booze Britain sinking some pints – in fact, with depressing headlines like these – and 50,000 jobs or so a day being axed – we can be forgiven for trying to forget. Yes, the final days of 2008 seem like the ideal time to seek out solace at the bottom of a bottle. Well, you’ll make up it for with a dry January (if only it wasn’t the darkest, coldest month of the year and the worst possible time to give up the booze).

There is a serious side to the annual office high jinks, though, and you’ve got to spare a thought for the poor old paramedics tasked with cleaning up the sickly mess. One front line medic branded the level of drunkenness on the city streets as “ridiculous”. And you only have to go out in Camden to see what he means. In London, they even laid on special buses to help the over-stretched emergency services.

Police in Ipswich have come up with a novel approach to the problem, dreaming up a ‘drink drivel’ campaign. With it comes a list of the words and phrases most difficult to say when you’re ‘tired and emotional’. These include the words ‘innovative’, ‘preliminary’ and ‘cinnamon’. Apparently, through extensive research, they’ve discovered that, “Good evening, officer, isn’t it lovely out tonight?” is absolutely impossible to say when the average late night party goer is three sheets to the wind.

In the spirit of their ‘things impossible to do or say when drunk’ theme, we’ve come up with our own LondonTown list which includes:

“Make mine a water”
“I’d better not drive, I’ve had a few” and
“No karaoke for me please”

In our experience, it’s not just speech that gets impaired after a skin-full. The capacity to listen goes out the window too.

Still, don’t let that put you off your merry making this Christmas, I’ll see you down the Cross Keys for a midnight mass mulled wine.

Donkey Taxi

City workers could be forgiven for thinking the Nativity scene of the Christmas story was being acted out in the streets while they went about their daily commute recently. A donkey, called Demitris, was seen walking down the street in Bishopsgate but, instead of a pregnant lady, he was carrying a man in a bowler hat. Turns out it was nothing to do with Mary or the birth of Christ. Just The Real Greek drumming up publicity for their latest restaurant – and a stunt in support of animal welfare charity Corfu Donkey Rescue.

Closing Time at the Bar

Just when you thought things couldn’t get much gloomier, we hear that sales of beer in pubs are now at their lowest levels in almost 40 years, that’s since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Apparently 36 pubs are closing every week. In a bid to save the boozer, the people behind the ‘Save the Pub’ campaign have called on Kym Marsh (ex Hear'Say, married to that ex Eastenders actor) to pull a pint. That ought to do it. The British Beer and Pub Association is calling on the government to axe the beer tax and save our pubs. We say, do your bit and get drinking. Well, it is Christmas.

No Extension, Just Congestion

London’s cyclists are up in arms over the scrapping of the western extension to the congestion charge. Boris has managed to offend the pedal pushers with his less-than-green policy. His defense? ‘Listening to the people,’ he says. Since when did that get you anywhere in politics? Not only that, cyclists have had a hat-trick of insults: first, motorbikes in bus lanes; second, slashing the borough cycle route budgets; and, for the final blow, this cycle-friendly western congestion charge fiasco.

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