Category - News

This story has been doing the rounds today. It tells how a child, aged 2, was accidentally served with whisky instead of fruit juice in a restaurant.

If you read the story, you are forced to conclude that his mother was in “a panic and rage”, was “crying”, and the toddler was in an alcohol-induced coma and had to be rushed to hospital because his life was at risk, and is apparently now “recovering at home”. You are left with the impression that he’d been served neat whisky in a shot glass, and that the restaurant staff couldn’t care less!

It’s now important to read between the lines, referring to the photo of him drinking the whisky.

The drink is in a tumbler, filled to the brim. Even if it was a double – as his mother claimed, without proof – it was watered down to about the same volume as a can of drink (say, around 330ml). He had apparently taken “ten sips” of this diluted mix, which couldn’t have amounted to more than a quarter of the whole drink – probably much less. He’d get a bigger hit from a dose of Calpol!

I’m sorry, but the one thing that this story proves is that children shouldn’t be allowed in bloody restaurants in the first place. Then innocent mistakes a like this wouldn’t have to be turned into dramas by attention-seeking parents.

It reminds me of an incident when I was at school. The lab technician – who, looking back, must have been 17 or thereabouts – was boasting to my biology class how he’d made a teacher drunk by dropping a thimbleful of pure ethanol into her coffee. He was under the mistaken impression that pure alcohol is orders of magnitude more concentrated than when it is in, say, a pint of beer.

In actual fact, a pint of typical-strength beer contains around 20ml of alcohol – probably at least FOUR thimblefuls. So the juvenile lab technician was talking crap.

I would doubt that an infant taking a few sips of an alcoholic drink would be intoxicated to the degree that is suggested in the various versions of the story.

(Another reason I know this is that when I was four, I got drunk after stealing four bottles of milk stout from my grandma. I got what I later – many years later – discovered to be “a hangover”. From the age of four up until I was 17 I didn’t touch a single drop of alcohol as a direct result of this, and even when I started I had to force myself because I didn’t like it! It took about six years before I could drink neat beer instead of shandy or a lager-top, and I still detest spirits in all forms).

I saw a comment recently where a right-on Thatcherite was questioning another person’s comment about how much of the current financial troubles were the fault of the Libcon coalition.

I have to laugh.

The current Mickey Mouse government has spent the last 2 years blaming the last Labour government for everything – even though the recession is a global phenomenon! What’s more frightening is that there are jackasses out there who believe it!

I suppose wasting £40 million of tax-payers’ money on the most corrupt franchise assessment of all time – the West Coast mainline deal – is also down to Labour. And I wonder who will have to pay for that through further “austerity measures”?