[Falling] Short of the Mark

Went over to The Bull at Biwmares for our now customary cheapy lunch of one soup and two chips between us. I settle for one of the portions of chips, supplemented today by two excellent pints of Bass ale. I will say that pretty much every pub - the few that are left to us, anyway - are guilty of short measures, due to the modern preference for a head on everything, rather than just lager or Guinness, but served in pint-to-the-rim glasses. As this actually constitutes a weights and measures offence and considering the price of the ales and beers we consume, I think it is probably time to kick back at the industry's purveyors of booze and demand our due quantities in return for our money. Just like everything else in the last few years, we seem to have allowed ourselves to be gaslighted into submission over just about every aspect of our lives, not least by beer measures alone.

I read in the i this morning that - surprise, surprise - consultancy fees over house-building (Homes England) have ballooned by a factor of fifty in the last twelve-month, with them halving the actual amount spent on building stuff over the same period, but with consultancy bills rising from £173,000 to £6,000,000. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. We are constantly being short-changed and short-measured these days by a bunch of charlatans and a political fixertariat centred around the old school tie nexus of public schools and 'gentlemen's' clubs: an axis of privilege so ingrained into British society that it will take an almighty seismic political event to shift. As with short pints in the pub, we need to bite back far more than we are accustomed to doing: but simply shouting and screaming at each other will achieve nowt, and at worst, as in the past, the diametric opposite...