Mark Daniels: Real Ale - its not for men
Every day I seem to be opening up a newspaper or visiting a web page or listening to the radio, only to hear more and more doom and gloom about our industry.
Figures have been re-evaluated to show that it's not two pubs a day that are closing, but five. As the credit crunch continues to bite, more and more of us have less money to spend and when we see the clouds gathering overhead, those of us with a few quid to spare decide not to go out anyway.
Walking home in the rain at the end of a night having nobody to talk to but the barmaid can be a depressing thought - unless, of course, the barmaid looks like Jennifer Aniston. In a miniskirt.
Seriously, I really wish somebody would write the headline "pub trade booming, good news everywhere, topless barmaids and tax-free beverages now available in your local." I bet people would forget about the smoking ban then and we'd all have roaring inns.
Each day I open the papers, hoping I'm either going to read no news or good news about the pub industry. Last week I read a columnist in my local rag who said that pubs are failing because publicans are fundamentally lazy and look for excuses as to why their pubs are failing, rather than working hard to resolve the situation.
Naturally, I took umbrage to that columnist and replied to the newspaper, citing just about every reason I could think of as to why he's just made himself as popular in local pubs as Alistair Darling would be.
This week the same paper ran another article on beer-related news and so I decided to Google it - and, oh heck, it appears to be true. Beer apparently contains more gender changing chemicals than previously thought.
A man with the name Gunter Kuhnle has found high-levels of oestrogen in beer, wine and nuts - pretty much everything you expect to see somebody consuming in a pub.
From his base in the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit in Cambridge, Kuhnle used something called mass spectrometry - which I think I used to use as a kid to play Manic Miner on - to search isoflavones in our favourite beverage and discover far more phytoestrogens exist than previously realised.
Of course, this produces a report more muddled than a bag of mixed nuts because some say that these chemicals can protect against cancer, heart disease and the side effects of the menopause. Another links them to breast cancer and male infertility.
But if you're worried that the discovery of these chemicals might speed up your becoming a hermaphrodite, fear not - on the next page of my newspaper is a report that tells me another mad scientist from Wales who now lives under Switzerland is going to switch on a great big particle accelerator that will turn the world inside out and suck us all in to a giant black hole.
At least, that way, we won't have to keep reading such negative reports on our trade.
