The Portuguese were pisspoor anad port wine was really all they had to sell.So we promoted it in England,always with the undernote "these guys will let us use their front gardens to skewer dagoes so buy their bloody wine."

Squires took this as a patriotic duty and the bottladay man was born.It was de rigeur to booze yrslf silly to help the Portuguese economy and give us a military base.Work is the curse of the drinking classes

You mean Sandeman,I think.In Portugal tghe wine would not last the journey from vineyard to Oporto via the river Douro.So they came up with the idea of spiking it with brandy to stop it going sour.Port was born.
Meanwhile,back at the ranch the Brits were anxious to keep a doorstep in Europe from which they cd attack Spain.Happily the Portugese signed a treaty making them our oldest ally.They were picking up drunken Crusader Knights and loading them back onto their ships for the Holy Land a 1000 years ago.Allies all that time.
So the Brits came out to oversee the reception and bottling of port wine.One was called Sandeman and that name has been prominent in the trade for more than 200 years.
Not a lot of people know that

It has occurred to me that there exist those who have never heard of champagne beers. Can there be such?

Go to Maastricht in Holland.There you will find a pub that announces on an outside wall in blackletter script that it sells no less than 100 beers.Enter,sit and call for one.Any one.A white aproned acolyte will come by reverentially bearing a cobwebby bottle enfolded in a whiter serviette and pour you a goblet of .....beer? You're making me giggle. Nay.Ambrosia? Nay,that's for tourists.Nectar? For CEOs trying to impress clients. Give up? Soma, the champagne of the gods.Made by crosseyed Tibetan monks in a Belgian cavern. My first time in the Pub of Pubs I took a mere sip and found myself lying supine under two feet of snow in the street outside, playing with my fingers and happier than Larry knows how to be.

You've likely not had much of a life,I expect,which is why you're staring into a screen and reading this.Go to Maastricht and start living,not just existing. Nay, kickstart it. Vrooooooom

I am up to Beer 52. Look at my pic.I'm only 23. Vrooooom

I know a bit about beers and wines so,naturally,I make my own. One brewery starts off fermenting with a dead rat in the vat. Another flays a goat and stuffs that in.I have heard of Spanish vignerons pissing in it,but until I have proof it is only a rumour.

At present I have instore five gallons of homebrew I made five years back. Any takers? No guarantees as to taste,of course.It cd range from Budweiser to angel piss.

Another goody is a 1998 bottle of Portuguese aguardente that has turned black in the bottle and was worth £250 at the last valuation.Bids in £20 lots,please. Similar I have tasted in Portugal goes down the throat like a torchlight procession.

Ta,BW326.All incense acceptable

more intelligent answers,I'm delighted to see.You see,due to our government's attempts to dumb down the workers making them easier to manage, which attempts centre around soccer morning noon and night and Yankee tv hour after hour it is getting harder and harder to contact intelligent people.We have almost an entire nation of Homer Simpsons now.The bad news is that it is very difficult,often impossible,to reason with the dumbed down.So when they drop their dummies and start bawling troops firing along our streets is the only answer,as we almost saw in last year's riots.
Apropos,has anyone noticed how good humoured those rioters were? Name one other nation able to riot clear across its national turf yet only kill one or two people? I got the strong feeling we were being messaged: perhaps, sort it or we'll be back and we wont be chuckling this time.But maybe I got it wrong.

Good answers.You may leave at 3 pm

Yeah.You are right.I do it often.Nevertheless simply producing a camera makes everyone in range go all artificial.I'm looking for a technique that hides the camera yet allows me to shoot.Thanks

If Romney and Obama came to you for jobs as gardener which one would you hire and why?

I DISTINGUISH ALWAYS BETWEEN THE INNOCENT INDIVIDUAL AND THE NATION.AMERICANS ARE LIKE HORSESHIT.DOTTED AROUND THE WORLD IN LITTLE PILES THEY OFTEN DO GOOD.IN ONE BIG PILE THEY STINK

At last,sensible adult non-football-contaminated discussion on international politics. All it takes is an Artingstoll Rant.Try it sometime

And men on the moon is a pretty good example of insane arrogance,I would have thought.I have Russian friends (Ooo,he's a Red!) and on asking them if they would do the same they told me being first in space was sufficient honour and what could a man on the moon do for science? They had robots up there to greet the Yanks when they landed and they were sending invaluable data down to Russian scientists. All the Yanks produced was a poor speech and a handful of moon dust. Meanwhile in the stews of the Yankee cities men women and children starved for want of the billions that went on that adventure. I'll never forget a` clandestine film I saw at University of a Skid Row street in NY.There was a grating there in the pavement over a bakers shop.It was freezing and snowing and lifegiving heat was coming up though the grating.Men and women were fighting,scratching,punching to get on that grating and LIVE. "I want to go to America" You must be bloody mad

Gore Vidal was a motherfucker (It is not enough to succeed.Someone must also fail) but I forgive him because he was so intelligent.He said once,"There is nothing so understandable in America's foreign policy as a desire for land and loot.It is entirely vanity."

From the wounded vanity of 9/11 America wrongfully invaded Iraq,lied about WMD (for it had nothing to do with 9/11) murdered Saddam Hussein and is still murdering women and children there although Afghanistan is giving it further outlet for its bloodlust.

The mask came off with Guantanamo Bay and there is a snarling beast where once Lincoln stood.

There is good news.After impoverishing the land of America it is now impoverishing itself,scraping the bottom of the financial barrel due to its insane desire to kill and destroy.

Dare we hope that one fine day America will scuttle into some recess in the mists of the Western Atlantic and matter a good deal less than Peru?

The rag tag and bobtail scum of Europe sat down on the richest piece of real estate on the planet in the 19th century and America was born.Since then it's been a pain in the arse for the rest of humanity. They stole it from the Native Americans by the expedient of murdering their food supply,the buffalo,by the million, reducing a proud people to penury. After turning the centre of a fertile continent into a dustbowl they hit on the idea of mass production and dragged the rest of the world in as clients. Using the money thus made they began nibbling at all non-American cultures by the use of film;buying cinemas and allowing only American-made films to be shown, all pushing their hideous social values. Espying a noble nation on the far horizon,Russia, a country which has never attacked anyone and which won the Second World War for us at Stalingrad where it sacrificed six million on the bloody altar of Victory, risking all to create the world's first socialist economy whereby the working man at last got a fair slice of the economic pie, it mounted a farrago of false propaganda against it so as to preserve and promote its home-grown rip-off economy and to spread the like across defenceless countries near and far.Whatever it did for them was done at a price,a huge rip-off price;military bases,huge loans at extortionate rates of interest and the demoralisation and corruption of any government daring to offer resistance.At home it made itself a couch for the Mafia and a criminal sub-culture whose tentacles permeate the entire main culture, economic, political and social.Eventually its capitalist cohorts created a criminal banking culture which has virtually brought the capitalist world to a standstill while those at its heart bled money through their ears like guzzling pigs. America. O say can you see,by the dawn's early light,a site where we failed and brought on black night...

and they threaten old men