I am rather confused by Jeff’s post on the SNP’s new proposals designed to curb anti-social drinking. He says that the SNP’s approach is radical and is proof that the SNP is not just populist. But when you look at the proposals, they are a who’s who of reactionary measures that could well have been lifted straight out of a cliché-ridden Daily Excess editorial.

Let’s look at the list as laid out by Jeff.

• Raise the limit for purchasing alcohol in off-licenses to 21

  Well right away this is about as populist as policies get. Blame it on the yoof. The media loves to do it, and the politicians love to throw around these age limits. They get to look “tough” by passing some draconian legislation that adversely affects someone. And who better to do this to than the youth, who do not vote in high numbers because they are already so disenchanted? SNP wins by looking tough without losing any votes.

  Besides that, what is this age limit supposed to achieve? We all know that these age limits are about as workable as a chocolate kettle. Given that there is currently an age limit of 18 and under-18s still find it easy enough to get their hands on alcohol, what makes anyone think that raising the limit by a few years will improve the situation any?

  There is nothing to suggest that raising that limit to 21 will make it any more difficult for rowdy youths to get their hands on alcohol. And why should perfectly law-abiding 18-20 year olds who intend to drink alcohol responsibly be prohibited from doing so?

  The fact is that those youths who really want to get alcohol will just nick it from their dad’s cabinet. Or their friend’s dad’s cabinet. Or their uncle’s cabinet. Or anywhere they can get it from. That is assuming they haven’t just got someone else who is above 21 to buy it for them, as Scottish Tory Boy points out.

  Congratulations SNP — you have made it almost impossible for law-abiding drinkers to get their hands on alcohol, whereas the rowdy contingent are encouraged into behaving even more rowdily.

  And if you want people to act like adults, it’s probably not the best idea to treat them like kids.

• Reprice drinks to a minimum of 35p per unit of alcohol

  You want a continental “café-style” drinking culture? Then raising the price of alcohol is the last thing you should do.

  Why is that then? Well, increasing the price of alcohol will mean it will make little sense to just have one or two drinks with a meal. It will be too expensive for little return. If alcohol costs three or four times more than coffee, no-one will drink it like coffee. Instead, people will use alcohol by saving up their money for a big night out. The result? More binge drinking.

  Jeff says that the SNP’s policies are remarkably similar to those of Sweden. He is correct. Jeff also says that “I can easily imagine [they] don’t have the same alcohol-dependency and vandal culture that we have here.” Unfortunately, Jeff hasn’t done his research because Scandinavia — where alcohol is much more expensive than it is here — has a notorious binge drinking problem.

  Nor is the USA exactly a haven of responsible drinking. Has he never heard of the American phenomenon of “spring break”? These North American events are legendary for their excessive binge drinking and rowdy behaviour. Nor do I think of Australia as one of the most sober nations in the world!

  Clearly, simply raising the price of alcohol won’t encourage people to stop binge drinking. In fact, if anything, it will have the opposite effect.

• Have dedicated [alcohol] checkouts in some of the larger supermarkets

  I’m not exactly sure what this idea is supposed to achieve. Jeff says it is to create an “inconvenience of having to go for a separate checkout to buy alcohol.” But what does it mean? Walking a few yards? If people will have already travel all the way to the supermarket, having them walk to a different checkout is hardly going to put anyone off.

  And think about the scenario. You’ve got some irresponsible people who only go to the supermarket to buy some bottles. They just go to the alcohol checkout, pay for their goods and then saunter off to the park to cause some fuss. Then you’ve got the responsible drinkers who want to enjoy a few glasses with their meals. These people are genuinely inconvenienced, as they have to go to the checkout twice — once to pay for their food, and another time to pay for their alcohol.

  Yet again, the responsible drinkers are punished whereas the troublemakers hardly bat an eyelid. Yet another sloppy policy.

• Increase of financial support for alcohol prevention, treatment and support services

  No complaints here. This seems sensible enough to me.

This is not to say that there is not a problem with irresponsible binge-drinking and rowdy neds in the streets. Jeff rightly notes that Scotland has a problem and it’s not good enough just to sit there and let it continue. The point is that these measures will do absolutely nothing to curb binge drinking. If anything, they will exacerbate the problems while making life difficult for the majority who drink sensibly.

Unfortunately — as we see from governments of all shades time and again — the temptation for a government faced with a problem is just to do something, anything. Preferably sounding tough. Then declare the problem solved. No matter whether the solution is well thought-through or planned out.

I have never really got into student life. Despite the fact that I hate summer, I love the holiday aspect of it. This is not because I am a lazy bum, because in my opinion I have actually been quite busy this summer. And the busiest bit (two weeks in Cumbernauld) was the bit I enjoyed the most.

Ever since I started at university I have noticed a pattern. The first Christmas after starting university felt amazing. I couldn’t work out why, but I just went along with it. After all, you oughtn’t worry about feeling good. Then, between Christmas and New Year it hit me again: I realised that I would have to go back to university in a couple of weeks.

Since then, every university holiday has felt the same. It’s not just having time off. Like I said, I am just as busy when I am away from university, just doing different stuff. But just not having to be there is such a weight off my mind. I must really hate university.

At this time of year a lot of people ask me if I’m looking forward to going back to university. The answer, “Actually, I’m dreading it,” is mostly met with confusion. It’s a bit like the “how are you” conversations. You’re not actually allowed to say what you actually feel about university. Student life is meant to be amazing — the best years of your life. I have spent them depressively gazing at my feet.

Student life is way overrated if you ask me. Maybe part of it is down to the fact that I still live at home, so I don’t get to sample much in the way of student life. I don’t get the fun bits. I just get the work. Plus three hours of commuting hell every single day. I don’t get to do all the cool things students do, whatever they are.

But even if I lived in Edinburgh I doubt I would be into it much. Student culture is probably one of the biggest stains on humanity. When it doesn’t involve getting horrendously drunk for the most tenuous of reasons, it seems to be about “ironically” watching Neighbours, “ironically” saying “retrooo” at anything that is vaguely more old-fashioned than an iPod Touch and “ironically” being a total and utter twat.

Plus, for a section of society that is meant to be well-educated and open minded, students are an incredibly reactionary bunch. You meet extremists of all sorts — right- as well as left-wing. I find myself wandering around going, “Where are all the reasonable people?” I can’t remember the last time I heard a student say, “On the one hand… On the other hand.” [Insert obligatory dig at excessive bansturbators People & Planet here.]

All-in-all, it is enough to make me want to “ironically” reach for the nearest gun and “ironically” shoot myself so that I could go to “ironic” hell, because that might be a little bit more pleasant than a university campus.

This year, the dread came a bit earlier than previous years. It came over me like a massive black cloud on a visit to Edinburgh a month or so back. I used to quite like Edinburgh, but now it just reminds me of university dread. On top of all of the usual stuff, I have to contend with a couple of factors that are making me more scared of this year than usual.

First there is the dissertation. Because of my unexpectedly busy summer, I have not done as much preparation over the summer as I would have liked. The deadline is March, but still. I have not come much further forward since April. And next week I have to meet my Director of Studies who is the same person as my Dissertation Supervisor. Meep.

Then there is the fact that I have still not worked out what the hell I am going to do once I have finished university. Given that this is my final year, I had better think of something quickly.

The thing about careers is, you really need to have a good idea of what you want to do from a young age. If you haven’t worked it out by the time you’re about 15, I reckon you are screwed (like me). I used to say to people, “It’s a bit worrying, I don’t know what I’m going to do once I leave education.” Invariably people said, “It doesn’t matter. Nobody really knows what they want to do. You still have plenty of time to think of something.”

This is bullcrap. I found this out the hard way by actually believing it. The thing is, the advice stays like that until you reach the age of about 20. At which point the general advice becomes, “Well you should have decided before then, shouldn’t you!” True, but unhelpful. And then you are stuck with it, all set for a life spent wandering around like a headless chicken.

So given that I have to think up a profession quick-smart, I am going to have to attend every Careers Service event under the sun this year. To have this on top of the dissertation, I have a feeling it’s going to be a pretty tough year.

One of the strangest things on the entire internet (and that really is saying something) is the BBC News feature, Most Popular Now. It can be found in the sidebar of most pages on the BBC News website. I often have a glance at it because often you do find some interesting stories there.

But it is really weird. Sometimes you see stories in there that are literally four or five years old. And it is not as if they are particularly interesting stories either. Okay, so that story about the bloke who was forced to marry a goat (and the goat’s subsequent suffocation on a plastic bag) was quite funny.

But the other day a rather unenlightening (and distinctly not very newsy) article about how to write a CV was right up there in the top five “most emailed”. Why would you email that to someone? To “gently hint” that you think they might be bad at writing CVs?

Today, for seemingly no good reason, this three-year-old story about a link between milk and ovarian cancer is the second most emailed story at the moment.

I realise that it is quite banal to point out the often contradictory nature of scientific studies on the various health effects of food. Red wine makes your heart happy but your liver sad. We all know it, and we are bombarded with so much contradictory information that we really might as well not bother.

You remember that advert that showed a girl guzzling down five litres of cooking oil because that is just what eating crisps is like (if you eat your annual consumption of crisps all in one go)? Almost put me off eating crisps. The next day I visited the dentist. He told me to eat more crisps and less chocolate. Not that I eat much chocolate anyway. I eat about three packets of crisps per day, so it’s a wonder I don’t constantly pee cooking oil.

Anyway, to veer back from that self-indulgent tangent, the point I am trying to make is this. It is slightly funny that the story about milk maybe possibly perhaps causing ovarian cancer was gazumped by a story saying that milk could cut the risk of getting diabetes and heart disease.

Helpfully, the related stories are: Milk in tea ‘blocks health gains’, Drinking milk ‘no risk to heart’ and Milk linked to Parkinson’s risk. So now you know.

So the EU has dropped its plans to invent the metric system, which means that we will be forced to use imperial measurements by those mad Whitehall bureaucrats. Or maybe not, says Nosemonkey, because the plan was not to abolish the imperial “system” once and for all. Oh well.

Evan Davies had a really interesting post on his blog about the possibility of converting from imperial to metric measurements. He notes the benefits of the metric system that we are surely all aware of — mostly that multiples of 10 and 100 are damn convenient.

Imperial, on the other hand, is a right mess. I put the word “system” in scare quotes in the first paragraph because there is no system to it. I had always assumed that a mile had to be a certain number of yards. That would only be sensible, right? Apparently not. It’s just an arbitrary distance.

The benefits of the imperial system? Evan Davies says that it’s partly down to the British being stubborn because metric wasn’t invented here. There are also the obvious costs to converting. An obvious example is the fact that if we were to change from miles to kilometres, every single road sign in the country would have to be changed at tremendous cost. There are other costs like having to get used to the new measurements.

I am a fan of the metric system, just because of its simplicity. And it was also what I was taught at school. But here is the problem. While I spent my whole time at school learning all about centimetres, hectares, litres and the like, as soon as I walked out of the school grounds everyone was talking to me about inches, pints and miles.

The end result is that I have a bit of a mish-mash of knowledge on vital measurements. I’ve never really taken inches on board, and I find that this is a particular problem. Because it seems as though everybody uses inches rather than centimetres — even people who went to school at the same time as me.

Moreover, whenever I mention centimetres or metres at work, I feel as though I might be judged for that. Under their breath, people might be saying I’m a cheese eating surrender monkey or similar, or they might think to themselves, “bloody youth of today”. The whole situation is like having a conversation where one person is speaking English and the other is speaking French (I guess that would be me, which is amusing because my foreign language skills are non-existent).

And for all of the merits of the metric system, what of the humble old British pint? As if pubs weren’t bad enough for social awkwardness, no doubt having a half litre would be too girly, while ordering a litre of Stella would make you an über wife beater or binge drinker. (Mind you, how often do you go to the pub and have only one pint?)

Evan Davies suggests that there should be a major study investigating the costs and benefits of moving to metric. But I suspect we all know what the answer is. Stick with what you know, because that’s what everyone uses. Economics textbooks look at the QWERTY keyboard layout as an example of these network effects, but people are probably more aware of VHS versus Betamax.

At the end of the day, this is about social conventions. Conventions don’t change overnight, and certainly not at the whim of governments. They have taken the whole of history to evolve to where they are today, and it is probably easiest to stick with the way things are — even if we suspect that moving to metric would be better. If only something would happen to make everyone wake up tomorrow morning and start using metric, we would all be better off.

It’s probably quite well known that QWERTY (man that’s an awkward word to type) keyboards, despite being the standard, are bloody terrible. Designed back in the days of typewriters, the QWERTY layout is said to have been designed to slow down typing to avoid the little arms clashing with each other. But look in front of you. No little arms; just a bunch of buttons in a silly order.

Part of me is tempted to just bite the bullet and switch to the Dvorak layout, which some say is more efficient. But of course I couldn’t do that. I would have to re-learn the keyboard layout when I’ve been using QWERTY all my life. I would keep all of the habits that I have developed while learning QWERTY. And perhaps most worryingly of all, if I had to use a public (or anyone else’s) computer I would have to use QWERTY anyway — which means using two systems in tandem.

Everyone is in the same quandary, but we all stick with QWERTY because we wouldn’t be able to shake off all the issues that would arise from switching. Likewise, imagine if some time in the 1980s the government said, “right, enough of these inferior VHS machines — you’re all using Betamax from now on.”

The same goes with metric. Even though most suspect a metric world would make more sense, we would all still measure short distances in inches and order drinks in pints.

Update: The Hard Sell…: Penny for your martyrs.

I also feel like pointing out right now that I have no idea what an ounce is, nor can I imagine what any value of Fahrenheit feels like.

It’s looking pretty unanimous on the ‘more personal posts’ front. The score is 8–0 at the moment. You nosy bastards! I’m currently facing up to the fact that the real reason I stopped posting ‘personal’ posts was because I’ve realised that I’m actually a bit rubbish, and writing about myself only reveals a bit more of my rubbishness each time. Which probably isn’t a very good idea.

The score on the other question is currently 6–2 in favour of keeping F1 posts here. I came up with a good name if I were to set up a separate F1 blog, although now that I’ve said it’s good I’ve only built up your expectations which would make it a disappoinment. I would call it vee8. Maybe a bit too obscure if you’re not a big F1 fan, and you just know that they would let teams use V10 engines again as soon as I started the blog.

Turnout is high, currently running at a massive eight votes. You’ve excelled yourselves. I’ll keep the polls up for a bit longer, but to be honest it looks as though the result is settled. So here’s one of those boring posts about my life that I promised.

I can’t believe that this is the last week of my summer. University holidays are meant to be long. They are really really long if you look at it on a calendar for instance. And last year’s felt really long, but that’s mostly because I spent all of my time either sitting on my bum or making a general nuisance of myself.

This year, though, I set myself a few goals. I know this is very target setterish, but it had to be done — partly to get myself in shape for life, and partly to keep me busy (staying busy makes me happier). I started taking driving lessons, which was quite good at first because it gave me a reason to get up in the morning. Then I got a job and I lost all interest in the driving lessons!

In a lot of ways I think this summer has been very successful — in terms of reaching some of my goals and so on. In other ways it wasn’t so successful. I mean, I never did all those summery things such as going out to the local scum-club. I think we are getting too sensible as we grow up.

I couldn’t reach all of my goals, mostly because I haven’t had the time! I know, it’s incredible — I’ve hardly been able to keep on top of time this summer. It was all so very different last year.

While we’re on time management, I was sad to see that the Political Teenager has gone on hiatus for the following reason:

Now I am starting University, I will not have time for long winded posts and rants.

This is a bit surprising to me. I’ve always wondered why you don’t find more students writing blogs (I’m not counting those of the LiveJournal type here). It’s not as if students don’t have shedloads of spare time. And in my experience students seem to divide their spare time approximately as follows:

• 40% boozing it up
• 30% “ironically” watching Neighbours
• 20% on MyFaceBeboJournal
• 10% forcing everybody within a 20 mile radius to use Fairtrade goods whenever possible
• 9% pretending to be in poverty
• ¾% being unable to add up to 100 and making ridiculous, mostly fictitious lists with little bearing on anything
• ¼% studying

Surely more of them can squeeze in a bit of blogging? After all, they are always banging on about how politically aware they are.

Sitting here, I think that going back to Uni might give me more time to blog. I really do dread going back to Uni, especially what with it being 3^rd year and all. It is going to be hard work. But at least I’ll be in some form of a routine. I’ll always have a few hours of spare time at the end of every day; ample time to get some blogging in.

I’ll also finally be able to listen to all those podcasts that I’ve been stashing away, never to be listened to. There’ll be plenty of time on the train for that. And reading all those economics books that I somehow never found the time to read.

The thing about this summer is that I’ve just been arranging lots of things without thinking about whether I really have the time to do it, simply because I’ve been so eager to keep myself busy. I’ve actually had to strike things off my list because I’ve got so much to do this week. For instance, my driving theory test is on Thursday. Thursday morning indeed. Why oh why did I book it for that time?!

I said I couldn’t believe that this was my last week of summer, but technically that was last week. This week is freshers week, and all the cool kids are out having fun. Here I am getting pale in front of a computer. Oh well.

Anyway, I’ve got to go through to Edinburgh to matriculate this week. Regular readers will know that commuting to Edinburgh involves roughly a three hour round trip for me. This week I’ve got to go through to Edinburgh to write a time when I can meet my Director of Studies on a piece of paper. Then I’ve got to go back and meet him at that time. Six hours of my life wasted on bureaucracy! Aargh!

And then once I’ve got work on Saturday out of the way I’ll just have a teeny weeny bit of time left to get rested and make sure I’m all set to start University. Do I have enough pens? I don’t know. Did I clear out my folder from last year? Can’t remember. Have I done any preparatory reading? Of course not. I need to get my hair cut, my shoes have chosen this week to wear out, and I really ought to buy myself a jacket that doesn’t make me far too hot whenever Edinburgh doesn’t happen to be an ice cube.

If any lecturer makes some smart-arse remark about how we should all be fully refreshed after the summer, it truly will be the end.