Lottery winners and boorish beers leave a bitter taste…

Why do lottery winners ever go public? It’s completely out of keeping with the spirit of the age. Lots of people are very stressed and miserable, as has been the case throughout history, but the current prevailing custom is to project that, not hide it. The mood note for public discourse is “grim”, so it’s unseemly to display good fortune.

It’s also unwise. It suggests you’re part of the problem. I know we’re all supposed to check our privilege, but I think most people only check the privilege they’ve failed to conceal.

So why tell the world you’ve won lots of money? Are the winners proud of it, as if it’s a proper competition in which they’ve shown the skill to predict the correct numbers? Do they think it shows they’re good at the lottery? Does the experience of winning destroy the objectivity required to understand its randomness?

Perhaps it’s impossible to win the lottery without feeling you’ve deserved it. The sensation is inevitably one of vindication: “Yes! I told you! My true nature has been restored! I’ve always been a rich person trapped inside a poor person’s circumstances.”

I don’t like the lottery, so I was sorry to see that the Set For Life game (in which the jackpot is an income of £10,000 a week for 30 years) was won on Tuesday by an Amazon worker who is now going to follow his dream of becoming a screenwriter and pay for his severely autistic brother’s care. I hate that sort of outcome because it provides anecdotal endorsement of lotteries as a system of wealth redistribution.

As I’ve said before, I love to see a convicted paedophile win, or a brilliant academic researching groundbreaking cancer treatments who then quits their job. Ah well, fingers crossed for next week. I bet Boris Johnson’s aides are making sure he doesn’t buy a ticket because it would be very awkward if he won and it feels like he almost certainly would. In fact, I bet he’s won it half a dozen times already.

Anyway, Dean Weymes, the winner, looked very pleased in the press photos of him spraying champagne around a lawn. It’s the iconic gesture of celebratory waste, but odd coming from Dean as he’s teetotal, so the commodity he’s wasting, though expensive, is of no value to him. In the other photos – the ones of him holding a big cheque or sitting amid screenwriting paraphernalia – he is sipping from a National Lottery-branded champagne flute, but the liquid inside is certainly not champagne. It’s brown and opaque, probably a cola or gravy. To illustrate his sudden affluence, he should really be wasting an expensive thing he likes. Perhaps he could be stamping on an iPad or pissing on a lobster. That would tell the story.



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Dean Weymes celebrates with a large cheque and a suspiciously dark-hued drink. Photograph: National Lottery/PA
But alcohol jealously guards its ceremonial role in our society. It has exploited those early endorsements from Jesus – the wedding at Cana and the Last Supper – to establish itself in the very heart of western culture in a way opiates can only dream of. Good luck to the Catholic church if it ever suggests that priests try to transubstantiate Tizer or Irn-Bru – the booze lobby would put so much pressure on the Vatican it would make the oil companies’ campaign against a carbon tax look as feeble as Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to Brexit.

I can understand it. Old certainties are being questioned at the moment, so alcohol manufacturers can no longer be sure booze will remain as integral to our culture as it has previously been. Little things like people not always wasting fizz in pictures that mean “Hooray!” are significant. Before you know it, the Formula One drivers on the podium will be chucking around expensive cheese. This could cause incalculable long-term damage to alcohol’s place in our society, a sort of cirrhosis of its market share. So I’m sure the drinks business is relieved that a bottle of Moët & Chandon found its way into the non-drinker’s hands.

Beer can’t be all things to all men, let alone all things to all people

Meanwhile, beer is struggling with its image. At last week’s Great British Beer Festival, sexist beer names and marketing were, for the first time, banned. That’s beers with names such as Dizzy Blonde and Village Bike and ones that have saucy drawings of scantily clad women on the pump clips. I’ve long been puzzled by the strange dichotomy in real-ale branding: some promoted in a cool, ale-is-now-trendy-and-Californian way – pastel shades and all lower-case – while others seem to be uncomplicatedly going for the beardy-nerd-getting-in-the-mood-for-a-lonely-wank market.

Abigail Newton, the vice-chair of Camra’s national executive, put it like this: “It’s hard to understand why some brewers would actively choose to alienate the vast majority of their potential customers with material likely to only appeal to a tiny and shrinking percentage.” On reflection, though, I’m not sure it is hard to understand. That shrinking percentage, which may not actually be tiny, probably buys a lot of beer.

The Farageist fag-and-a-pint reactionaries are on the rise again, to the same extent as, and weirdly simultaneously to, the cause of political correctness. Those guys are only going to be more attracted to beers with tits on the tap now the real-ale establishment has proclaimed that they’re unacceptable. Suddenly, choosing a drink with a misogynist name isn’t “just a bit of fun” that snowflakes don’t get – it becomes a political statement about freedom of speech.

Both the persistence of the sexist brands and the move by Camra to ban them are attempts by the beer industry to respond to this bizarre era, where two mutually contradictory political trends somehow coexist. This is a particular problem for those marketing ale since it’s a product that benefits from its customers having a sense of ownership, from being a positive part of their self-image.

But beer can’t be all things to all men, let alone all things to all people. There’s pressure on it to pick a side, to nail its colours to the pump, to actively put off some customers in order to garner the approval of others. In these grim and unlucky times, no one likes a centrist pint. It’s bitter versus bitter, with no place for mild.

Topics

National Lottery

Opinion

Beer

Alcohol

Food

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