Reply to Rick on gambling

I have been going to the Casino quite a lot recently and i'm just not sure about the whole thing. There is an air of desperation, similar to that in a strip club, that makes it a little bit uncomfortable. I think anyway.

I have friends who gamble but only for fun, and everyone wastes money in some way or another, so £50 that you have already accepted your going to lose i think poses no problem at all. It's the people that are there because they need money that are the issue. I suppose they are the people we think of when the term gambling addict is thrown around. Rich people gamble all the time but they can afford it, so no one cares in the slightest. And I think that's fair enough, if I was loaded i'd go to Vegas and put 2 million pounds on black, but i'm poor, and so i wont.

Basically I think if you can't afford to gamble just don't.

Rick on Gambling

drunk on holiday

I think it's quite funny, but I do think it's quite bad, the reputation Britain has abroad for 'loutish behaviour'. Programmes like 'booze Britain' certainly don’t argue against the idea.

The reality television programmes that follow British people abroad don’t seem to serve any purpose at all. From Magaluf to Thai-Land it's always exactly the same scene, a boy staggering alone in the street with his pint spilling all over him trying to find his friends, and then slipping over in sick. I’m sure I don’t want to watch that happening, and I can’t see anyone else wanting to. I doubt even he would want to watch that. Just as well they're all on at 3:30am on a Monday morning, on Bravo.

Brits on holiday

Smokers banned again

When the government said that no longer could we enjoy a cigarette with our pint in a pub and from now on we would have to sit outside with the dogs and children, it wasnt that great, but it did make sense . We had our own designated areas but the smoke did waft over to where non-smokers were sitting and talking about banning smoking. Then it would about face and waft over to where people were eating and that was no good either.

I have no sense of smell, but I am told smoke stinks, and so I can appreciate that people who didn’t smoke didn’t want to smell of cigarettes. I doubt smokers themselves want to smell of smoke. The haze that began eight feet into the air and reached to the ceiling in clubs has also gone, which is bound to be a good thing.

So we have been made to go outside and now we endanger nobody but ourselves. If we are lucky enough to have a hut it doesn’t have an attached roof, so the smoke can escape through the shelter and we don’t force other smokers to breathe our smoke. If we are lucky enough to have heaters we are still cold and uncomfortable, but at least we can drink our pints and smoke our cigarettes with our friends, safe in knowledge that we are not harming anyone and we can go back in once we have finished smoking. But perhaps not for much longer.

Apparently they are going to review and possibly further the ban to include beer gardens amongst other things. Beer gardens?! The problem used to be that because of confined spaces smoke couldn’t escape and so passive smoking was unavoidable. They sorted that out in 2007! They banned us, made passive smoking impossible and left us with fewer rights than we had before. Now that is not a problem however, I suppose it was only a matter of time before they stopped letting smokers do other things that they enjoy. Doctors are even talking about banning us from smoking in our own cars. I won’t quit.

Ban the banned

drugs

From what i can gather, Heroin is never any good for you. Even if it is better than sex, at least after sex you don't search around the rooms in your house for things to sell to pay for more sex before sitting in town with a dog.

Aside from Heroin and Crack though i don't really see a problem with people experimenting with drugs. Obviously Cocaine can make people pretty annoying and confrontational, but no more than a few pints of Stella really. Combine the Coke and the Stellar though and who knows how you are getting home.

Mixing drugs and drink causes problems. Most people who suffer dehydration from pills fail to realise that they are dehydrating because they are drinking alcohol when they are thirsty, which of course dehydrates you more. Used properly though and apparently they are quite fun.

Research shows that drink can change the effect of all drugs, so playing safe with drugs is just as much about playing safe with drink.

Ecstacy and Beers

Lying

The worst lie told to me was regarding the death of a rabbit when i was eight or something.

We had a rabbit, named Basil, who was horrible. He mated with another one of them that we had and got very territorial over the garden. He would chase you from the back door to swing at the back of the garden biting your ankles and jumping at you. That went on for a while until one day i came home from school to be told that Basil had been taken in by a garage to help guard it.

This isn't really the worst lie i have been told, but i only realised the other day that Basil wasn't actually taken in by the garage, when i was telling someone about my rabbit Basil, who was taken in to help guard the garage.

Lying

Smoking

Smoking in films is cool because they don’t have to go outside to do it. If every time Clint Eastwood wanted to smoke a cigar he had to leave his whisky on a makeshift shelf, shut a fire door behind him and stand under a corrugated plastic canopy with a sixteen year old girl and a man lying in his own sick, I doubt he would have starred in anything after A Fistful of Dollars. Not so much to do with the fact he had to follow stupid laws which liken smokers to leppars, but because while he was outside a man would have slipped a Rohypnol/Valium cocktail into his drink.

Smoking and drink spiking

Infidelity

Some people think that having an affair can actually strengthen a relationship. Apparently the process of confessing and discussing what happened can bring a couple closer together. I do see how that could make sense, but i don't really understand why you would bother.

Personally if my wife/girlfriend was having an affair i wouldn't want to talk it through. Nor would i expect her to should i have been unfaithful. I think if some one in a relationship feels compelled to deceive their partner and sleep with someone behind their back, the relationship isn't really worth saving.

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