Andy Twelves

Andy Twelves is a writer based in London.

Tuesday

Andy Twelves

Lime Bike jousting is a noble sport

From our UK edition

London Fields, East London. Saturday the 17th of October. A slight north-northeastern wind is blowing. The sky is overcast, with a drizzle earlier in the day making the ground slightly softer than usual, but still firm enough to get a good grip. Perfect weather for the joust to make a return, after six hundred painstakingly long years. At long last, the beautiful game is back. Here we are in heaven. Like many things in the last six centuries, the mechanics of the joust have changed. Where men used to ride on warmblooded chargers and destriers, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has had its way and transformed their steeds into equally noble Lime Bikes – the iconic green rental bicycle that plagues London’s pavements and gives transit to its most downwardly mobile residents.

Tuesday

Andy Twelves

Pubs are no place for cats

From our UK edition

The perfect drinking companion is a difficult thing to acquire. Over the last two years, I’ve cycled between Nottinghamshire communists, a Wrexham-born investment banker, a Dulwich College-educated think-tanker and a few others in between. My quest has not been successful, despite the relentlessness with which I’ve pursued it. Perhaps the perfect drinking companion is not a fellow human, but rather man’s best friend. I’ve considered a public house having its own dog a sign of a decent enough boozer for a while, but there is a phenomenon I’ve been noticing more and more of late that I’m unsure of the meaning of. Pub cats. The perfect drinking companion is a difficult thing to acquire. I am not sure when the cat entered the pub.

Saturday

Andy Twelves

Timothy Taylor’s rebrand is a disgrace

From our UK edition

This week, there has been a brutal murder. I speak not of one in the many wars in faraway lands, but one that has happened in every decent pub in this country. Timothy Taylor’s brewery, in their eternal wisdom, have decided to kill the Jovial Landlord that adorned the pump clip of their famous Landlord ale. This was apparently part of a wider campaign to attract Gen Z to the real ale scene, but I, a member of Gen Z that actually drinks Landlord, am furious about it.  They have replaced the proud, slightly balding, patriot of a landlord, pulling a pint of the good stuff in a red rugby shirt, with a skinny-looking fella in a top far too big for his frail frame.

Monday

Andy Twelves

Shakespeare is best drunk

From our UK edition

Over the last few years, I have gotten smashed with some fairly interesting people in some fairly interesting places. But never before have I got shitfaced - a technical term - with people whose professional obligation was getting tanked up before me. This is the premise of Shitfaced Shakespeare, a show in which one member of the (professionally trained!) cast is chosen to spend four hours drinking before performing a Shakespeare play while their sober colleagues try to stop them from destroying the Bard's work. This is Shakespeare as Shakespeare intended it Currently, the company is performing Romeo and Juliet in London before touring the UK. I joined the cast for their ‘drink up’ on Saturday, arriving at the Leicester Square Theatre a few hours before the curtain went up.

Thursday

Andy Twelves

What I learned in the pubs of Makerfield

From our UK edition

Last Wednesday I went up to Makerfield to do a bit of on-the-ground research into what voters there really make of Burnham, Kenyon, and whoever it is that’s standing for Rupert Lowe. To do so, I went from pub to pub in search of unguarded moments and in vino veritas. I have family just outside Warrington, ten miles up the road from Makerfield, and have lost more money than I care to count at Haydock Park Racecourse, on the border of the neighbouring seat of St Helen’s North, so I did not arrive entirely unfamiliar with the local area. I pulled into Wigan North Western just before ten in the morning, early enough to make it before the pubs opened. From the station, I took a taxi to Ashton, the largest settlement in the seat.

Thursday

Andy Twelves

Hannah Spencer is not the first MP to campaign against alcohol

From our UK edition

Green MP Hannah Spencer has said Parliament’s drinking culture makes her feel ‘really uneasy’. Her comments, in an interview with PoliticsJOE, have landed her in hot water with MPs who have a soft spot for at work tipples, many of whom think she is naive to the traditional drinking culture of Westminster. But Spencer is far from the first parliamentarian – particularly on the left – to have taken a dim view of British attitudes towards alcohol.  Across the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Temperance movement – which sought to prohibit the consumption of alcohol – plagued parliamentary agendas.

Tuesday

Andy Twelves

Did Matthew Goodwin use AI to write his book?

From our UK edition

After losing the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election to a leftwing plumber, Reform’s Matthew Goodwin has published a new book: Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity. It’s clear that Goodwin was trying to emulate Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which was published in 2017. It has almost the same tagline and rough thesis. But while we can be sure that Murray did not use AI to write his book, I cannot extend the same confidence to Goodwin’s attempt, which opens with: ‘There are moments in the life of a nation when everything changes – not with a bang, not even with a conscious decision, but with a quiet, creeping loss of confidence so profound that a people start to forget who they are.