Corkage

Not many restaurants do this nowadays; but there was a time when it was common for restaurants to allow you to bring your own wine and to charge you a modest sum for opening it. Needless to say, if you objected to this system, you didn’t go back.

I was listening to a bitter complaint from Kevin about the price of wine in restaurants. He had encountered a restaurant which charged 5 times the off-licence price for a bottle of Chateau Plonque. He thought this was ‘unjust’. I see no injustice here – perhaps a certain commercial ineptitude. The restaurant has no means to compel me to buy their wine.

People like Kevin are very quick to associate injustice with commercial enterprises. But it would never occur to him to suggest that it is unjust to force us all to pay for inflation-proof pensions for sometime government employees, simply because they are sometime government employees. To me this is iniquitous. The injustice is plain.

I once needed an electrician. The guy who turned up charged me £40 simply to reset a fuse. In my opinion, he was a greedy bastard; and I shall never use him again. Do I accuse him of injustice? No!

Yemen

What a sad country. Today over 100 people were blown up in their mosques by a rival Islamic sect. What can you say? Stay away from Yemen. IS have this week murdered over a dozen tourists in Tunis - and a policeman and a cleaner in the national museum. Stay away from Tunisia. We in the West are dismally ignorant of economics. In the Muslim Arab word things are beyond dismal. They are totally dependent on the West’s need of oil and the West’s desire to holiday in their countries. Without the West they would be in the toilet. Fracking offers us the opportunity to be independent of middle eastern oil. Let’s take it. Pull the chain.