State of things to come?

(From Off Licence News)

Call me, Ishmael," said a voice on the answerphone. "I have something interesting to offer you. You know where I am. I know I can rely on your, er, discretion." Ishmael's wife, Amelie, deleted the message. "If it's more Sussex Pinot Noir, we're not interested," she declared. "Far too sticky and jammy. People don' want that kind of thing any more. What happened to that vineyard in Cumbria we were dealing with? The one that did the Shiraz we liked?" Ishmael peered out of the window at the protestors on the pavement and their familiar placards. "It's still on the approved list, but they've exceeded their production quota," he replied. "Whatever's left will be powering a detention centre by now. Or sold on the black market to people who've probably since been rounded up and placed in one." The shop was known officially as Approved Alcohol Sales Centre 633, but the locals knew it as Ishmael's. Every day, from 4pm until 9pm, it did a steady business among the town's wealthier and more independent-minded citizens - people who didn' worry about being heckled and jeered by prohibitionists as they entered the shop. Wine started at AGBP40 a bottle, AGBP30 of which was duty, so Ishmael and Amelie were not rich enough to afford much of what was on their own shelves.

Beer, capped at 4 per cent abv by the Department of Public Morals, sold more briskly, but sales were restricted to six cans per person per week. Spirits were still luxury items, even though the maximum legal strength had been cut to 30 per cent abv in the recent Budget. Despite the reduction in alcohol, the government had not relaxed its pricing regime.

Age matters When Amelie unbolted the door at 3.59pm, Sol was already waiting outside. "Get my message?" he smiled. She ushered him inside.

"Why can' you just wait for us to call you?" she demanded, as Ishmael offered him a banana. "Compliments of the house," he said. Fruit was supposed to account for a minimum of 25 per cent of the store's snack lines and the bananas were good quality, grown by a local farmer. But the Department of Public Morals' newest diktat demanded that at least 50 per cent of the fruit must be organic, and so Ishmael was faced with boxes of healthy produce he could not legally sell.

The three made self-conscious small-talk as customers drifted in. Nobody was served without presenting their electro-ID card, though younger customers tended to favour the skin chip. Amelie thought there was something distasteful about the way they brandished their forearm over the counter and their name, age and address appeared instantaneously on the till screen. One press of the "validate" key would reveal all their alcohol purchases over the past four years; their criminal convictions and any comments that may have been keyed in by a registered alcohol counsellor.

Ishmael was serving a young Libyan immigrant; there had been quite a few of them in since the country had joined the EU. The lad looked younger than 21, the minimum legal age for buying alcohol, but was actually 24. Ishmael saw on the screen that he had bought six bottles of light Cognac in the past three months and a dozen cans of lager, and was suspected (but not convicted) of being drunk in public just over a year ago. He was "medium risk".