Over the heads of babes

A sixty-four year old man has been fined by magistrates in Nottingham after he poured beer over a crying baby in a Wetherspoons pub.

I'm not one of those grumpy old men who think children should be banned from pubs - quite the opposite in fact. But if this Wetherspoons is anything like some of the ones in Manchester - and by the sound of it, it is - why would you take a baby into what is, especially during the day, a retirement home for geriatric alcoholics?

Having said that, I doubt the baby's beer baptism will have done him much harm. Unlike the toddlers I once saw in a pub in Manchester whose mothers carefully arranged their pushchairs into a protective circle between them, well away from stumbling drinkers, before all proceeding to light up and envelop the sleeping infants in a fog of tobacco smoke.