a berkshire school has sent an eleven year old home for possession of a can of shandy? what’s the world coming to?

for the unenlightened, shandy - when served in a pub - is a half and half mix of beer and lemonade. the beer is usually lager, i think there’s something very dodgy about the taste of bitter shandy

in a pub shandy is an alcoholic drink, albeit one with only about 2% alcohol by volume. probably the mildest alcoholic drink you could find.

in a can however it’s a soft drink that just *tastes* like lager shandy. cans of shandy say that they are something like 0.001% alcohol. you’d have to drink an awfully large quantity to get any alcoholic effect from it. i haven’t drunk any myself since i was under ten and thought it was a dead grown up drink. that’s what it’s for. to let kids think they are drinking something alcoholic when they’re not. banning it from schools is about as ludicrous as you can get. they might as well start in on the two litre bottles of sweet cider straight away…