So the United States shut down Megaupload.com today.

The United States is the major hub and remains over-represented in the management and delivery of the Internet (cf. ICANN) which, as I recall, has always been done in a consensual, multi-organisational, global environment without the need for tampering in the form of regulatory control or oversight. It’s a bit like Belgium sans gouvernement: you let people who know what they’re doing get on with it and you find that they do well enough without intervention from the political class and the money men (who are the only ones losing out here, let’s face it).

What the United States .gov has chosen to do here unilaterally – shutting down a Hong Kong company primarily serving out of China – has an obvious effect on the rest of the world, but we would be foolish to swallow any assertion that this has been done “to protect and to serve” the rest of the world.

This political blinkering is compounded by a general failure, as far as I see it, to find and support a proper, open global forum for the discussion of the Internet-specific issues beyond narrow and exclusive processes like ACTA which are about as open as a maximum security jail.

Certainly orgs on a supranational level such as WIPO have not really grasped the nettle. This may be because the ACTA process has cut them out of the deal.

Elsewhere the output of interesting developments like WSIS and WGIG has either remained fairly abstract or slowed to a trickle.

Old men with old ideas shuffling slowly

As I see it, this generation of representatives and legislators is faced with a phenomenon for which it does not really have a proper vocabulary. It continues to apply proprietary models that date back to medieval society.

These models are flawed in the online context because they are based on intrinsic notions of fixed physical boundaries and transactions conducted essentially between two parties, each with obligations that bind them to the other.

It is fairly obvious that the Internet does not slide nicely into this particular suit of armour.

To quote the Wikipedia article on WGIG:

IT experts have expressed doubts that a UN body that does not necessarily know enough about the Internet will effectively coordinate the Internet technologically.

If the Internet were a physical object, for that generation it would be a quantity of mercury: a marketable yet frustrating, shapeshifting and fairly noxious liquid which needs to be contained in a bottle.

In fact, the Internet is more like oxygen. It’s already out of the bottle, it’s all around us, you can’t measure it and even if we share a common need for it, we each have a unique relationship with it. You can package bottles and sell them in lots. You cannot package an atmospheric gas, you can only cut access to it.

So if the lawmakers have abdicated from addressing the more technical aspects of the Internet, how do they propose to address the issue?

The Internet is also, for want of a better term, a cross-cutting issue. What we are talking about here ticks an awful lot of boxes and individual institutions will find it hard to address these modern questions with the relatively narrow scope of their respective remits.

The Internet includes elements of intellectual property, the law of contract, freedom of expression, human rights, international law etc because it is the collective product of human intelligence.

If you focus on the tangible targets – the companies, the websites and the servers – you ignore the the way people behave and vice versa.

After all that, my feeling about the Internet is that it’s a reflection of our world. Some good, some bad.

Perhaps those few with the big vested interests are the ones who need to evolve instead of trying to impose their self-serving control on “the rest of us”.

I recently read a French translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. Equal parts autobiography, meditation and literary examination, the book reflects on the past and present of one of the world’s great cities.

The central theme of Istanbul is a sense of collective sorrow that Pamuk perceives in his hometown and which he likens to huzun, a word of Arabic origin found in Islamic scripture.

Huzun translates roughly as “sadness for things lost” and according to Pamuk its use in the Koran is ambiguous. It may refer to a rejection of sadness at wordly loss since such things are nothing compared to Allah. Instead it may express the feeling of sadness provoked by a worldly event, entailing the reminder that one cannot be closer to Allah.

Pamuk suggests that huzun is an undercurrent felt by all natives of Istanbul who witnessed the years following the establishment of the Turkish Republic.

When the capital was moved to Ankara in late 1923, the Anatolian stronghold of the Republican movement, the old Ottoman seat was left to its own devices. For Istanbul the transition from empire to nation entailed a sustained period of urban decay characterised by the impoverishment of the population and the mass destruction of buildings by fire or neglect.

It occurred to me that this sensibility, when expanded beyond mere notions of nostalgia or specific historical circumstances, is by no means unique to Istanbul.

I have heard something similar from Iranians strongly aware (and proud) of their past greatness.

A whole culture has grown up around the concept of saudade in Cabo Verde and Lisboa.

And then Germans, always surprising in the subtle complexity of certain of their abstract nouns, have their weltschmerz. Perhaps most famously of all, there is the gauzy, insubstantial mono no aware of the Japanese.

No single word in English may do justice to what is a very intricate cultural meme but perhaps among the best is ‘wistfulness’.

Source: BBC News

One of the latest in the BBC’s increasingly ambitious programme of infographics. And this probability plot’s easy to digest from the first look.

I found that there were two sides to Caye Caulker.

This small island – population 1,200 – retains a lot of Caribbean charm and for now resists the crass overdevelopment that has turned neighbouring Ambergris Caye into a theme park. On Front Street you’re dazzled by the brightly-painted beach houses. Your 15 year old snorkel guide is already a divemaster yet he’s cool, modest and has impeccable manners. You get broad smiles every morning at your favourite café.

Meanwhile drug pushers loiter outside the Chinese-owned supermarket. Scruffy, shambling men make muffled, salacious comments to tourist women. Cute little street kids call you a rich whore as you leave your lodgings.

In contrast to those rainy Cayo mornings, we touched down on Caulker under hot sunshine. We took one of those golf buggy taxis from the airstrip. The driver nodded to everyone he passed on the sandy road. Palms swayed and flowers burst with colour on all sides.

We arrived at the office to take the keys to our rented place and there we saw the first of many enormous dogs, gazing at us ambivalently as we swiped our credit card. I’d read about all this. I considered myself quite well-informed. All the same, we were reminded to be sensible. To say no to offers of drugs. To avoid getting into conversations with sketchy types. We wouldn’t do that in our own city, so we shouldn’t do it here.

As warnings go, these are pretty mild. They fit right in with the advice about tap water (you can’t drink it and you probably shouldn’t rinse with it) and the high local cost of sunscreen. All the same, standing at a counter opposite a handy-looking man filling out forms and being scrutinised by his man-sized dog, this scene did have something of the police caution about it.

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Caye Caulker

Among Belize's northern cayes and divided in two by a 1961 hurricane, life on Caulker is summed up by the island motto 'Go slow'.

Go slow

Even laying in a hammock, listening to Parliament and sipping on rum and lime seems pretty lively for this place.

It’s late afternoon and as I gently swing this way and that, only the hummingbirds are busy. J is nearby sketching a particularly fecund looking coconut palm.

Caye Caulker seems quite touristic after San Ignacio. A few Dutch, a few Canadians, lots of Americans. And we all rather stand out, as we did among a big group of spectators at yesterday’s ladies’ football match. I never did find out which teams were playing. [Island Stars (home team) vs. Millenium Girls (Belize City), I later learned]

Caulkerans [sic] are noticeably more entrepreneurial than San Ignacians [sic, again]. Many family homes are also shopfronts or cookhouses or garages. The ancient lady two doors down will do your laundry and she’s had a little sign made to tell you so.

During our ride out of San Ignacio, Dutch shuttle driver William Hofman had told us how local cabbies resented his success. He was stealing their business, they told him. But incoming tourists were not calling them, retorted William. Development is inevitable, he reckoned. The only question is whether or not you were ready to participate.

If San Ignacio’s cabbies are dithering, Caulkerans seem clearly to have made their choice. Doubtless this has changed Caye Caulker but perhaps no more so than Hurricane Hattie in 1961. The evidence is everywhere you care to look. For building materials, all the lovely hardwoods are gradually being replaced by concrete and the builders are piling on more storeys. Nature will find concrete much harder to hide than the limestone of Mayan temples.

Those of us who visit as tourists are largely responsible for these changes. The Caye Caulker community shares its island with tourists – whose presence doubles the population every year – and that must surely represent a lot of pressure and unusual influences on local resources and development.

Offshoring

Offshoring in Europe may mean having one’s job done cheaper by Asia but in Caye Caulker it’s about taking a boat ride out into the beautiful waters that make the Northern Cayes such an attraction.

J and I did the classic Hol Chan – Shark Ray Alley snorkel trip with Carlos Tours and, whilst the reef is not for various reasons on the scale one finds in the Red Sea, the proximity to sharks and stingrays is exciting.

Elsewhere we were fortunate for our last full day in Caulker to visit Goff’s Caye, which included a stop on the way to watch manatees at Swallow Caye. Though sometimes perfectly deserted, the tiny Goff’s Caye seems to be a favourite destination for cruise ship parties. Whether or not that was their origin, we were probably lucky that there were so few other groups on the Caye that day.

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Boats from Caye Caulker

Belize's northern cayes are home to a wide array of aquatic life and the best way to see it is by boat!

On this side of the Mopan river is Benque, Belize. On the far side is Melchor de Mencos, Guatemala. The air is full of last night’s rain and sickening diesel fumes. We’re at the border checkpoint, a confusing mess of trucks, money changers, uniformed men with pump action shotguns and a lot of blank staring people hanging about.

J and I emerge from the border house with passports stamped and we get into a dusty car with Guatemalan plates, driven by a heavy-set, silent type who only later reveals that he has in fact a handsome command of English.

They’re building a new bridge into Melchor de Mencos but it’s not finished, so we take on the narrow, older crossing instead. We’re stuck in traffic trying to cross the bridge and the crowd is pressing in. Eventually, after a stop at a gas station in which everyone is smoking, we clear town on a highway punctuated by intermittent rough sections.

After about an hour of broad, deforested landscapes and sleeping dogs and poor shacks and rich churches, we approach the village of Ixlu (“Lady Catfish”) near the banks of Lake Petén. Ixlu has all the usual suspects – a couple of tiendas named after women, a little bar, a colourful graveyard and lots of washing lines – but it also has our guide Luis.

Luis introduces himself and then translates a few newspaper articles for us. He’s a fast-talking septuagenarian who starts out like a club comedian but turns out to be a Mayan mystic.

This is no schtick: Luis is a timekeeper. He’s here to describe the events of the world. This is his birth role. His birthday is the same as mine. He brushes away the coincidence. To Mayans there is no such thing. Instead he stops dead and fixes me with a serious look. He tells me that it means I’m also a timekeeper. Luis stops dead again and fixes us both with a serious look. He says we have a long hike today. This staccato is something he will do throughout our visit to Tikal. It gives a rhythm to everything. He’s keeping time.

Luis has been doing his job as a timekeeper, this same job, four times a week for over fourteen years. Tikal is one of his best friends.

That best friend is much older of course. It was founded around the fourth century BC and came to prominence in the Classic period. Unlike nearby Caracol, Tikal has been fully mapped and its true extent is known: an area of 16km² containing 3,000 buildings and home to around 90,000 inhabitants, though some believe the city state could have fed almost half a million.

Tikal’s history is exemplary of Yucatec Mayan history. An agrarian society was in evidence around 1000BC which grew to prominence during the course of the early centuries AD.

Conflict and alliance with other city states followed and then a strong, probably ruling connection with Teotihuacán in modern day Mexico.

Tikal’s zenith began in the late 4th century AD and lasted almost two hundred years, during which time its influence spread widely throughout the Yucatán Peninsula and encompassed several client settlements.

In common with most Mayan city states however, by the 9th century Tikal had become unable to cope with the demands of such a large population and intense regional competition for resources and it entered a period of irreversible decline.

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Tikal

One of the largest and finest Mayan sites in the Yucatán Peninsula, Tikal in Guatemala is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Luis is busy. He is calling to birds and monkeys. He is climbing the ruins via all the small paths he knows. He explains the ball court system to J. He points out the architects’ signatures in the stonework. He warns a tourist off the ramparts of a fragile building.

Luis says that all religions are valid. He says they all converge like tributaries on the same great river of life and death. He says that it is useless to fight over this religion or that: all religions are merely mathematical and they all contain the hidden, codified messages of the universe.

Luis talks about ley lines, sutras, I-Ching, Stonehenge and Jesus Christ walking on water. He has us standing in temple doorways, closing our eyes, humming, feeling the energies of the place.

Luis describes an infinite cycle of waves – the biorhythms of the individual and the attack and decay, the ebb and flow of the world.

Luis says that humans alternate in their collective awareness and proximity to the creator force. The capacity for enlightenment versus the capacity for obfuscation. And the world alternates simultaneously, between stress and balance. These concepts are universal, not simply Mayan.

Luis says that in 2012, the end of one of these great cycles will come to pass. This is not the end of the world, says Luis. It is the end of a world.

Balance must be restored. Humans must rediscover their proximity to the creator force.

John Chuc drives us out of San Ignacio on a cool, rainy morning in Cayo. We soon hit the stony, potholed tracks that constitute the majority of Belize’s minor roads. We pass through several villages, each of which have been paved with their regulation mile’s worth of asphalt.

John tells me later that he hopes that all those minor roads will stay unpaved. If the tarmac arrives, he says, so too will the bigger vehicles and their drivers and passengers and heavy loads. And with them the expectation that everything in Cayo will have to speed up. Such an expectation would be created in direct opposition to the Mayan tradition, the Mayan way of life. Progress, reckons John, is subjective and should not always be inevitable.

Kids play on the roads. Dogs sleep on the roads. Huge elephant grass grows on the fringes of the roads and threatens to steal them back for Nature. That is John Chuc’s sort of progress.

When we reach San Antonio, John makes a brief stop and I get out to stretch my legs. The quiet is deafening. A young Mayan smiles shyly as she floats by. Later the road starts to rise steadily while the temperature drops.

Into the forests

We cross the brown, busy Mahal River and enter the Chiquibul National Park. There are electricity pylons, incongruous among the trees of the forest. Somewhere nearby a controversial dam project still supplies no current to them after design faults were discovered.

On the far bank of the Mahal, the stony white tracks give way to bright red clay: today it makes for a wet and rather treacherous surface. The clay and the increasing altitude indicate that we have now entered the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve. The existence of this native pine forest was a late discovery in Belize, a territory whose thick forests and tiny population precluded any serious exploration until the early twentieth century. In recent years, up to 80% of the pine forest was severely damaged by a massive infestation of beetles. A restoration programme in progress since 2002 aims to replant 3.5m beetle-resistant seedlings across 36,500ha. The programme is reportedly very successful but the landscape visible from the dirt road looks rather bare all the same. I roll up the window a little: it’s cooler up here.

Eventually we reach the Douglas D’Silva Forestry Station at one end of an abandoned loggers’ settlement called Augustine. Augustine today looks more like a deserted prison camp than a village. John tells me that a few licensed loggers still live in Augustine. True enough: in amongst all the neatly-spaced but deteriorating shacks I spot a few bits of soggy washing on a line.

The British Army still comes up here occasionally for jungle training exercises but its presence this close to the Guatemalan border is unlikely ever to be conspicuous. Our destination today is closer still and memories of Guatemala’s military manoeuvres in the 1970s are still relatively fresh in Belize.

Today vehicles heading to Caracol are escorted to and from the site following recent reports of visitors being robbed at gunpoint, a story more common across the border in Petén. These attacks are believed to have been conducted by Guatemalans entering and operating in Belize illegally under the cover of thick forests around the border.

The week before my visit, a band of Guatemalan loggers enticed by valuable hardwoods had been identified and pursued by the Belizean army. The loggers – working only at night but with the noise of their saws audible to the night guard – fled camp immediately. In their haste they left behind their heavy equipment and this was duly confiscated.

Caracol: the city state

The entrance to Caracol is the end of the line and the last few kilometres to the site are paved with asphalt. Visitors find there a couple of nondescript buildings including a small information centre with a handy scale model of the complex.

Caracol – or Oxwitza, to give the city its proper Mayan name – was rediscovered by a Belizean logger in the late 1930s. The British officials who subsequently visited the site incorrectly concluded that Caracol was of relatively minor importance in comparison with other sites then being excavated around the Yucatán Peninsula. A later topographical review revealed their error: the findings suggested the extrapolation of a much bigger overall plan.

Such was the accuracy of this conclusion that only 10% of Caracol has so far been excavated and exposed despite decades of work by archaeologists. Buildings that form part of the Caracol plan have been discovered as far as 30km away from the principal dig.

In common with all major Mayan complexes, Caracol was home to a self-contained, socially stratified and highly sophisticated society. The city state was led by a small patriarchal élite, protected and advanced by a warrior class and supported by broad middle and servant classes, with the population probably exceeded 150,000 during Caracol’s zenith period in the 6th century AD.

Built on a site far away from rivers in the midst of thick jungle, Caracol was designed deliberately to be difficult to locate and built from about 650BC. The population survived entirely on rainfall and localised farming operations, utilising intelligent irrigation and storage systems.

The need for blood

High on the Vaca Plateau, the people of Caracol had no need of neighbours. However this did not mean that they isolated themselves from the rest of the Mayan world. When growth outstripped resources – as certainly happened at Caracol – the city state required the blood of the élite to maintain the life force of their creator deity. Though Caracol’s rulers could ritually supply some of their own blood, war with other city states became necessary to secure adequate sacrifices.

Mayan wars seem almost clinical in their scope and prescriptive formula: battles involved only warriors and nobles, usually took place at agreed locations well away from the urban complexes and apart from the taking of prisoners, vanquished city states were left otherwise intact. All the victors usually wanted was the blood of their adversaries’ élite.

Ball games

As the rain falls gently on our heads at Caracol, John begins to explain how the victors obtained their sanguinary tribute. We’re standing before Altar 21 in the centre of a ball court on which was played a sort of divine game bearing a few similarities to tennis and squash.

The two players were taken from the vanquished élite and they bounced a heavy, 7.5kg latex ball between them. This ball was probably hit only with the hips and could deflect from the walls but was not supposed to touch the ground.

The winner of this game might have been spared, but it is more likely that both players were beheaded and their blood dedicated to the creator deity.

Playing the game was surely very difficult but the élite class probably trained and practised for the eventuality of formal play throughout their active lives. John explains that, contrary to the appearance of brutality in these proceedings, the ball game was a sacred ritual for which all players were spiritually prepared and in which they were proud to participate.

Plazas and buildings

Later I climb the steps of several of the taller excavated buildings in each of the two plazas.

First among these was Structure A2 on the western side of the A-Group plaza. Probably built during the first couple of centuries AD, A2 was found to contain numerous tombs and stelae at its summit.

Meanwhile the Temple of the Wooden Lintel, on the eastern side of the A-Group plaza whose function was to support astronomy and timekeeping activities. The eponymous lintel is in fact original to the structure which was built around AD70, a full nine years before Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii over in Europe.

Then followed the highest of the complex: Caana (“Sky Place”), which dominates the B-Group plaza. Caana is still Belize’s tallest building and seems to have been fully rebuilt in the late 7th century AD to contain at least 70 rooms.

The end

The ball game and evidence of timekeeping activities are just two examples of how elaborate the cultural formalities of Mayan civilisation were.

Yet however sophisticated they had become, the Classic Mayans could not respond to the vicissitudes of Nature. Up to the middle of the 9th century AD, Caracol continues to record events and then there follows the ‘radio silence’ characteristic of the period across the Yucatán.

There are several theories behind the so-called Classic Collapse which was probably never so total as historians once believed. Among these is the persuasive idea that the period of sudden decline at Caracol coincided with a severe regional drought. The fact of Caracol’s distance from stable water sources seems particularly to support the possibility.

Whatever really happened, as John explained, the jungle probably reclaimed the great, millenial city within a couple of decades. Now as we leave Caracol behind for the entrance clearing, I look back briefly and find that the jungle had already claimed the site from my view.

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Caracol and Chiquibul

Accessible only by rough roads, Caracol is the largest Mayan site in Belize: in its day, a city state home to over 150,000 people.

John Chuc is a guide from a local Mayan family well-known in Bullet Tree Falls, Cayo. He runs K’in Winik Jungle Tours based in San Ignacio.

It’s already hot by mid-morning on Saturday in Cayo. I’m standing in the middle of the noisy, sweet-smelling weekly market in San Ignacio.

People come here from all over the District and it feels like most of them are indeed here right now! J and I hitched a lift from Theo and family at Parrot Nest Lodge in Bullet Tree Falls. It’s our last full day in Cayo and we’re thinking about hiking up to Cahal Pech above the town as we file through the market.

Most of the stallholders on the town side are selling fruit and vegetables: bananas, onions, cauliflower, cho-cho. Down the middle, they offer cooked food: tamales, burritos and hot corn tortillas in black plastic bags.

At one end of this middle section, a young man is chanting Bible passages and Christian admonishments in a breathless Spanish monotone. He holds a microphone in one hand and his other one is flailing about in a strangely angled, witchdoctor dance.

On the Mahal River side of the market, many of the stalls seem more like jumble or garage sales in their lack of a common theme. Old toys, books full of brown pages, sandals, second-hand clothes, used lipsticks, towels and pirated DVDs.

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Cayo

We stayed near San Ignacio, capital town of Belize's wild western district bordering Guatemala.

While not without its problems (what city in Europe or the United States does not have any problems?) San Ignacio is a good base from which to visit Mayan ruins and organise rainforest activities but like at the Saturday morning market, it’s also a funny old place to browse around and find a surprise.

This is more or less how we ended up spending the rest of the day – despite our best laid plans – in the home of British ex-pat Paul. He and his family had all of that warm, welcoming, disarming friendliness to which it’s very difficult to become accustomed as a rush-rush European.

The sheer sincerity of Belizeans and many of the fascinating ex-pats living in Cayo takes a good while to click, to the extent that I think it took us until our morning of departure to finally get it.

• Robert Tressell
• Penguin Modern Classics (2004)

Exploding unemployment. Reckless state mismanagement. The obscene profits banks derive from debt. The yawning gap between rich and poor.

These are some of the facts of our time. They were also prevalent in Robert Tressell’s time, at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then, with two world wars and the fall of empires, a whole, tumultuous century has passed by, the majority of which Tressell never witnessed, dying while still fairly young from tuberculosis.

Tressell was the nom de plume of an Irish painter and decorator named Robert Noonan (viz. the trestle table of his profession) who signed his work thus to protect himself from the inevitable controversy of his radical political novel about class struggle and the troubles of a few ordinary men.

Sadly, he needn’t have worried. The novel was rejected by a succession of publishers and did not appear until some years after his death.

Radical

Robert Noonan left home when he was sixteen years old. Growing up in Ireland in 1870s, he became politically radicalised and left for South Africa. While there he married and carved out a career in the construction industry.

However the Boer wars interrupted his steady course to maturity and eventually he found himself in England and in somewhat reduced circumstances.

His frustration at the deep-rooted inequalities in British society led to his writing of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists but the finished manuscript was unanimously rejected.

Though he will have noted the widespread protests and marches that signified a tide turning towards his viewpoint, Tressell never lived to see the advent of the Russian Revolution, which brought about the total restructuring the sort of which he dared to dream.

Legacy

The resultant Soviet society echoed in many ways the central thesis of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in the form of Barrington’s lunchtime lecture, yet that same Soviet society was both corrupt and flawed in a way that Tressell’s Socialist workmen could not have expected.

Even if Communism is now a failed experiment, Tressell’s contemporaries have left behind an enduring legacy in less absolute societies. The end of the Second World War saw the implementation across Europe of systems intended to provide basic healthcare, education and social welfare. These were the foundations that rebuilt modern Europe and their decline and gradual dissolution in recent decades is a cause of great concern.

Perhaps this is a good moment to take another look at The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and think again about our priorities for the future.

The Belgian non-government led by Yves Leterme has announced a plan to tackle public debt by the issue of public bonds. Leterme was quoted in Thursday’s Le Soir as saying:

« Vu les difficultés sur les marchés financiers, nous voulons davantage faire appel à la capacité d’épargne des Belges pour financer la dette »

Given the present difficulties on the financial markets, we want to appeal to Belgians’ capacity for saving money.

Government bonds are supposed to be risk-free – this is their principal attraction – and Belgian people are indeed notable savers among Europeans. The government is now offering the incentive of a 4% interest rate for Belgians willing to fill the coffers in support of financing their burgeoning national debt.

There are however a couple of problems with the proposal of Leterme et al.

Firstly, we have embarked on a unique period in Europe, in which the economic landscape will almost certainly look rather different in five years’ time. So while Belgium is not in the same fix as Greece, there is no longer such a thing as a risk-free investment.

Secondly, Belgium is a strongly divided nation which still lacks a government after another recent breakdown in talks (indeed the political crisis itself is thought to have cost €1.8bn so far) and many potential investors may question how their money might be used.

By Brasserie Dupont. 8% ABV, serve at 12°

Brasserie Dupont, from the little village of Tourpes near Tournai, is pretty well-known here in Belgium thanks to the broad distribution of their popular copper kettle brews Moinette and Saison Dupont.

Dupont has been producing Bière de Miel (“honey beer”) as an organic product since 1997, having rediscovered the recipe after about 75 years in abeyance.

The brew, served in irritatingly small bottles or the 75cl Standard, is full of springtime flavours, in amongst which the honey is only one.

Indeed the strongest note in there for me is orange blossom. Refreshing, light and pleasantly floral.