Last week saw the anniversary of the one of the strangest and little-known tragedies in the history of London. It’s difficult to discuss sensibly: often, when people first hear of it, they can’t help laughing at the circumstances in which eight people – all women and children – met violent deaths. Time has helped dull the edge of tragedy of course, but even so, it seems awful for sane, balanced, kind people to find such a tragedy funny. But laugh they do.

It’s a little-known fact (outside beer geek circles) that stout, the beer that defines Ireland, has its origins not in Dublin but London.

If I asked you what you wanted to drink with a really great meal, unless you’re teetotal I’m guessing your decision-making process would largely centre around the question, ‘red or white’?

As I’ve said before in this column, one of the biggest misunderstandings I encounter in my career is that people assume – what with me being a beer writer – that I hate lager and anyone who drinks it. Many – even some close to the industry – will make a distinction between ‘beer’ and ‘lager’, clearly suggesting that lager is somehow not real beer.

Over the last couple of years I’ve written quite a bit in this column about beer festivals and events happening in London. Sorry if that gets repetitive – if you read this column, and you live in London, I figure you’d be interested to know about beer events happening in this great city, and they’re happening with increasing frequency.

It all started with Barack Obama. In 2009, white police Sergeant James Crowley arrested a black man for apparently breaking into a house in a prosperous part of Cambridge, Massachussetts. It turned out the black man was Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr: a writer, TV presenter, editor, literary critic, filmmaker and essayist, and the first African American to receive the prestigious Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He’d lost his keys. Crowley had arrested him for trying to get into his own home.

There’s a war going on for your soul. On one side, we have the drive to conformity that is seeing every street jammed into the same rigidly branded template. On the other, we have freedom, individuality and humanity.

OK, so I’m a teensy bit biased in my war reporting, but hear me out.

One of the best things about being a beer writer now people actually want to read about beer is that we’re starting to escape our little ghetto. It used to feel like beer bloggers, writers and enthusiasts were just talking to each other in a bubble that was entirely separate from any flavour of mainstream discourse.

So the media have finally cottoned on to the fact that binge drinking is declining, not increasing as they have been telling us for years. The strangest part of the coverage of new research by Cardiff University linking a drop in violent crime to declining binge drinking is that the press reporting the story treat it as news: whatever link there is between binge drinking and alcohol consumption, both have been in long term decline for a decade. It’s just that no one wanted to admit that, until now.