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If you turn your back even for a few moments, your glass or bottle is vulnerable. Ped-Lock eliminates that risk with a private locker which can be installed as part of the furniture, with a capacity of a single drink or a whole table's-worth. To help protect against the crime, a company called SafeFlo has started marketing a bottle cap that fits on to the neck to make it much harder for malefactors to slip anything inside. The drinker carries the cap and clips it on as necessary, though Cobra beer, the popular Indian brand, has also introduced the caps on its bottles.
Look at for more information.The second device is even more extreme: a built-in drinks locker for installation in bars and clubs. Ped-Lock is the creation of an 18-year-old inventor from Somerset, Jason Malone, who conceived the idea after his own visits to clubs made him see how insecure a drink is when out of its owner's sight. According to the Roofie Foundation ( ), there may be 2,000 cases of drug-assisted robbery each year and about 900 incidents of drug-assisted rape. Most of the victims are women, and the dangerous places are usually clubs and bars.
Scientific testing has established that women, on the whole, are better wine tasters than men. I worry about the failure of the national effort to educate young drinkers, women especially, about the true purpose of alcohol: to provide intelligent gustatory pleasure.This is a public-health issue as well as a matter of good taste. A recent Datamonitor study has found that young women in Britain (aged 18 to 25) are the heaviest drinkers in Europe (216 litres of alcohol a year as against an average of 148 litres), and says that their consumption is set to rise to 291 litres by the year 2009.I'm not the only one who's worried about drinking by young women. The same concern lies, in a somewhat different form, behind two recent inventions whose necessity is a cause of sadness. The question: why is the food served at these otherwise well-run enterprises so unremittingly awful? The answer came from a quick snoop I conducted while recycling our weekend's drinking in the glass-recycling bins What I saw there was truly alarming. The only good bottle was of the fabulously complex Hobgoblin Strong Dark Ale (£1.69, Asda, Booth's, Threshers, Waitrose). We're to take it home to share it with our loved ones, like children showing off their schoolwork to their parents.By now the cioppino and the braised octopus in Rioja are ready, and we eat a plateful of each, mopping up with fresh bread and sipping a crisp Loire white.
