Welfare drinks 24 cans of Wifebeater XXXX daily on welfare

Now, I wouldn't normally bother with anything the Daily Express desecrates the corpses of dead trees with, but this is a good 'un. The story, in the May 6th edition of the hateful Tory arse-wipe, recounts the tale of the Kent "yob" who - rather too good to be true - is named Nicky Welfare. Mr. Welfare has no qualifications we are told, lives with his parents, and drinks 24 cans of Stella Artois along with two cans of Strongbow cider (well, you can't start off on the hard stuff before you've had your Shreddies, can you?). If he was foreign too he'd be the paper's Public Enemy Number 1.

OK, so far so good. But Nicky Welfare? Come on - seriously? I couldn't help but wonder if - just perhaps - one of the pseudo-Mail's hacks had in fact fabricated the story, using the first name that came to mind (inventing convincing fictitious names is a surprisingly tricky thing to do, as a look at one or two of the desperate examples in this very blog will demonstrate) which s/he intended to go back and change before submitting the piece, but eventually forgot. Or does Martin Amis make up the names for them?

Purely in the interests of science, I went out for a walk with my credit card this morning (so click on one or two of this page's ads, please) to find out what the lowest priced four pack of Stella I could lay my hands on was selling for. No matter where I went, there was absolutely no way that someone on Jobseekers' Allowance, which pays £60.40 a week, could possibly have afforded 24 cans of Stella a day. So I went to the supermarket to see which beers they had on special offer as loss-leading promotions this week. To cut a long story short, the cheapest price on can of stella possible (by buying a multi-pack) works at around 75p.

You do the maths.

Or, if you can't, here it is: Mr. Welfare drinks 24 cans per day, and we are assuming these cost him 75p each. 24 x 0.75 = £18. There are seven days in a week. 7 x 18 = £126. Jobseekers' allowance - 126 = £65.60.

So £65.60 is how much I'm willing to bet that the Express story is either a complete fabrication or at least differs vastly from the truth. Tell you what though, if you could be bothered to register www.nickywelfare.com you'd make a packet selling it to one of the myriad of teenage punk bands who are going to adopt the name.

Anyway, I've got about a ton and a half of Stella here. Cheers!