#32

It must be late Altumn...well OK there's no point in ignoring the shivering elephant in the room: it must already be early Winter, because there are few, or no, leaves left on the trees and the customary vat of home made cider (this year made using donated apples from my Cousin's garden) is bubbling away in its little niche next to the radiator in the kitchen in between a cupboard and Sumpy's hide-out, waiting to be liberated for Christmas Eve merriment which is usually round at Russ's place. As you can see there's only about five litres of it this year due to a shortage of donated apples, but plenty enough for Christmas Eve since my cider tends to be about 12% alcohol per volume, or more, so however much you try and pace yourself when consuming it, it usually catches you out and you get drunk very quickly...especially one year, when I thought I'd make some low alcohol cider by putting loads less sugar in it than usual... but as it turned-out on that particularly mentally fuzzy Christmas Eve, round Russ's, unbeknownst to me before I consumed it, it was somehow just as strong as previous years, so expecting it to be about 5% and not 12% I drank twice as quickly sending me in to some altered state of reality, when, as informed days later by the folk who were there assembled, for the rest of the evening I assumed the persona of a comedy style mad professor with a French accent. Alas, I think Russ might even have a sound recording of the performance. Yeesh...all those dead brain cells, may they rest in peace...damn... with my brain problems I need every brain cell I can on the team too. And what tends to seal the brain cell decimation process on these Christmas Eves is that I'm not the only one to bring-along home-made toxins -- Barkfoot also comes-round with all sorts of home-made alcoholic fair... and of course it would be rude not to have a proper drink or two of each of his offerings which are usually in the form of very, very alcoholiclyallicly spirits.... for example slo gin, ginger whiskey type stuff and the most lime flavored liquor known to mankind. I only probably tend have a drink about once a month on average during the rest of the year now-a-days (it's not like the days of our youth trawling multiple pubs every evening) so not being used to alcohol and, the tolerance there gained, it means my the Christmas period is a somewhat floaty dreamy period... especially now I'm old and have started to endulge in the the alco-pop for the aged: sweet sherry in-between the usual Christmas drinking sessions.

I've brewed my own cider for many years now... some years it turns-out really nice,some years it's very disappointing indeed, but it's always been very pure and very alcoholic, as described above. It always has a most welcome an unusual trait not found in most commercially available alcoholic beverages -- it makes your head go numb with-in a couple of minutes and your body follows soon after, I'm sure Barkfoot will testify to this. Generally though it's a life long voyage to get it right because you only get one stab at it per year -- trying more or less apples, sugar, water, and perhaps other ingredients each time...I could do it do more brews a year, but it would mean buying apples and would defeat the object for me... when apples come from a friend or your own garden it just has more meaning somehow -- you're making something good (hopefully) from what would otherwise go to waste. Well, I'm not sure why I used the phrase 'from your own garden' because it's a lucky year when I even get one apple from my Mother's garden (which is kind-of 'my' garden because I live at my Mother's house, or as I less stigmatizingly prefer to call it: 'The Homestead') where there is but one small apple tree, upon which grows nice eating apples, which inevitably is heartlessly stripped-bare, bare I tell ye, of each and every fruit the instant it ripens by the greedy-bastard squirrels. This is in stark contrast to the situation in the garden next door, a garden consisting of ten large apple trees which are heavily laden with cooking apples every Altumn which are not even touched by the little fury gits, obviously because cooking apples are sour.....you do occasionally, occasionally, see one of the blighters perched on a branch on a tree next door trying a single bite of one and then disgruntle-y alum-faced, casting is abruptly directly down onto the ground. They might make quite good cider those cooking apples because yeast tends to like the more acidic apples, but the land lord who owns next door is not the most approachable person so I've not asked if I can take any....they inevitably fall to the ground and rot where they land un-utilised by man nor beast (certainly not squirrel beasts... perhaps waspy beasties through).