Thursday 11 August 2011

The Package in the Post.


Ciderman, Ciderman
Drinks it out of a cider can
Can he swing from a thread?
No he can't, he's too pissed.

I had a surprise today. A keyring arrived, one of the most useful kind - with a bottle opener attached. No return address, no note. So thank you, Anonymous One, and I'll wait until I have a few bottles of Weston's Cider before sullying this by opening lesser brews.

It's another of the creepy coincidences that plague my life. I have often written stories about the mythical, magical and utterly deranged Blackthorn family without once linking that name to Blackthorn's cider. In the follow-up to Jessica's Trap, the lands owned by Lord West in that book have become the town of... Weston. I had no idea that was another cider name. Maybe I should drink more of it. It is, after all, allegedly summer, and obviously cider is where my inspiration comes from. It probably started on the Night of Cloudy Scrumpy, but I don't recall much of that evening.

I hope Weston's cider is available here. Tomorrow I'll scout around the shops. There are still some off-licences the supermarkets have not yet killed.

Thanks again, Anon. It's much appreciated and will be put to good use.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you need to send three bottle tops to Westons and they will send you this handy bit of kit.

My mate came down, downed 2 bottles and left the tops, then promised me the third so I may claim my prize.

Never seen the cunt since, last heard off at Legoland Windsor with his sprogs, what a selfish bastard eh?

hangemall said...

But how did they find your name and address?

Leg-iron said...

Anon - I haven't heard of this cider before so I consider it a tip-off. maybe it was from the cidermen themselves, having recognised a potentially very good customer ;)

Hangemall - The addressing suggests it was through the novel or the short story book.

Leg-iron said...

hmm... Dr. Who and the Cidermen. Having beaten the utterly logical Cybermen, how will the Doctor fare against the absolutely illogical and often forgetful Cidermen?

But that would be fan fiction, and that's just not on.

Brew Wales said...

Westons Cider is made in the beautiful setting of Much Marcle, birthplace of Fred West. Hence the jokes about the cider being bone dry and full bodied....

Kynon said...

Weston's is pretty widely available these days. I hear it's quite nice too, as cider goes.

Simon Cooke said...

And they do, of course, deliver...

http://www.westons-cider.co.uk/Shop/

Enjoy

Captain Haddock said...

Weston's 2010 vintage cider (8.2 ABV) is widely available at Morrison's, Tesco & Sainsbury's ..

Wonderful stuff .. ;)

Jane said...

Weston's vintage - Co-op 2 for £3; Morrisons, £1.26 a bottle. Love the stuff!

nisakiman said...

I remember as a teenager holidaying in Somerset discovering scrumpy one night. Oh dear. It was very easy to drink, so drink it I did. Scuttered or what... My memory of that night is very hazy, but I do remember vomiting a lot. It was more than thirty years before I could even think of drinking cider again. Just the smell of it used to make me heave.

I don't know if it's true, but they used to say that the farmers would chuck a leg of lamb into the brew to give it 'body'. In fact I once heard that a farmer's collie had fallen in the vat one year, and everybody reckoned it was the best brew he'd ever made!

Anonymous said...

There was an astounding documentary segment a few years ago with a bunch of regulars at a pub downing the local speciality - a strong scrumpy, apperently over two pints off it could cause uncontrolled bowel movements, one old boy recounted how he had 4 pints, went to go home and shit his trousers just past the pub threshold, another regular showed his party piece to stop someone sipping his pint while he went to the bogs, he took his false eye out and dropped it in his pint glass.

Sorry cant recall the name of the programme, its probably on Youtube if you search long enough.

Leg-iron said...

The Night of Cloudy Scrumpy was at university. I was sharing a flat and one of the others was from near Exeter.

We'd already been drinking. He brought out a plastic container that looked like a petrol can, full of coudy yellow stuff.

And then it all went dark.

John Pickworth said...

I grew up on scrumpy... I am (or was) a Midlander though, so it wasn't a typical pastime in those parts for many of my peers. However a few did imbibe the magic apple juice. Oh what fun we had betting on the first timer's bout of heaving - would they stop once their entire stomach contents had been expelled or would they continue retching into the following morning?

Come to think of it, there used to be a tacky little wine bar in the centre of Nottingham - on Bottle Lane, appropriately - but upstairs was 'the upstairs'; a simple dimly lit room, no furniture or seating with just a basic bar at the far end. Here they dispensed two varieties of liquid death... proper scrumpy (served in plastic glasses) and mead*. To reach the bar you'd need to gingerly push your way through the 10 deep queue of motorcycle leather wearing adherents to some Chapter or other. The other thing to remember was not to stand too long on the impossibly sticky carpet for risk of remaining there indefinitely - we never discovered the cause of the stickiness, it was probably best not to dwell upon such things.

Good times :-)

* I'd never drunk Mead before but after my first session I was down the library the very next day and found an old recipe for it. Two weeks later I had my first batch and continued to make it for many years.

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