Making a Virtue out of a Necessity: Or, Trident Lite

Having been a ‘ban the bomber’ on those marches in the early sixties I still feel guilty at having failed. I also still feel guilty that underneath all of my marching, speecheefying and giving the thin blue line a bit of a run around, I was always thinking, ‘I hope those Marxist Fascists over there don’t march in when we get rid of these stupid bangers’. By the seventies I was thinking, ‘Well if they do we will go down with our own personal bang which is probably better than inflicting it on the rest of the planet’. Little did I know that the peril to be inflicted would come more from a global economy which made some very affluent, others very poor, and all of us heading for hell in a bucket.

What is my point? Just hang in there a second. Well, at least I recognised the perils and had to decide what the right route was in moral terms. There were those among us then who had no such doubts. Bertram Russell was one, Canon John Collins another. The Canon had been a bomber pilot at the time of Dresden with Hiroshima and Nagasaki yet to come. Not only listen to your radicals but listen to those who have seen into the abyss. Between the two perspectives we all know that ‘MAD’, i.e., mutually assured destruction, is not a defence mechanism but a suicide pact. Against such people I used to feel a bit of a moral coward, and I think I still do, as it is easier to be brave when you have had a great life.

This really does bring me to my point. Why start proclaiming that we will reduce the number of our Trident submarines down to three from four? Come off it Gordon! You know as well I do up here in the agricultural hills that your mini ministers have done so much to undermine, that you can’t afford to do anything else. You can’t really afford three Trident Subs, let alone an ID Card Scheme not to mention a properly conducted land war in Afghanistan. You have written on ‘Courage’ and now is the time to put that noble concept into practice and have the courage to set out the reality. How about saying, ‘We cannot afford a nuclear deterrent so we will reduce it, and at the very least, we will make every effort to further multilateralism’. Not exactly the moral high ground but at least it is honest and will take a bit of courage to express. You have nothing to lose. In any case, and this will appeal to your fragile political judgement, the environmental flip over point might well be reached before anyone actually has to press the button. At least one thing is pretty clear by now. It won’t be you on the hotline to Washington or to Naval Command at Northwood authorising any such depression. Your vaporisation will have already occurred within the next 9 months. ‘Another fine mess you’ve got us into......’

Dacier

Citizen Cider and the Rescue by Ciderman

Having been trying to get rid of our accumulated junk for sometime I decided that it was time that our garage had some attention. The only thing we don’t keep in it is the car. There is so much junk and my visits so infrequent that it never fails to provide a surprise or two. This time it was a load of home made alcohol at the back which I had forgotten about. Although there are several full wine bottles their labels have all fallen off so it was only the cider which was clearly recognisable because it is in crown top beer bottles. I also remembered that the bottles with a white sticker were the sweet whilst those with no sticker were dry, or more correctly, sharp.

This meant that they had to be brought down to the house for sampling. The sweet was quite good and some ended up going to Glastonbury with Mary. It has lots of flavour and a good aroma but as usual too much alcohol. I always drink it by the wine glass. Being a complete slap dash merchant when in comes to cider making I just follow the old John Seymour recipe from his self-sufficiency bible and throw a good lot of sugar into the juice and let nature take its course. Having had many disasters down the years I don’t make too much so as to avoid a lot of wasted effort. I have not only made quite a lot of undrinkable cider but also I am constantly reminded at this time of year not to repeat the great pea pod wine fiasco again. We had such a good crop of peas that it seemed a shame to waste all the pods so five gallons of pea pod wine were set in motion, bottled and stored. The brew had quite a kick but had the one big snag: getting it past your nose! That done, it had quite a kick but not enough to obliterate the smell, so eventually many years later it went down the drain on the occasion of one of our many moves chasing the work.

When we lived on the edge of Worcester I imported large quantities of cider apples to the back yard and spent many hours pulping and pressing them to make a nearly forty gallons of cider. This was all stored in our brilliant cellar which had a near constant temperature throughout the year. My Hereford cider, brewed in Worcester, was soon being sampled by neighbours and I eventually learnt that I was known by some neighbours as Ciderman.

One set of neighbours fell victim to the persuasive powers of Ciderwoman in that she had encouraged them to consider the merits of camping as a cheap holiday for a large family. Soon, thanks to the local ad mag, they had acquired a full range of equipment, including an old style frame tent with steel work which seemed to be a scaled down version of a New York construction site back in the thirties. Such was its size that the family had tried several times to complete its construction and on its umpteenth attempt was nearly there but was a pair of experienced hands short. Up went the shout that Ciderman was needed and soon a knock was being applied to our front door. The small child sent to summon help was in an agitated state of mind but clearly someone was needed across the street. Ciderman was already engaged in a project to preserve his job i.e., meeting a deadline. Ciderwoman therefore dashed to the rescue and soon the huge tent was in place and soundly pitched. At this point Ciderwoman and Ciderman (who had eventually put in a belated appearance)were applauded for their help and deliverance from the violent ways of the steel framed tent. Needless to say we had not been sampling our harvest at the time. If we had been the result could have been somewhat different.

Dacier and Sian