On cider

I cannot think of cider without thinking of a particular early summer, that of 2014, in all its teeth rotting, gut gurgling glory. I am stood in the narrowness of the Lamb and Flag Passage, the Oxford wind cold (for summer is always too late and too short in that strange Narnia of a city) and the stares from tight-lipped cyclists are even colder. We- for I am invariably there with a good solid reprobate of a friend as little inclined to work as I am and with the college groundsman, - half stand, half perch on the tiny stunted window ledge and there drink pint after pint of it- sweet, cheap and sticky. It made us, I think good humoured, imparting the spirit of the Devonian commune or the medieval midsummer festival. We would lose count early- not least because the kindly groundsman would almost always buy, allowing perhaps the sixth or seventh round to be bought for him, as a gesture towards social norms. En route to that moment we would wend our way through old rivalries, imagined slights, unrepeatable jokes and countless cigarettes- but these were only detours, there was a wonderful circularity to it all; consumption of cider was both our starting point and our only discernible goal.

I think too of a family friend who would turn up at the ancestral home during summers with little or no notice, implausibly claiming that he was ‘just in the area’ when he in fact lived two counties away. He would bring two things to the house without fail- humour and cider. The latter was a Somerset variety, dry as Ezekiel’s bones, which would arrive in two jerry cans, ready for immediate consumption in the heat of the day. The former was dry too and, like the cider, all the more enjoyable for it. A different cider then from the groundsman’s but with the same warming effect. Those evenings in high summer, when the gloaming is so glorious that night’s arrival is barely noticed, would disappear as we sat on the lawn, consuming far more than was healthy for us until, with an inevitability as sure as the groundsman’s round, we would begin to sing; not folksongs of yore, but filthy, bastardised versions of Gilbert and Sullivan, until either the ache of laughing was too much or we were out of cider, at which point a member of the party would hop barefoot across the patio, still hot from the baking rays of the day, and drain the jerry cans of the last of their liquid.

Brewers, though they are now more likely to be buzz cut denizens of a chrome-clad domain than stout inhabitants of a world of oak and water, will still repeat to all who will listen that good beer is a perfect marriage, the harmony of hops, water, malt and yeast. Quite how harmonious a marriage of four parties can ever be, I leave to the latter day advocates of polygamy to find out. Regardless, I think of cider more like a giddy and ill-advised affair. Stolid hops and barley, bywords for reliability since Hogarth’s day, are left at home in favour a whirlwind flirtation with fruit. The sugar, the alcohol, the faintest memories of childhood apple juice on the palate- all make for a drink that positively encourages the cancellation of whatever seriousness was going to impinge on one’s afternoon and stay on the ledge or the lawn.

It is not that I am bereft of the memories (or, more appositely, lack of memories) of good friendship induced by ale or lager or fine wine (and, indeed, I will doubtless scribble them down one day, before either friends or faculties desert me) but that those I associate with cider are so utterly bound up with the joy of an afternoon stretching out in front of a group of friends, with nothing but drinking to do.

Cider, then, is master of its own time frame, imposing the patterns of its agrarian past onto our all too mechanised present. Now, I do not mean to gulp down with my scrumpy the beguiling myths of the ad men or construct for you a Metroland Georgic, painting wasted hours of drunkenness past in the colours of a Somersetshire rural idyll. Make no mistake- these were hours spent not with hat tilted over the eyes and wheat lolling idly from the lips, but swirled round about by smoke and dirty jokes and yet, unlike the dinner party spoiled by a fight after a glass of white too many or the pub argument escalated by the shouty goading of lager from the sidelines, my distinct memory of these cider bouts is that they only drew forth from us comfortingly rehashed anecdote or well-rehearsed song. I look back on them as I would a Bruegel painting of a peasant wedding- although, if truth be told, they probably resembled a Bosch doom.

I acknowledge my own rose tinting- and delight in it. After all, it is not as if cider’s defenders are as eloquent as claret’s or as robust as bitter’s. As far as I can tell they are few and far between- numbering the Wurzels, Laurie Lee, the groundsman, the reprobate, our jerry can bearing friend and me. Indeed, far from having vociferous defenders, cider’s fate is sealed as a drink often looked down upon precisely because it is the preserve of those with nothing else to do. In the public mind it is ordered by the secretly beer-phobic sixth former in an illicit post exams trip to a pub, or drunk warm from an electric blue bottle by a drunk man on a bench or swilled by me and my friends, in those far off days where allowing an afternoon to tail off into anecdote and song was the height of activity for perhaps an entire week. 

Now, locked in as I am to a round of daily, weekly, monthly responsibilities, that time is ruled by others, and I cast a look of jealousy back on those outside pubs or in parks or on patios with glasses full of dark amber. This is not self-pity- I do not wish I had the lot of the pupil or the drunk or the student, for their concomitant trials are far greater than mine, but sometimes, as my days grow shorter and more serious, I long for a sip of the apple and a slip back into that Narnian timeframe, where a whole day is nothing at all.

(Note, 23/3/20: When I wrote this, the prospect of long days of nothingness were a thing to be envied, their memories to be cherished and the prospect of more hours filtering off into sun and cider-soaked oblivion to be welcomed. Now the prospect of long days is all too terrifying to many and the reality of oblivion all too evident to us all. I include this piece then not to mock or belittle those concerns, but in happy anticipation of the return of a time when I can meet with groundsmen and reprobates and Savoyards and perch once again on a window ledge or hop across a warm patio, cider in hand, and welcome an afternoon of glorious idleness as an old friend once again).