Cheers!



Friday 20th July 2012
My birthday!

I have not mentioned this before, but I do in fact hold the secret of eternal youth.
For last year I spent the whole year convinced I was 45, only to realise as my birthday approached that I had been 44 all year! Now this mistake could be forgiven once, but I've only gone and done it again this year. All year I've been 46 in my mind, so when I reached my real 46th birthday today, I did not actually get any older!

So that's now two birthdays without getting a day older!!

To celebrate we cracked open the cider which we started making back in April and I have to say we were very pleasantly surprised. I remember drinking the roughest of scrumpies back in my student days and I was expecting a repeat.
But no. The lid of the recycled Grolsch bottle popped up to reveal a clear, bubbly and sweet liquid which really was very refined. Beginner's luck I guess.

Not so the elderflower champagne though. Although the taste was delicate and summery, the fizz was disappointing. But worse than that, it had a strange, gelatinous texture, almost snotty! Most offputting. So we decided to turn it into sorbet, that is until we finally tracked down the reason for the snottiness... bacterial infection... no cure.


Ah well, one out of two wasn't bad, and neither experiment cost very much at all.
There's always next year. And we'll make enough of the elderflower champagne to turn some into sorbet too. I'm already looking forward to it.