No Room for the Gin

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.

My allotment in the snow

Eliot’s words resonate with all long distance travellers who endured December. (See The Journey of the Magi on the Poetry Archive). They repeat our thoughts trudging through the Weald to see forlorn allotments in the very dead of winter, and the vegetation lying down in the melted snow.

There are few better ways to remind ourselves of last month than the magnificence of the natural allotment at the Brighton and Hove Organic Gardening Group Weald allotment where carols were sung, mince pies eaten and warm hugs given on the Sunday before Christmas.

The wasteland of Christmas sales

The journey of Magi and their gifts are the justification for linking Christmas with commercialisation, taking us relentlessly onwards into the wasteland of the post-Christmas sales and onwards to the “rush” to beat VAT rises, with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all folly.

Sloe and other delights

There is some solace in the presents I was given of home made, VAT free, blended by silken hands, sloe gin, redcurrant shrub, blackberry rum and beech leaf. There will be no feet kicking the empty wineskins, as this nectar (no card needed) breathes life into my body in the very dead of winter. But today I am so full that there is no room for the gin, even when drunk sloely.

Apple chutney is food for thought

I cannot say that there were times when I regretted the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, and the silken girls bringing sherbet. But can say that I remember the summer sheds on the slopes, the raised beds, and the warm friends picking fruit, as I delight in the jars of apple chutney made by their honest hands to redress those hollow men.

My homemade fruit leather

And three trees on the low sky brought presents of plums, currents and apples, which I preferred to cook all night as leathers, in a low oven that kept the kitchen warm and the sharp weather at bay. The leathers, tasted of a summer sunburst, were more rewarding than the sales in the city, charging high prices remembering the hard time we had of it.

I should be glad of another journey through a year of good food, good drink and good company, when at the end of the day there is room for the gin.

Waiting for Seedy Sunday

Now is the time to book Sunday 6th February in your diary for Seedy Sunday at Hove town Hall (see the Seedy Sundays website). Anyone who wants to volunteer to help for a couple of hours please contact me at aphillips@gmx.net.

There will even be quiet corners to read poetry books and stalls to buy jams and chutneys.

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