cider and morris dancers

I promised pics. So, from Jan 15, our visit to Sea Cider, for morris dancing and general whoop-di-doo. Though the weather had been uncertain, with threatened rain, when we arrived it was clear and sunny, but COLD. Bravely, Mark and I joined the tour just then going around.

Here you see the proprietor of the family-owned (and run) business, standing in front of the casks, explaining the brewing process. Their Rumrunner cider was aged in barrels that had been used for Newfoundland Screech, but the screech distillery switched to plastic barrels, which Kristen refused to use. Turns out that screech is matured in bourbon casks. So they got the empty bourbon casks, soaked them with screech, and went on from there. It tickles me to think of think of these casks going from booze to booze to booze.
The tour wasn't as visually interesting as Victoria Gin's is, because you can't go into the working area for fear of contaminating the process, and since it isn't distilling, there aren't massive steampunk-type brass and copper vats with fascinating dials and pipes. 

 Next is the view across the orchard, which as you can see is young yet. They also get apples from local farms, orchards, and Lifecycles (I've thought of calling them to take away the Transparents). Mark drew my attention to the degree of pruning, which he thinks I should follow. I am way too tender with pruning our apple trees (not that this is reflected in my revising of my writing, noooo....), but I have promised to be more ruthless (less ruthful?) this spring.

 Anyway. Nice view. We hurried inside for warmth, but the big doors were open to the balcony and winter air. Fortunately a couple of heat lamps had been provided to huddle under, and drink tickets got us generous samples of cider, which does warm the interior.

The Island Thyme Morris Dancers (the women only) performed a series of dances, with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and I'm a bit peeved with myself that I didn't trot up to the gallery while they were doing the sword dance that ends with the wooden swords interlocked in a star, which is carried off in triumph.







See? I did get some pics of another dance, but it isn't as spiff as the sword dance figures would have looked. 













I did love their musicians, who were straight out of an English or Irish pub. I bet the fellow in the flat cap is a demon darts player. 











And a traditional mummers play by the Quicksbottom Morris Dancers. Nostalgia! I was able to mutter along with several speeches, from the version of the play that we performed, gosh, over twenty years ago. We didn't have a Green Man, though, and he is pretty cool. Nor did we have a hot Witch in tall black boots. 





Yes, I did buy cider, a bottle of the new Wassail, and another of Kings and Spies. 
Closing with a fiddler in concentration.

pigeon post

Back from Hemingford Grey Manor, the original of Green Knowe, and that deserves a long and thoughtful and amazed post. Which I'm not quite up to at the moment, after two half-pints of cider. So instead I provide a sampling of the pigeons of England. Honestly, pigeons everywhere, in flocks like starlings, inside train stations, all over churches as if they were auditioning for a John Woo film, pecking around the street markets, everywhere.
This is at Dane John tower, part of the walls of Canterbury. An arrow slit, the perfect size for a pigeon hole.


This is part of the overhang of the roof at the Peterborough train station. There's a whole series of spaces on the inside, with a walkway--pigeon size--along the interior. Thoughtful of British Rail, isn't it?


Cambridge, a statue on the outside of one of the colleges. When I first noticed the pigeon, it was roosting on the statue's wrist, pretending to be a hawk. By the time I had the camera out, it was wandering around the wig and had met a friend.

Just for a change--gulls! And can you guess why the first pic is on here?

ills that flesh is heir to, continued

Rheumatologist appointment this afternoon--made only this morning, so I suppose someone cancelled--and the tentative diagnosis is that I'm in the 30% of palindromic arthritis cases who graduate to rheumatoid arthritis.
Pretty much what I'd expected, since the second knuckle of my left hand has been swollen since February, unlike the usual palindromic thing where a random joint swells and goes down again within a couple of days (sometimes only hours). The right hand has been fine, so I wasn't symmetrical, but arthritis is just shifty and variable and unreliable. Though not as bad as lupus (It's never lupus) that way.

So, new drugs! Going to add methotrexate, which is such an exciting drug that the rheumatism website wants to show you an exclamation-marked video about it! It's on youtube! It is cooler and more exciting than me!
Methotrexate is a chemotherapy drug, but not to worry, because the doses for arthritis are teeny-tiny (a technical term) compared to the whacking huge doses you'd get for chemo. Oh, and they're not quite sure why it works for arthritis, just the way they're not quite sure why hydroxychloroquin (a quinine derivative) works for arthritis.
I think they may know why naproxen works. Maybe. It would be nice if I were taking one drug whose workings were comprehensible.
RA is a possibility I've been aware of from the first diagnosis, so I'm not upset. I'll just have to see what happens down the road, and cope with it as it comes (which is how life works anyway). Dr. Northcott seems pretty positive about the methotexate, which I keep wanting to call meths, and I tend to be lucky with side effects, so there's no point fussing.

What is more than a little annoying is that alcohol is pretty much out. One drink a week is what the pamphlet says. Of course this happens just as I've found a local cider that I like. I thought I didn't like cider (I don't like beer--it smells bad to me) until Mark got me to try a local still cider while we were in Suffolk, and it was lovely. Like what white wine ought to be (this will make no sense to you if you prefer white wine) and nothing like the fizzypop cider that comes in cases.
I stopped at Sea Cider on the way back from the ferries, caught their birthday celebration, and bought two bottles--Pippins, and Kings and Spies. Both were very nice indeed but I thought Kings and Spies had the edge.
If I can only have one drink a week, it had better be a good one.

In other news, I've almost caught up with the Transparent apples, and the blackberries have come in, forcing me to learn to make pies. Honestly, pastry intimidates me. It's one of those deceptively simple things, like gesso sottile, where the ingredients may be exactly right but all hope of success lies in having the right touch, and preferably decades of experience. So even though the pie looks okay, and the fruit sets, and slices can be cut and it all gets eaten, in some subtle way it can still be a failure.
Which is why I prefer making cookies. Pastry seems like a sneaking incursion of the imponderables of cooking into the rational world of baking, where if you follow the recipe you come through safely.
The third blackberry pie I've made in the last week is cooling on the baking centre now. This is not my fault.