Wine pronounced success

I wish to apologise to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that I will henceforth not be doing quite so much to save the planet. The reason? Fewer. if any, of my empty wine bottles will be going to the Bottle Bank because I will need them.
Yes, mes chers potes, the Old Scrote has successfully bottled his first five bottles of home-made Cabernet Sauvignon! My neighbour Andy came round this morning to help me transfer the plonk from the demijohn into the bottles and thereafter to bung in the corks. We sampled it, of course, and found it good. There should have been six bottles, but you know how it is once you start sampling....So impressed was I with the quality of this Chateau Scrote 2008 that I immediately went online to order another batch of syrup.

A note for my son Jeremy
Your dad's plonk may have tasted like Ribena in 1975, but the 2008 variety is the dog's bollocks. Come home and taste it sometime, but hurry: wine doesn't hang around long du cote de chez Scrote.

Go forth and multiply, if you can

And the Lord gaveth he to Adam a todger and to Eve a nana that they might procreate, which they did. And on the seventh day the Lord rested, and when he got back to work, he perceivedeth that it had all gone pear-shaped. For, lo, the fruit of A and E's loins and the fruit of the fruit of their loins, yea, verily, unto the nth generation, all that begetting, remember?, were doing stuff with todgers and nanas that was never in the Original Plan, to wit, fornicating for the fun of it, doing the onan thing and even dancing tangos todger-to-todger and nana-to-nana. And the Lord did the thing with the wax and the wrath, and spake from a black cloud in a voice of thunder, saying:
"You pervs! It's all bloody nooky with you now, isn't it? Have fun today and sod'em gomorrah."
And then the Omnipotent One heaved a great sigh, regretting that he hadn't made it an eight-day week with TWO Sabbaths in it, and caused a great Flood to cover the earth. But, being soft-hearted, He got Noah to save two of everything, but with a strict injunction: no nooky on the Ark, keep them occupied with quoits and other deck games, bromide in the soup and get rid of that condom machine in the gents, etc.
And it came to pass that the waters receded, except in the Cambridgeshire fens, and the Earth was repopulated, but with the disappearance of quoits, bromide, etc, the lads and lasses fell back into their old wicked ways, doing it just because it was fun to do it, anywhere, anytime and with anyone.
It was then that God called to His Servant in the kitchen, saying "Mohammed, never mind the dishes, I've got a job for you on Earth............"

Invitation

I just received this email:
On 31 January 2009 the St John's College Choir will be singing Evensong at Sidney Sussex, our sister college in Cambridge. The Fellow for Alumni invites you and a guest to join him at the service and afterwards for a champagne reception and fork buffet supper in Sidney’s Old Library. Evensong will be at 6.00pm, with drinks following at 6.45pm and supper at 7.15pm. You are welcome to join in all or part of the evening’s activities. Regrettably, numbers for the supper have to be limited to 48, so we will be filling these spaces on a ‘first come first served’ basis. We do hope that you will be able to join us at our first ‘St John's in Cambridge’ event. With best wishes The Alumni Office
The things these people will do to lure an Old Scrote back into the fold....
..., erm, of course I will go.

Upper Left Five

Two nights ago - please don't tell my children, who do not know about my addiction to junk food - I was working on the second slice from a mini pepperoni pizza, when I thought: "Bugger, this pizza has pieces of bone in it! Last time I buy pizzas from Joe Tesco". ButI quickly realised that the bones were in fact fragments from the filling of UL5. So, for the THIRD time, the temporary fillings in UL5 had come adrift.
So, today, my dentist filed down the tooth to keep it free of contact with Lower Left 5, repacked it with antibiotic filling, and then put a temporary cap on it. It will take dynamite now to shift it.
The thing is this, amici miei: I only have the one life and the one set of teeth, so, crooked as they may be, and recalcitrant as Upper Left 5 may be, I am committed to throwing money at them till they settle down and agree to keep chomping.
And I pray that you never find bones in your pizza.

Trellis on Thanksgiving

Dear Rabbi Sachs, she writes, I so enjoyed your little piece on Thought for the Day about counting our blessings. It makes a change from moaning about problems all the time, the way that awful Scrote person does.
So I counted my blessings and found I had seventeen, which might seem a lot for an unpresumptive Welsh widow, but it does include such items as not suffering from varicose veins and having an unopened bottle of medicinal sloe gin in the cupboard.
You're a good man, even if you are Jewish, when you could easily have been a Primitive Methodist, and no snipping. The only other person of your faith that I know of is Rabbi Burns, who wrote incomprehensive poetry and lived off haggis.
If you are ever in Llanfairpg, do call in and we can have a nice theophysical chat over a plate of kosher Welsh Leek Soup.
Yours already
Blodwen Trellis, Mrs, Widow, retd.

A day on the fen

This morning, the weather forecast promised a mild day, possibly overcast but with the sun breaking through later, and a gentle southwesterly wind. To me, this suggested that a day on the fen could be very pleasant, so I made a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches, and set off in the Land Rover just before 9 o'clock (not earlier, because I had to visit my dentist in Histon first). What follows is an account of a wonderful day. No rarities, but just a series of really beautiful sightings. So, please, I am not boasting – I really have nothing to boast about! - but just hoping to give you vicariously the pleasure I had.

Starting at the back of Aldreth Hill, I again watched beaucoups of Redwings and Fieldfares busily feeding in the hedgerows and on the field, and periodically coming down to puddles on the track to drink and bathe. There were other species too: a pair of Bullfinches (they always seem to come in pairs, quite romantic really), Blue and Great Tits and Greenfinches and Chaffinches. Oh yes, and Robins, spunky little birds they are, too. Then I went on to Aldreth Fen, along Dam Bank, where I flushed Pied Wagtails from the concrete, and later watched a flock of about fifteen Corn Buntings on the wires, one of them giving little snatches of their distinctive tinkling song. Down to the Haddenham Engine, where I had good views of Water Rail, not a bird you see every day, for sure.

I paused for coffee and a snack, and began to wonder if I would ever find a Little Egret on the fen (two have been reported this year). More ambitiously, I thought Flat Bridge farm might finally yield a Great Grey Shrike. Never mind, I enjoyed visiting the reservoir there anyways, and clocked a pair of Gadwall and about sixty Wigeon, which took flight – wonderful sight! Back to the corner of Dam Bank and Long Drove, where I had my sandwiches while watching a pair of Stonechats together with about eight Reed Buntings. It always amazes me how much wildlife can be found in a scruffy patch of brambles in the middle of a tidy arable landscape. Birds demand so little....

Going along Long Drove, I decided on a detour up to Clayton's Bridge, where my attention was caught by a distand raptor being mobbed by corvids. It was falcon-like and it was bloody bulky. My guess is a juvenile Peregrine, but it was too distant for me to be sure. Coming back to Long Drove, I came upon a small flock of Goldfinches feeding on teasel, and a flock of about fifty Linnets feeding on the ground on goodness knows what, seeds of some kind presumably. Before leaving Long Drove, I spotted another male Stonechat, a bird that's always worth stopping to look at. As usual, a couple of Kestrels were hunting along the drove verges – I swear they hover because they know they look good when they do it.

Over Hillrow Causeway and straight into Fowlmere Drove, which at this time of year is a nightmare of viscous mud and deep ruts. I made it, but only just, to the firmer ground of Back Drove, which turned out to be very quiet, possibly because it was the siesta time of day. I decided to go along the track which parallels the New Cut Drain, in the direction of Ces Burton's old house, hoping for maybe an owl or two. In fact, I didn't find any owls, but I was rewarded with more flocks of Fieldfares and Redwings, a party of five or so Yellowhammers and a little flurry of Long-tailed Tits. After another walk in fruitless search of owls, I decided to call it a day.

But what a day! Nothing to cause a bishop to kick a hole in a stained-glass window, as my old colleague John Andrews used to say, but a memorable day all the same, and further confirmation that the fens are not the barren waste that people often think.

Ancor' una goccia, professore

In the Autumn of 1959, I was working in Naples (that's Naples, Italy, for my American readers), and today I tasted Naples again. Thanks to Tesco's, our giant superstore chain. Walking, as I always do, reverently, down the aisle where the booze is displayed, I came upon an offer for Martini Rosso. One bottle for £7.20, two bottles for £10. It was meant to be.
The first time I ever tasted Martini Rosso, a fortified wine if ever there was one, I was in Naples, a beardless youth of 22, eager for adventure, and all the etceteras that follow from that eagerness. With friends, I seemed to spend my non-teaching hours in my room in the Pensione dei Mille sipping Martini Rosso and trying to impress a Scottish girl who taught in another school in the city.
I left Naples and after that didn't drink Martini Rosso again until this evening, thanks, as I say, to Tesco's. I really believe Tesco's have my welfare at heart. Why else would they gorge me on nostalgia like this?