Yesterday was Arthur Guinness day and I had planned to drink several pints last night to mark 250 years of the stuff. However I had to settle for just a couple in order to guarantee that I made it in time for voluntary organic gardening class this morning. That’s right - voluntary organic gardening class.
It is a little after 7.45 and I, along with 20 others, stroll through the farm. We approach some bushes staked out in rows. “Are they roses?” I enquire of another student. “Raspberries” comes the reply. It’s going to be a long day. Later on I plant a tray of radishes. It is the first thing I have planted since watercress in cotton wool on the kitchen shelf. Hopefully they won’t go the way of every other piece of foliage unfortunate enough to pass into my custody over the last couple of decades.
We are not cooking today. Today is theory day. Wine and cheese in the morning, fire and food safety in the afternoon. Well that’s the theory at least. We run through a couple of quick demos to get warmed up. The pub in the ‘village’ was pretty busy last night and a few people look jaded, not least the gardeners. We are drifting and are only an hour in.
Mercifully, Hugh Johnson comes to the rescue. Yes, he of the Pocket Wine Book once starred in an educational video about wine. I say ‘starred’ but I mean ‘appeared.’ Actually a couple of times he ‘disappeared’ (using ingenious camera technology from the early 1980s) before reappearing to advise a young and oenologically retarded John Fortune (who, incidentally, was sporting a rather fetching knitted sweater with a parrot on the front). This kind of painful attempt to initiate the excruciatingly ignorant through the use of light comedy is obsolete these days. Thanks to the fragility of videotape most examples, especially of this ‘quality’, are all but extinct.
This is a classic of the genre. Not only for its appalling production quality, script and dialogue, but also its content. Firstly, the bow tie wielding Johnson spends ten minutes pointlessly talking us through a range of medieval bottle openers (his personal collection no doubt). He then pours champagne into glasses that are quite clearly not flutes, before recommending cleaning decanters with household bleach. Despite all this, because of it in fact, the next hour flies by and a coffee break comes to the rescue.
After coffee we are treated to a talk from a charming German wine producer. He shows us a four-minute film that imparts fifty times more information than Johnners in a fraction of the time. He speaks good English with some wonderful inaccuracies (combinate instead of combine - why not?) and despite getting sidetracked by a barrage of questions on the cork or cap debate (who cares?) we manage to progress to the wine tasting.
It is now midday. Most of us are either hungover, still pissed or knackered. Some are all three. Wine tasting before lunch in this condition is madness. We press on with a buttery blanc de noir before upgrading to a couple of really classic Rieslings. The first was a 2007 of lesser quality than the 2008 that. The 2008 tasted very young and had a long lingering finish of elderflower that would develop very nicely in time I’d have thought. We finished with up with a Pinot Noir. The tastings were generous and the winemaker happily garrulous, so it was almost 1.30 before we sat down for a lunch of roast pork. After that, everyone was ready for bed.
What you need in this situation is a quick adrenalin hit or some excitement to shake you out of it. Not a lecture on fire safety. A demonstration of how to put out a fire promises to liven things up though so I dig deep. The ‘fire’ we put out is actually a gas hob burning in the usual manner. Not that exciting, and certainly not as exciting as when the bouncers in the Cottesloe Beach Hotel put out a fire in the gents that I had alerted them to whilst I was still taking a piss.
We reluctantly trundle on into food safety, our knuckles scraping on the carpet. It somehow morphs into a rambling discussion of obscure topics as the questions pour in and take us on a number of implausible tangents. Washing your hands. Freezing ice cream. Turkey stuffing. Stainless steel or wood? Local or multinational? Food labelling. Free range or battery? Metric or imperial? E-Coli or C-Coli? Cats or dogs? Cork or cap? Black or white? White or red? Red or brown? Home made or organic? Freezing ice cream. Cork or cap? The clock ticked round, we plodded on. Five o’clock came and went. Behind me an Irish voice, in desperation, steals then whispers the words from my mind: “Stop asking fucking questions.”
His prayers, and mine, are answered. The undiscussed cheese goes back in the fridge and we go home. The first week is over. What a week. If I am still awake, I might tap out a refrain on Sunday to put my rambling in some kind of context, if I can find any. But I really must be going now, for there is a row of glasses with some black stuff in them that is 250 years and a day old, and they have my name, along with His, etched all over them. God knows I've earned them.
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