Cider-making night

On Friday night, a mate invited me to join his party on their annual pilgrimage to the 'SuiCider' night at Wiscombe. River Cottage were filming and guests had been enouraged to dig out their smocks and gaiters....and many did just that.
It really was like stepping back in time.
The ramshackle barns, festooned with ivy and ancient farm implements ( but stripped of the grisly animal remains which normally decorate the beams and walls lest the eventual TV audience takes offence, one assumes) were rammed with the full range of rural types. One popinjay sporting full 18th century hunting fig, including burnished gaiters and brass buttoned split falls ( not that I was really looking at these, you understand!). Three cauldrons of stew were on the go, suspended over gorgeously aromatic wood fires: offal, oxtail and roadkill. Yup. ROADKILL. Mainly badger and squirrel...though it seemed that Devon's drivers account for more innocent carrots than anything else... Tim declared badger delicious but I am afraid I chickened out, mainly because I loathe stews...a throwback to childhood and, even now, nausea-inducing memories of unswallowable gristle.
A vast steam engine produced the steam to clean out the old rum barrels and a rather splendid victorian rolltop bath was filled with apples, which bobbed and glistened before being bucketed out into the press.
I don't think a huge amount of cider got made that night, but a spectacular amount was drunk! I had volunteered to drive the minibus home, so sampled rather than consumed. While everyone else got gently trollied, I got smellier and smellier, having been adopted by a small, stinky and incredibly persistently attentive terrier, which climbed all over me, sharing her recently-acquired anointment of badger doings with my coat and jeans. Lovely! Not sure the dry cleaner will take the coat in...
At midnight, fireworks filled the sky above the host's crashed ME109...a very bizarre but rather splendid adornment to the hillside and one which definitely warrants a daytime snoop...perhaps at the Opening Meet next Saturday.
One by one, my prospective passengers gathered round, mumbling about home and bed. My invitor, however, was clearly stuck in for the night and , in true Hardy fashion ( in his lighter novels, that is..I am thinking 'Under the Greenwood Tree' here), surrounded by local beauties and assorted rival swains. We left him to it.
Fascinating. Look out for the River Cottage episode which includes this gloriously quaint event.