Sad Day

It’s a sad day when you pour your last drop of sloe gin several weeks before the onset of spring.

   

Last winter my modest hoard didn't see me through January. With temperatures on the Moor plummeting to minus fifteen and living at the time in a house without central heating this caused no small amount of consternation. Last Autumn I planned ahead. Determined not to be caught out I imagined harvesting so much fruit that I would have to invent summer cocktails to accommodate the oversupply. However, after searching in public and private hedgerows until my hands bled I started to lose hope. That was until one day in late October.  In a moment similar to Dorothy’s, in The Wizard of Oz, when she realises that home had always been within her grasp, I discovered that the farm where I spend most of my days was bursting full, hedgerow after hedgerow, of both sloes and bullaces.  Happiness had been in my backyard all along. Yesterday, as I sipped my last dram, with dismay I wondered how one could consume five litres of gin in eight weeks and not notice.