Cider, can’t touch the stuff.  At least not any more.  I rather spoilt cider for myself as a teenager when it was the drink of choice for the underaged girl about town.  We didn’t like beer, spirits were too strong and alcopops hadn’t been invented yet.  I’d seen how weirdly Thunderbird and Mad Dog 20/20 made people behave too plus they both tasted rubbish so cider it was and the cheaper the better.  Many the 3 litre bottle of Olde English passed our lips round at someone or other’s house.  How very classy.  Then as we got a little older and started to try our luck getting served in pubs we diversified a little.  Our mantra was no longer “the cheaper the better” but “the stronger the better”.  Many of the bad nights I experienced involved Diamond White, K and, my personal favourite, snakebite and black.

It was the sheer volume of bad nights that put me off cider over time.  Not bad nights in the sense that bad or upsetting things happened but bad with much throwing up or falling over.  Though thinking about it that is pretty upsetting.  There are myriad tales of my rampant misbehaviour when under the influence of the stuff, and to this day I can’t tell them apart.  Perhaps it could even go some way to explaining why I left the house looking so bloody awful with my frizzy hair and nasty glasses?  No, I think I might be deluding myself there.  There was one time when we went to the Duke of Buckingham in Old Portsmouth and drank lots and lots and lots of K.  The DofB was our Friday night haunt and we used to arrive very early before the bouncers went on the door as we lacked fake ID.  Because we’d got there so early we drank loads but it wasn’t until we left the pub and the cold outside air hit me that I realised what a state I was in.  I could barely walk and it must have taken hours to walk back to my friend’s house.  But not before I’d fallen over and scratched my Deirdre Barlow glasses.  Or run right into her front door while attempting to outrun the security light.  The bruises were quite special.

Now if I take a sip of cider it all comes flooding back.  It doesn’t have to be cheap nasty stuff either, even the expensive stuff my lovely husband insists on drinking on Sundays has the same effect on me.  Even the Sheppey’s cider that he reliably informs me makes your wee smell of apples.  It’s the cider twang, it makes me all unnecessary.  Strangely, snakeyB was never something I went off, despite the fact that it’s a pretty lethal concoction and banned from most pubs.  The lager and blackcurrant are sufficient to disguise the evil cider twang and so, even now, I can still drink it.  Here is a photo of me at my fairly recent wedding enjoying a pint of the good stuff with friends.  It was like old times.  See how shiny our faces are. (I am in SO much trouble now!)

Luckily for me about a year after my first foray into pub based underage drinking, with the irreversible cider damage already having been done, Two Dogs and Hooch hit the pubs and getting shitfaced became so much easier.  The alcopop was born.  These were times before they coined the phrase “binge drinking” but that’s exactly what we were doing.  We went out every Friday and Saturday night and our aim was to get drunk.  It seems odd to me that these days there is so much in the media about the binge drinking culture, what a disgrace it is that our young people would behave in this way etc etc.  Are they honestly trying to tell us that when they were young they didn’t do exactly the same?  Of course they did.

I’m all grown up now and drinking has become something I do only occasionally.  Tonight, for example I drank 2 weiss beers.  Very tasty they were too but it took me all night to drink them.  I have the odd glass of wine sometimes but if I’m completely honest I’d rather have a glass of coke or a cup of tea.  I no longer drink to get drunk.  Well, only very rarely.  This may just be because I don’t go out much at the moment and because I want to stay healthy for when we think about having baby number 4, but for now this is how it is and I like it like this.  One thing’s for sure though, even if I were trying to get drunk I most definitely wouldn’t be partaking of any cider.  Even if it could make my wee smell of apples.