apples and spice and all things nice.

It's nearly that time of year again - October 21st is National Apple Day (or at least it was last year, I haven't checked the dates this year, I don't have an apple fetish or anything.)
Last year we took ourselves to Middle Farm, a working farm straight outta the Shire and hidden in the Sussex countryside, known for it's homemade cheeses, a monstrous shire horse called - and over two hundred different types of ciders, meads and scrumpies all for the tasting.
These are proper ciders and scrumpies - bitter and cloudy and in the case of the pear cider, a mild laxative. As Odge can tell you. Ten minutes with a 5ml tasting cup and you're already a bit heady, feeling the crab apple flush building on your cheeks and a slow, stupid smile rise on your face. It's homemade and cheap and sold in cleaned out milk cartons with handwritten labels plastered on the front. If it sounds overly twee that's because it is, and if, after quarter of an hour of standing in the low-ceilinged converted barn, surrounded by the musk of old wooden barrels and the tang of spilt cider you don't emerge swathed in gingham chewing a piece of straw then you haven't really done it right, and should keep drinking until you fall through the Cider Portal. Even the names themselves seem to thrust huge innuendos and charmless metaphors into your slowly blinking bovine face. 'Crippled Cock', 'Double Vision' and 'Mangled Perspective' might sound like pro-wrestlers, but the only parallel they have with them is that all may leave you with something either sprained or broken, depending on how long you spend with each one.
They also have an Olde Time Fayre (don't laugh) which consists of the kind of circus music and swirling giddy rides you only ever see in cheese based nightmares and 'drug trip' sequences in bad films. One of the stalls is a Olde Time variation on a shooting gallery with crossbows and arrows instead of air rifles which isn't only perversely dangerous when you think of all the Double Vision seeping into your bloodstream but hilarious, especially when Richard fired vertically instead of horizontally and speared the fairy lights in the ceiling.
No prizes for Richard.
They also have a huge selection of bantam hens, each and every one of which looks as though they are wearing a pair of feathered flares, which, once I'd had enough mulled cider (hot, spicy, sweet and embarrassingly potent) I could and would have laughed at for hours, if Sweetman hadn't taken me by the arm and dragged me away muttering,
"They're just hens, Daisy, they're just hens."
Everyone should go, and if you're not singing the duelling banjos from Deliverance and making ill-judged predictions abut the weather all the way back to the train I'll eat my straw hat.