BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
There is a remote farm up on Dartmoor twelve miles from where I live where I was taken last summer on a hot Saturday afternoon by a friend.
We were accompanied by two fellow fathers from our sons’ sports club. One of the fathers is a diminutive fellow who I never much liked and with whom I found I had little in common – his announcement that he was a lifelong Manchester United supporter hardly drew me closer to him.
We arrived at the longhouse-style, thatched farm in the back of our friend’s Land Rover, as is the way in these parts, and were pointed by a chap with a strimmer to a rickety old barn off a second drive flanked by sweet-smelling rhododendrons. There we parked and were greeted by a buxom lass with a beaming smile who welcomed us into the barn.
Inside this cathedral of a barn, beside a conked out John Deere and an old Morris Minor, was a dusty, wooden kitchen table and four chairs. We were asked to take a seat while the buxom lass plonked four tankards down on the table in front of us then disappeared outside of the barn promising a ‘flagon of XXXX’s* finest’.
I was already narked. The Man United hobbit was banging on about ‘evil’ Tories and Liverpool-supporting ‘bin-riflers’. This uber-troll had noticed my irritation and I was happy to confirm it when I loudly asked one of the other fathers if he had a remote.
Shortly, a glass flagon of scrumpy arrived – the flagon still speckled with straw and the excrement of bird, bat or rat. While we stared at her, the buxom lass filled our tankards and then told us to ‘holler if we were man enough to need any more.’
The hobbit was still prattling on.
We all sipped the scrumpy.
It was very fruity and moderately sweet to begin with, but then it turned bitter and lightly sour. There was a lemony tang in there, slightly too bitter for my tastes. After that first wave it turned dryer and had a very light woody aftertaste. Not good, to be frank.
So, we all turned to our friend, who had driven us up there to drink ‘the best scrumpy in the South West’ and asked him why we had been dragged up the thin country lanes, past ponies, tractors and Winnebagos, to this back-of-beyond outpost to sample a second-rate appley bevvy.
He just smiled.
And then it happened.
After several glugs of XXXX’s scrumpy, the hobbit was, miraculously, silenced:
“Of course, Liverpool can’t afford a player of the quality of Brazilian Antony. For the 23/24 season they are GAAA-GAAA-GAAA.”
We looked at the hobbit.
The friend who had taken us there started laughing, then belly-laughing.
“This is why I took you all up here,” he chuckled, “because after a few sips of this beautiful stuff you completely lose your GAAAAAA-GAA-GAA.”
“What the GAAA-GAA-GAAA,” I replied and was immediately stunned to learn that I too had lost any ability I had for oral comms.
The only one not to be hit yet – possibly because he’s a local builder and his daily cocktail hour starts just after lunch on a weekday and just after elevenses on weekends – was roaring with laughter at us. But then he too was levelled:
“You GAAA-GAAA-GAA. What the GAA!” he blurted before succumbing to this extraordinary bout of Joker syndrome.
Once I was sure that we four middle-aged men were not victims of a communal stroke, I began to relax and enjoy the experience.
They say words are silver and silence is golden. Well, GAA is bloody platinum.
We were soon rolling around giggling. We drank the rest of the flagon up as if as parched as Tantalus and soon the buxom lass was delivering a second then a third flagon until the chairs were useless and we were forced to reassemble, for the sake of our stomach muscles, near the rhododendrons where under the afternoon sun we lazed among dandelions and buttercups on lawn the strimmer chap had not yet reached.
The effects of the scrumpy were mind-blowing.
The annoying hobbit was no longer annoying. He was now a great pal, like the other two who were now my best mates too. It was as if the ‘what’ no longer mattered and all that mattered was the ‘who’. We had become souls and our human bodies were still there but less relevant – where there had been hate there was love, where there was difference, similitude.
There up on Dartmoor I believe we found the solution to world peace; the cure for the racists, race-baiters and dividers in our world. An elixir to force Putin and Zelensky into an accord, a potion to convert Yasmin Alibhai-Brown into the Immaculate Mary, a drink concocted by bumpkins but for the angels which Satan surely conceals from humankind up there on that moor.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine.
*the reason I use ‘XXXX’ to label this liquid refreshment is because i) its actual name, like the flagons it is served in, is filthy and, since I am not a lawyer, ii) I am not 100% sure of the beverage’s legality.