09/03/2020
9th March 2020
Every child knows what happens if you put sugar, in any form, into a fizzy liquid, most teenagers will have discovered the joy of putting a mentos into a bottle of coke. As we get older things change and thus, at the age of 59 9/10 I assumed that because I'd not put sugar in a fizzy drink since I was about 9, dropping a kilo of granulated into 23 litres of "mash" that actually was still in the fermentation stage, nothing much would happen.
I watched with amusement as, almost in slow motion, the fizzy froth rose to the top of the 25 litre carboy, with concern as I raced to screw the cap on, with horror as it fired out the airlock and with nostalgia as the thing, now hurriedly placed on the floor, recreated the opening scene from the 1968-1969 tv show, "The Champions" where the key actors stand in front of Jet L'eau in Geneva.
The clean up took about 30 minutes, about a litre of sugary, sticky alcoholic froth adorned the conservatory floor.
Interestingly, the clean up may have taken longer but I had help from Max, Baily and Lucy, the visiting "Honorary beagle", actually a very young, very bouncy Staffy cross.
It's interesting to see the different reactions that people have when drunk, some become mouthy, some become depressed, many become aggressive, it's the same with dogs.
Bailey - Settles down and goes to sleep, on a bed, hastily placed on the conservatory sofa. IT looks really uncomfortable, HE looks like he's been dropped there from a helicopter, relaxed, happy, asleep, tail and paws twitching contentedly.
Max spends 15 minutes shaking his head,then scratching his ears, then looking for food, any food (just to qualify this, the plastic bags he stole yesterday are "food" ) He's got the munchies, he's not aggressive but he's quite alert, if he were human, I'm pretty sure we'd be having a discussion now on how wrong it is that toilet rolls, one of his favourite "foods" are now on ration and how global warming has stolen his puppyhood, and/or his future (He's 11) Half an hour later, he too is asleep but with one bleary eye open.
Lucy... Lucy really likes the alcoholic nectar and quickly adopted the worst of the spill. She's hyper, bouncing off the furniture, jumping up, leaping from sofa to sofa, as I hose stuff down in the garden, she's trying to get out so she can dance in the hose pipe jet and her banging on the glass doors only subsides when I aim the hose at her through the glass. The vacuum cleaner is a large noisy aardvark that needs to be attacked, Max has to be pounced on, Bailey wound up. There is therefore absolutely no discernible change in Lucy's behaviour. As we would say in 1970's Derby, "for a skinny lass, she can't half neck it!"
Hangovers planned for 4pm.
