It’s that time of year again: the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – and influenza. Actually, it’s been so long since I had the flu that it seems now like one of those childhood afflictions one no longer need worry about. I am, of course, not uniquely immune to the virus; regular vaccination has saved me from the dreaded lurgi. So, I was pleased to be invited this week to the local clinic for the annual flu jab.
My
appointment was set at 09.22 (which did strike me as being improbably precise) and
when I arrived ten minutes early, I was perplexed to see a queue snaking out of
the entrance and into the carpark. My first thought was that I could have stopped
for coffee at that nice little café I walked past, but I observed the queue
shuffling forward at a fair pace, so I took my place. Before long, I was
inside, with just enough time to banter with one of the attendants, who told me
they were doing 850 jabs that morning and that the reason it was organised so efficiently
was because “the boss is ex-military”.
‘Military
precision’ is one of those assumptions that, in my view, deserves to be
questioned. I may be biased but, with a father who served in the armed forces, I
was accustomed to hearing stories to the contrary. The terms ‘balls-up’ and
‘cock-up’ were familiar to me from an early age and, later, I learned the US
forces equivalent, SNAFU. It was with scepticism, therefore, that I viewed footage
during covid lockdown of army personnel taking charge of vaccine distribution.
I took the cynical view that it was just a morale-boosting stunt. Nevertheless,
here I was, rolling down my sleeve and being ushered out of the back door, with
my phone displaying 09.23!
Anyway, now
that I’m jabbed, I can relax and enjoy autumn’s delights, especially as the
weather is clement and there’s plenty of sunshine to enhance the colourful,
turning foliage. The bumper harvest has already given us a freezer full of
stewed apples and there is no end in sight to the season’s plenty. Now there is
apple juice. A friend, who lives in a farm cottage next to a small orchard,
invited a group of pals for an afternoon of sharing both the labour and the produce
of an apple-pressing session. She had hired, or borrowed, the equipment and we
were required to bring suitable containers. Glass-bottled juice can be
pasteurised and kept, plastic-bottled juice can be frozen and kept, but untreated
juice will soon ferment.
Had I
realised the scale of the abundance, I would have brought a wagonload of
vessels. She has no more than a dozen fruit trees, but they were loaded with
fruit. Even so, there was no need to reach up for them. Heavy winds had
deposited so many on the grass that we could barely cope with the gathering. I
soon became expert at throwing them into the hopper that chops them into a
mulch that is then then put into a screw-press. The juice flows from the base
and is collected into buckets for bottling.
At the end
of the afternoon, each of us took away our filled containers, leaving sacks
full of unpressed apples, the fate of which may be to rot. I put plastic
bottles in the freezer (in the spaces next to the stewed apple), gave glass
bottles to neighbours, took some more to a workshop next day and put the
remainder in the fridge, where they will turn into cider if I don’t drink them
pronto.
But I can’t
help worrying about all the surplus left languishing in orchards around the
country. All that nutritious produce going to waste, for lack of a viable distribution
system. Perhaps we could call in the army.
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