Cider Tramp

Lately, it has all been about The House; our real quest for an archetypal place of secure residence. Some balance is required, firstly because too much poignancy will make you sick and secondly because the rest of the world is still there, shuffling uncomfortably while you mutter to yourself.

Embarrassment may cause you to refer to yourself in the third person, maybe even the third person plural, Lily Tequila, and all of her aliases, awkwardly note.

So, still believing that in the particular lies the universal, I look outside myself and pick this for a subject. It has the essential edge of oddness.

Cider Tramp.

This is a terrible thing to name a person, obviously, but then so is village idiot. Sometimes the external labelling is socially understandable, if not wholly acceptable. Every village needs an idiot, it could be argued, this idiot being a vital unifying force, a source of comedy, provider of the jester function, the safety valve of social pressure.

Towns have cider tramps, though I hesitate to say they are necessary. I would be happy if they all got sober. But there they are, drinking cheap white cider, symbols of subdued hope, giving us something to talk about. Let us not be judgemental. They are undeniably part of the human condition and experience, because we all are. These notes are, by intention, only observational.

We haven’t seen our town drunk for a week or two, so the perpetual rumour that this time he is really dead is due to surface soon.

I did hear an educational story from a neighbouring town. It centred on their resident alcoholic, who drank so much cider his teeth floated out. Not all in one day: they changed angles and came adrift over time. Sometimes a slow moving target is easy to miss.

“What’s up with your teeth?’ was a frequent question.

“There’s nothing wrong,” he decided, errantly.

Therein, the lesson.