Crying into his beer

John of Alacrity tickled me with his recent post when a trip to the boat revealed that he was about four years too late for some things.

“Next was a shopping trip to Tesco Daventry to stock up on staples as some of the tinned food was showing a sell by date of 2004”

I reckon that some of it would still have been edible. I once found a jar of Marmite at my mum’s and it was about six years out of date – still tasted okay though although how you could detect anything through that deep yeasty gunge I do not know. We share John’s problems on board but they are all of our own making, I must confess. We have what we term ‘the captain’s cabin’, an extra food and beverage repository under the dinette. Initially it was used for naughty stuff like chocs and crisps, as if secreting it away under the seat would somehow deter us from ripping open the packets and stuffing our faces. Didn’t work....But over time, it started to receive all sorts of goods inwards and as it became less interesting so our keenness to ferret around in it waned. And that led to a certain ignorance about what lay within, which in turn caused us, well, me, to buy more of what we already had – and which we threw in to join the rest. You can see where this is going can’t you?

Well, it reached a point where we had Frosties pouring out the end door, rice cakes trying to make a run for it and 168 bottles of beer pushing upwards in search of light and a bottle opener. So we decided to have a bit of a sort out and A said that he would manfully attempt to lower the beer mountain. So I opened a bottle and it fizzed up like Old Faithful, a hoppy geyser that proceeded to foam all over the floor. I checked the sell by date – April 2004 – and without ceremony emptied the remaining contents into the sink and put the bottle in the bin. A raised his eyebrows – he’s very sensitive to waste and would have had a fit if he’d known how long we’d been sitting on this beer – so I merely said that it was a tad out of date and didn’t beer keep badly these days, blah, blah blah. Cheerfully I grabbed another bottle and tried to keep smiling as I clocked a 2005 sell by date. This routine continued for about half an hour and at the end of it A was still thirsty (and crying), the bin was full of a score of empty bottles and the ducks outside the sink outlet were completely paralytic. Lucky ducks...