Drink up thy Tizer!

I wonder how many people actually remember Tizer, the Appetizer. It used to be sold in grocery stores and corner shops. Don’t forget the Tizer, shrieked the adverts. I hated the stuff – but others loved it. Sweet, sticky, a little bit like dynamic Lucozade – and who remembers that, I ask. The same people as had cod liver oil poured down their throats when they were little children in the United Kingdom. An old and almost forgotten generation with its own traditions. But this post is not about Tizer, it’s about cider. Good old Somerset / Zummer Zett scrumpy.

I met Scrumpy when I went to Bristol University. It was an alternate drink to beer, and many pubs sold cider, in one form or another. A pint of cider – sufficient unto the evening was a pint thereof. After a couple of months, one could manage two pints of Scrumpy. Our drinking competitions including drinking a Yard of Ale. Someone always brought one when we went on a coach trip and we always ended up in a bar, in the middle of nowhere, trying to drain our yards of ale. I remember one lad bravely trying to quaff a yard of cider – scrumpy at that. Honk city – and it had nothing to do with the geese. But it was spectacular.

My own adventures with scrumpy really started in my second year at Bristol. The boarding house I lived in stood close to the Coronation Tap, one of the best cider house in England, if not in Bristol. First night I went in there and asked for a pint of scrumpy the barman suggested I have just a half. In my best Somerset accent, I said no, I’d appreciate a full pint. The barman duly placed it before me. As he did so, the man standing next to me at the bar suddenly woke up from his meditations, poked me in the ribs with a boney finger, and announced “Ah, lad. That’ll put lead in thy pencil.” I looked over at his pint of scrumpy and saw a slice of lemon floating in it. “What’s that lemon doing there,” I asked. “I’m waiting for the cider to eat it,” the man replied. “Better for the scrumpy to eat the lemon than to eat my insides.” Another night, at the Cori Tap, I met an old gaffer who wouldn’t touch scrumpy. I asked him why not and he replied that one night he’d managed to down seventeen pints of scrumpy. “That’s a lot,” I said. “What happened?” “Oi spend three weeks in ‘orspital, in bed, doan I?” He muttered.

In my third year, Hamburg University Athletics Cub arrived by coach to participate in an athletics competition with Bristol. The Cross-Country Club became the Athletics Club, in the summer, and we specialized in distances from 400 > 800 > 1500 > 3000 > 5000 > 10,000 metres. Thirsty work on a hot summer’s day. We took the Hamburg athletes back to our apartment building and spent the Saturday night slurping scrumpy down the Tap. They slept on the floor at our place, and next morning, a Sunday, they went shopping early. When they came back to their coach, they all grinned happily at us, and waved their bottles of Tizer in farewell. I looked around and saw that they had twenty cases of those bottles stored in the bus. “Ve vill have gut trip to Hamburg, no?” I started to laugh and they all joined in, waving their bottles at me. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Scrumpy came in barrels, not bottles, and that they had not purchased cider at the local stores. Alas, they had bought 20 cases of Tizer the Appetizer. Somehow, in translation, cider had become Tizer – oh the glories of discourse analysis and the meaning of meaning.