We’ve finally come to the last of my birthday ciders! Again, I drank this one on the Tuesday after we moved into the new house. The reason Futurama is so prominent in the background is because we had to have the TV on the coffee table due to lack of space.
Vixin is a French cider. Its website isn’t very clear about exactly where it’s made, but it tasted very similar to Normandy cider to me. I’ll be looking out for this one again, as I love traditional French cider!
Yup, it’s another of my birthday ciders. I drank this one the Tuesday after we moved into the new house – there was a lot of cider that week.
What I liked about this one was that it tasted quite rough, a bit like real cider, but sweeter than real cider usually is. It was quite strong as well – very nice after a day of house stress!
We’ve finally got to the last of the ciders I drank the night we moved in! Not to the end of my birthday ciders, though. Not yet.
I remember this one clearly, despite my tipsy state. It tasted exactly like raspberry yoghurt, which was really interesting and no bad thing at all. I think out of all the M&S ciders, this is the one I’d most like to try again sometime.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I drank some ciders! I should probably get back to logging those now…
This was another one of my birthday ciders that I drank the night we moved into the new house. Again, my memories of it are a bit blurry, though I do remember that it’s not as good as Thistly Cross Elderflower. Mind you, very few ciders are as good as Thistly Cross Elderflower, so I think this one probably holds up as a nice elderflower taste. Maybe I’ll try it again some day when I’m a bit more with it!
As the last week has been so insane with the move, I’ve been drinking a bit more cider than I really should. This was another of my birthday ciders, which I had on Saturday night after a few glasses of prosecco.
I was a little out of it (moving day had been a long day and the prosecco went straight to my head), but I do remember it having a vaguely similar taste to Breton cider, which is no bad thing.
Friels was another of my birthday ciders that I had about a week and a half ago. I then had a couple of pints of the stuff at my local last Thursday and it knocked me out a bit; it’s pretty strong stuff and having lost a lot of weight my alcohol tolerance is a long way from what it used to be. It’s nice stuff though.
The taste is perfectly medium in my book, with the apple flavour very strong. I do enjoy it, but given the aforementioned reduced tolerance I’m going to have to be careful with stronger ciders from now on if I’m having more than just the one.
Another cider I had a week ago:
Old Mout Kiwi & Lime is one of my favourite fruit ciders. It sort of suddenly appeared in British pubs around the summer of 2014 and has been ubiquitous ever since; for me, it’s my go-to ‘we only have fifteen minutes left in this pub but I want another pint’ drink, as it’s just the right level of sugary-sweet (not cloyingly so like Kopparberg or Rekorderlig) that I can down it like juice. I like the other Old Mout flavours as well, but Kiwi & Lime is my favourite by a country mile.
Because it’s currently one of those weird transition times in life for me (everything is in flux due to the house move), January has sort of both flown and dragged at the same time. Not drinking for the month has been a lot easier than expected, but it’s felt different than expected, too.
Last time I went for a substantial period of time without alcohol (Lent 2011), I spent the whole time being irritated that I couldn’t drink when I was out or visiting people, making sure to try as many alcohol-free versions of beer and cider as I could find, and impatiently counting down the days till Easter, when I would be able to drink again. This time round has been a completely different experience, and I suppose that’s partly because my life has changed a lot without me realising. I don’t go out to pubs or round to people’s houses anywhere near as much as I did in my mid-20s, mostly because I’ve relocated twice in the intervening period and have maintained a much more pared-down social life than when I lived in my hometown. As such, I’ve only been out once in January (post-birthday, that is), to a dinner party, and I found I didn’t miss drinking while socialising at all. I’ve had no interest in alcohol-free fake booze, either – this is mainly due to being on Slimming World, as fake booze would just amount to useless extra syns when I’ve got perfectly good syn-free fizzy flavoured water to drink.
The biggest difference, though, is that I’ve not been itching to get back to drinking again, or really missing it much at all. I think there are a few reasons for this:
Obviously, it’s an extra-stressful time at the moment, and usually I’d deal with that by having a few ciders in the evening. What I found over Christmas, though, was that drinking was actually leading to more stress and anxiety the next day, which was the main reason I decided to give Dry January a try. While it’s sometimes felt a bit frugal/miserable to be spending weekend evenings without a drink, on the whole I think not drinking has been better for my mental state.
Over Christmas, having even a couple of drinks every night, coupled with all the extra food I was eating, was making me feel ill. It’s nice to have avoided that sluggish/bloated/hungover feeling for a while.
I started the year with a lot of New Year Resolutions, mostly pertaining to daily habits like writing and keeping up with hobbies, and I’m pleased to say that I’ve been sticking to them. It’ll be interesting to see if this feels harder on an evening when I’m drinking alcohol.
Well, that’s not quite true – I have caught myself doing it a few times, and then realised I couldn’t possibly have been drunk, because I’ve not drunk alcohol all month, obviously. This has been a) eye-opening – I’m surprising myself with the things that I assume I must have been drunk to have done/said (e.g. not actually remembering doing household chores that I have done – I was surprised to find that sometimes ‘not remembering’ is due to distraction/tiredness rather than alcohol use!) and b) alarming – it’s really made me realise how much mental energy I waste on trying to ascertain what state of intoxication I was in at any given time. And this is with my current ‘normal’ intake of about 10-15 units a week – I dread to think what it was doing to my mental state pre-Slimming World, when ‘normal’ was closer to 40 units a week.
Obviously, as I’ve not had to spend my syns on alcohol, I’ve been free to use them for other things…but I’ve found that I’ve not been that bothered about the other things, meaning that rather than struggling to stay under the 105-syn weekly limit, I’ve been averaging a much more SW-friendly 70-80 syns per week, meaning that my weight loss is really speeding along at the moment. This is definitely something I will be keeping in mind when I go back to drinking!
So, the original plan was to celebrate the start of Non-Dry February with a few of my birthday gift ciders after weigh-in tomorrow, but having realised that I’ve got a tattoo appointment the next day (which is starting to feel like the worst timed tattoo appointment of all time), I will be avoiding alcohol for an extra day so as not to thin my blood, meaning that I will be enjoying my ciders on Friday night instead, having gone exactly thirty days without a drink. It’ll be nice, but this month has really made me think about my drinking going forward, and what I can do to keep an eye on it.
