Clart & Whippets

Well, I had good intentions. And Vox is quite nice (although I don't much like the fact that sometimes you can't leave comments unless the commenter is on Vox as well. Throwing out the bloggers with the spammers, feels like).

But - I'm elsewhere.

Here, in fact:

http://mikesowden.org/feveredmutterings

But I like Vox enough to want to do something with this particular blog. I'll scratch my chin for a while. 

Painless blogging, in fact.

Yes, OK, I see why you're all here. (And you're *all* here, it's amazing).

(Well, apart from Mr Miami Public Defence Lawyer Twat, and poutrelle).

It took me 11 months to see the light. Consider me dazzled, then.

100_4616

It's Xmas Day afternoon and everyone's feeling sleepy.

So it's time for Mike's Special Xmas Cocktail to be brought out.

Every year, I make up a dazzling new variety of cocktail using nothing but ingenuity and a selection of bottles containing liquids freely available within the EU, if not always legally. I'm famous for my Special Xmas Cocktail. I've had people come up to me to tell me that after they had a glass of my cocktail, they were never quite the same again.

Every year, it's a different variety. 1997 was a good year, when I found that unopened bottle of tropical fish tank algae remover (a lovely rich royal blue colour), and found it mixed delightfully with the vintage (1932) jar of typewriter alcohol I unearthed out of a box in the loft. Mixed with Advocaat, it made a stimulating and memorable tipple, with the fascinating side effect of turning everyone's body hair green for a week.

2001 was another corker. That was the year I was given a bottle of Dom Perignon '62 that I immediately ran through a filtration column and loaded with gunpowder, TCP and tahini paste. The resulting mixture, while tasting superb, was a little too thick to serve so I mixed in a pint of heavily fermented fish stock that I'd been storing in an old car battery out in the garage for a rainy day. I don't have to tell you that the picquancy of this Operation Market Garden of the senses was the talk of the town for months (mainly at town council meetings).

We don't talk about 2003. Two words - China Syndrome. And 2004's Xmas was cancelled due to ongoing structural repairs.

But this year, it's going to be a good one, I can tell, as I put the first experimental drop of Potter and Fossick's Luxury Nail Varnish Remover into my shot glass and watch it turn black on contact with air. The reinforced balsamic Windolene has been broiling all night in a Tupperware container above the stair-cupboard immersion heater, and I've got a fresh bag of cut grass to fold into the 20 litres of Dog Shampoo currently filling the upstairs bath. It's gonna be one fuck of a drink.

Not long now, world. Not long now.