Toby Rider wrote:
Okay, one of my musician friends in Scotland claims that he likes to have a couple of bottle of "Buckfast" as inspiration.. He's daring me ask you guys what Buckfast is :-)I was visiting my son and his girlfriend in Hawick a month ago, and we found a Safeway
bag containing two empty and one half empty bottles of Buckie a few yards from his yard entrance. Last week, I passed a group of six alkies passing round the same brand of bag with Buckfast hidden inside it, just off the High Street (it was a nice sunny Saturday afternoon). I tell him what a good neighbourhood he lives in. Here we find the broken bottles instead, they don't bother with the bag.
Buckfast is the only evidence needed that some orders of monks care not a toss about the fruits of their labours - it's a fortified 'tonic wine' made by the monks of Buckfast Abbey, in Devon, once sold as a medicinal drink and therefore available throughout Britain from stores which could not have sold alcohol (at all, or all day, or whatever). I think the loophole was closed decades ago, but the tradition continues. Buckfast is the poison of choice for the elderly who can't afford real sherry, and believe that added Strontium-90 will keep them healthy as long as they (religiously) drink a glass every night.
The theory is that the herbs, spices, minerals and cheap wine which go into Buckie make you ill before you can make yourself drunk, and it tastes like a 'tonic' so you won't drink it for fun. This hardly matters when you are at an age where one half-pint of cider makes you ill anyway, and ACE is sold as a kind of lager, instead of being processed properly at the local sewage treatment plant before return to the ecosystem. And anyway it's a lie.
Buckfast is the first seriously damaging drink for most 13-year-olds, who are not questioned when they buy six pints of it for granny. It continues to fuel them to the age of about 15 when vodka poured into part-full Irn Bru bottles at a ratio of one small bottle vodka to one Irn Bru was-a-litre takes over - almost undetectable, Irn Bru is so sweet it takes an expert nose to detect byproducts of the Finnish wood petroleum industry.
Some unfortunate people are able to digest Buckfast past the age of puberty, and before the advent of senility. Most of these become tramps, prostitutes, beggars, thieves or musicians. They add to local colour (without them the steps and wynds of Edinburgh would be nothing but grey boring stone underfoot) and perpetuate the tourist myths of Scotland, acting as a kind of free ghost-train experience - frightening, but harmless unless you get your hair caught.
I've never tasted it. I rely for evidence entirely on what my children told me when they were in primary school. I have however smelled it - it's rude to make a 20-foot detour round someone who appears to know you and is wanting to shake your hand.
David
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