Who could have guessed days ago when C8 started on parfait glasses, that the discussion would morph into spiders (the drink), and it would turn out that spiders (the drink) have more spokes than a Darwin’s bark spider’s (the animal) web? (For any nervous Northern Territorians, Darwin here refers to Charles, not your city, the spider lives in Madagascar.)
Graeme Finn of Campsie reports, “I have made a variation of the spider using cider, which I call an ‘Old Lady’, as in ‘There was an old lady who swallowed a spider, that wriggled and jiggled and tickled in cider’.”
Even more: John Lees of Castlecrag says, “I grew up in Eugowra in the central west and in the 1950s that drink C8 calls a spider was called a ‘bodgie blood’.” Diligent investigation by C8 shows that, yes, “bodgie blood” is a real thing, and there is also “widgie blood”, made from lime cordial and cola.
Stepping back a moment to parfait glasses, Carole Dawes of Randwick suggests, “If anyone needs another purpose for them: a prawn cocktail with shredded iceberg lettuce and home-made cocktail sauce with a hint of Worcestershire sauce.”
Then again to meetings, Adela Parkes of Boat Harbour remembers, “I was at Sydney Airport when I was approached by a woman who called me by my maiden name. It was my high school Latin teacher. Nothing unusual except I was 60 years old and looked nothing like my teenage self. As someone who doesn’t even recognise people I see regularly, I am awed by that skill.”
Steve Hulbert of West Kempsey adds, “Last June, I was sitting in a pub in London and the patron at the next table asked in an Aussie accent to borrow a chair. He turned out to be an old schoolmate of one of my cousins, but they had lost contact. I took a selfie with him, sent it straight away to my cousin, asking if my cousin knew who it was – an almost immediate response, while we were still there, naming the stranger, lead to them being reconnected.”
Regarding Stewart Martin’s sad tale of losing his keys and then his car (C8 Wednesday), Allan Gibson of Cherrybrook wonders if “Next time Martin enters any of the stores he had checked with, will he be asked, ‘Do you know where you parked your car, or did you walk?’” C8’s reach is far and wide, but doubts it is that specific.
Column8@smh.com.au
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