sherry

We are very grateful for the decanter of overly sweet sherry in our Wimbledon hotel bedroom - fortification is welcome.  For me, of course, it tastes horribly like the stuff that Elaine Griffiths, one of my St Anne's tutors, would ladle out in Middle English tutorials: sherry refuses to decouple itself from Gower and Troilus and Criseyde and Langland, in my sensory memory.  Maybe, indeed, sherry was ultimately responsible for my inexplicably bad relationship with Piers Plowman ...