Mother's Ruin

Oh dear. I have been home again for only two days, and already there is a problem.

The problem is this: we have no gin.

Seems quite simple, does it not? Not so much a problem as a small hiccup between trips to Tesco. There is no gin, therefore we put it on the shopping list and buy it next time we go up. Then we can have gin and tonic and sit around whilst we argue about whose turn it is to cook and who failed to notice we were out of chopped tomatoes*. Huzzah. There may even be some olives, which is always nice.

However, this fails to factor in one other quite important point of note: my mother.

You see, way back in the beginning of the summer, when I moved back in, my mother was against the presence of The Gin. Gin was a bad thing: it was expensive, bad for our health, and an all round Extravagant Bad Habit. Nevertheless, as a twenty-something non-smoker and ex-caffeine addict, I felt that I was allowed an EBH; moreover that it was my positive duty as a young person to keep up one EBH; and so I fought for The Gin, and The Gin stayed. As did some tonic and half a lemon wrapped up in clingfilm in the fridge, but they were just optional extras, and you know, nice.

So The Gin entered our lives. Only for half an hour a couple of times a week, of course, but it soon became a regular fixture.

And soon after that, it was not down to me offering to make us a nice drink with my mother yielding delicately and naughtily after a little persuasion, it was my mother coming in and going ‘pour us one, go on’ and as she drank, rolling her eyes and telling me what a bad influence I was, and if it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be drinking it. But apparently, despite the way the tables have turned, I am still responsible for driving my mother to a drink once or twice a week.

And now that we have no gin, a whole new dilemma is born.

There are four possibilities:

1. Buy more gin. Allow vicious cycle and recriminations to continue, but also ensure that gin and tonics are available for weekends and the odd ‘needing a drink’ times. But then must shoulder the guilt placed upon me by mother.

2. Buy more gin with own money. Mother feels grateful to me for allowing her to share, and therefore blame is lifted from my shoulders as am doing a Good Thing. But I have very little money.

3. Don’t buy gin. Although technically sensible option, will end up going to pub to buy drinks, and as mentioned before, have very little money. And when friends come round, will have nothing to offer them but tap water and something disgusting in a 2ltr bottle in the fridge that my brother abandoned when he went off to university. Maybe even end up trying this out of desperation and dying from rabies or similar.

4. Buy something less desirable to mother. However, as proved by the ‘Baileys Is Such A Teenage Drink’ debacle of six Christmases ago, this could be difficult.

There is, of course, option five, which is waiting for my mother to crack and purchase some gin herself, unprompted by me or a shopping list. However, this could horribly backfire and still all be my fault, and moreover be a far worse offence than merely persuading her to buy the stuff in the first place. I’m not sure I want to wait for this to happen, and should it happen, it may even tip me over into teetotalism (for a month at least, until the scandal dies down.)

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*In this house there are either too many cans of chopped tomatoes or not enough. It is impossible to have a satisfactory number of cans. Much research has been done, many experiments have been carried out, but it is a problem that will probably never have a solution.

: 30 Oct 2006 16:23 |  Comments (4) |  Report a problem