Let’s do this together

If you are what you eat, can you also be what you drink? The Dark Lord’s teenage drink of choice recently is called Monster, and it seems to be working.

And no, I’m not on a retainer for the energy drinks brand, but there are so many Monsters on my daughter’s wall since she made a collage from the colourful cans, it looks like half our net worth is held in empties.

There’s no point banning the rubbish drink otherwise she’ll start sneaking them in, so we have a rule – she can only buy one a week, but if rules are meant to be broken, this one got stretched to breaking point this week.

Out walking in the freezing cold on one of our state-sanctioned walks, I managed to get her chatting and talking about all her favourite streamers, until as we were going through a cemetery at one point, I said: “Please, Jesse, no more Minecraft talk, or I’m just going to lay down and die here.”

She even laughed and we walked on companionably for a while longer until we were almost at home. “Can I pop in the shop, Mum, and get my drink?” she even asked nicely.

“Yes of course, we’ll wait for you outside,” I replied, and stood around while well-wrapped-up children stopped to pet Boris, who sniffed their hands for crisp crumbs. When The Dark Lord came back out, she was carrying two cans.

“Er, I don’t think so, you can take one of those straight back,” I told her, but she walked off around the corner.

I made a stand and refused to go any further until she’d taken one of them back. “I have the house key and we will stand here for hours until you do as you’re told,” I said patiently.

She gave in surprisingly quickly, walked back around the corner to take the can to the shop. On her way back, I recognised that guilty look on her face and said: “I’ll have to check your pockets – come on, fess up.”

She laughed and showed the can hidden in her inside pocket, and turned back again to return to the shop.

This time she said she’d chucked it in the bin, so I went to check the bin.

“It must have fallen straight down to bottom,” she fibbed badly as I poked around in the rubbish. This was not how I imagined parenting would be back in those heady days before having a child.

Eventually she gave up trying to cover up another lie – and rescued the can from where she’d hidden it behind a bush. Both cans were eventually taken home and are now sitting in the fridge, just waiting to start another argument.

How are you spending Lockdown 3.0? If you have decided to eat your way through it, I hope you can enter our new bake-off competition. Email me at siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.