Amuse bouche... Sunny pints
Tina liked the sound of sunny pints but, in practice, they brought her to a dark place. Tina was in the toilet of the pub she had come to with the gang from work.
This was the third pub they’d been to in the three hours since leaving work, as they moved around, following the sun from beer garden to beer garden.
Tina hadn’t put any sunglasses in her bag that morning — it had been cloudy — so the combination of sun and pints of cider had given her a headache. She looked in the mirror while she washed her hands. Her morning-applied make-up was past resurrection. Her eyes were bleary. She had frown lines from squinting in the sunlight. Tina looked terrible. And she was starving. That never helped. That was sunny pints for you. Tina never normally drank cider, obviously, but if it was sunny, it was all she could think of. Pint bottle, half-pint glass, tons of ice. The taste of summer. But sort of sour in its over-sweetness after pint three, at which point you were wedded to it. You couldn’t go to G&Ts after three pints of cider. Or wine. You were stuck with it, and slightly sick. Especially on an empty stomach.
Tina’s problem with sunny pints was the early start and the no eating. The guys didn’t seem to need to eat until the drinking was finished and they were ready to destroy their work shirt with a dripping kebab.
The girls in work didn’t eat in general. They were always on various diets that would not allow for eating anything you’d order in a pub, or grab in a convenience store to eat on the hoof. Their stock answer, if Tina ever suggested eating between beer gardens, was that they had eaten before leaving the office, even though they knew Tina had been there and had seen no one eating.
Tina had no problem with her perfectly normal appetite, but it gave her indigestion to eat even a small metal basket of hipster triple-cooked chips under the gaze of her fat-deprived colleagues.
She should have shoved into her handbag one of the bags of Monster Munch hidden in her drawer, thought Tina. But maybe not. She’d need them to get her through the Friday hangover tomorrow and, really, sneakily eating crisps in a pub toilet would be a new low.
Sunny pints and starvation didn’t suit Tina, she realised, looking at her reflection in the toilet mirror.
She determined to develop some other response to a sunny evening, like the desire for a swim in the sea, or something. Nice in theory, Tina thought, though a swim in the sea always made her mad for a cider, too.