Let’s do this together
I was in a state of shock at the price rises at the tapas restaurant where I’ve been meeting my best man for 20 years, when I got the call from The Dark Lord.
I’d left her at home on Tuesday to make the annual pilgrimage to London to celebrate my late husband’s birthday with his best friend, also called Dave, just to make things confusing.
“What?” I said rudely into the phone. TDL likes to wait until I’m relaxed and happy with friends and then start hitting me with requests for money or urgent tickets that are selling out.
Well, it wasn’t going to work because I’d just broken my budget for the next three months on catching up with Dave. The restaurant was half empty too – I guess the extortionate prices are even keeping loaded Londoners away.
“I’ve had a slight accident,” she said, sounding guilty. Had I realised at the time, this was an understatement along the lines of calling The Hundred Years War a minor skirmish.
I directed her to the pile of old dog towels under the stairs, and pushed it from my mind.
It was good for the soul catching up with Dave, but then at Waterloo, I discovered my train home had misplaced its driver, so I told TDL not to wait up.
I was dozing when she texted me in a panic. “The Life 360 app says you’re not on the train – where are you?”
Irritated at being stalked by my teenager, I replied: “The train’s just pulled out of Waterloo. Go to sleep.”
She replied: “No you aren’t – you’re on a Mayfield Road. Have you been kidnapped?”
I laughed and texted her back. “Ha ha! You mean mum-napped? Yes, but they soon realised why nobody would pay my ransom. Go to sleep, you donut.”
It was after midnight when I finally got through the front door, and I immediately wished I hadn’t.
Like a sniffer dog, TDL had somehow located the half bottle of red wine I’d kept hidden in a cupboard, and had clearly been about to help herself, when the Gods of Clumsy Teenagers had intervened.
My bottle had launched itself, Mission Impossible-like across the room, spraying the entire white kitchen with a million red droplets, before shattering into a thousand green pieces of glass.
I switched the light off and went to bed.
It took three hours to scrub the place clean the next day, and when she got home from school, looking sheepish, I told her: “You’re totally busted. Wine is now banned in this house until you are old enough to buy your own.”
I’m now running out of things to drink that she won’t nick – just the untouched bottle of raki in an otherwise empty drinks cabinet.
It’s enough to make me teetotal.
■ Email siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.
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Yours, Siobhan