It was the very tail end of the holiday season, and I was trying to make my mother drink whisky, partly – no, sorry, entirely – because I bought it for her and I wanted to drink it. While I am intensely relaxed about drinking alone, I still have a faint cultural taboo about drinking someone else’s present in front of them. I should have also bought her a jigsaw or something.
She wouldn’t, because she didn’t want to fall over and end up in A&E. God knows I don’t want her to end up there, either, but whisky the way she drinks it – in minuscule amounts, topped up with boiling water like a Lemsip – could no more topple a person over than a gusty wind. I came at this point forcefully, from many different directions, but she wouldn’t budge and we resolved it by finding other whisky for me to drink that was a present from someone else.
