No good can come of this

While Dig boogies round strange places on the other side of Planet Earth, Grit drives the two minute journey to Tesco and buys booze. In quantity.

Really, she is not proud of this moment, so don't applaud.

In fact, my voice of guilt and doom tells me to hang my head in shame, have both my alcoholic pickled legs amputated, forget I have early onset dementia, and be denied a transplant. Because I have convinced myself that all this inevitable misery is my just deserts for one drop more than a small bottle of beer with supper. And that's before I push that trolleyload of beer, red wine and whiskey to the checkout. This little prim voice in my head, the one which sounds like my girls grammar school English teacher, the one who strangled herself with a lace collar, says I am going to die a horrid all alone death without a liver.

But today the other little voice in my head, the one that sounds like Jack Nicholson from The Shining and wears a red cape and has little horns and carries a pitchfork, whispers Come on, for here you suffer an absent husband, an alone October day, a home education schedule as gruelling as having an axe embedded in the skull, and squabbling triplets who can swing a punch that would knock out a donkey. That Doublewood whiskey at bedtime? It's your reward.

And what finally tips me over the edge, into the alcohol aisle of perdition?

Close to bathtime I can no longer escape the obvious. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger need their hair combing. Quite frankly it looks as if three dead cats got entangled in those woolpits. Tonight, only a decent malt will alleviate the pain.

And here's the problem.

We haven't got any. No whiskey. Beer. Wine. Don't ask where it's gone.

Well I could blame Dig. He normally buys, and possibly drinks, the booze. Now Dig has failed in this monthly husbandly duty, because he is not here. Normally, in his absence, I'll buy my beer when I run down to the Co-op for bread, cheese, stamps. But actually this routine is pretty difficult when I'm on kiddy call 24/7. And when I try to buy my evening bottle of beer on the sly, then Squirrel invariably pleads to pop into the Co-op with me, so then I buy beer with her standing at my side, eyes wide and innocently fastened onto the behind-the-counter hard spirits and cigarettes. The worst is when I get the tee-total checkout assistant at the till who slowly gazes from the bottle of beer, to me, to Squirrel, then back again, with a hardening face of judgement that damns me as a mother destined for hell. She should just go ahead and add, Would you like crack cocaine with that? For the CHILD. Well lady, do not bother, because truly, I have put myself in damnation already.

So with my beer run failing, I glumly face my evening meal with a glass of apple juice and probably kiddy spit in it too. There is only one solution. Stick the kids in front of Night at the Museum again and get the booze run over and done with. Buy the month's supply in one go.

And that's what I do.

I'll just pray the whiskey's not included in that timetable.