Booze Management is an ongoing situation in this apartment. Mostly it involves H ordering bottles of wine by the dozen and beer by the case and me shoehorning them into any space we can find. Then we invite my relatives over and pour it down their necks. And repeat.
This week I moved all our wine from the hall cupboard into wine racks on top of the spare room wardrobe, relocating the spirits to the cupboard above the fridge, and in doing so I realised that for a household of non vodka drinkers, we have rather a lot of vodka. Not good vodka, either. Cheap, nasty vodka. One bottle was only a quarter full, so I poured it down the sink. I did it dramatically, like an alcoholic in a telemovie.
I’ll tell you something that doesn’t make me feel old: being the proud owner of four and a half bottles of vodka, one bottle of mezcal, some tequila, three kinds of rum and a bottle of black sambucca. That’s the hooch collection of a young person. (We shall leave aside the fact that none of these bottles of spirits were purchased in the last decade. They are quite literally the booze collections of two young people: the two young people H and I were when we met. They form part of the greater booze collection created when two people who don’t drink a lot of hard liquor but who have each hosted a parties in their twenties move in together and marry.)
The only spirit we do drink much of is gin, and we have none of that right now. Don’t put your judgypants on: if you’d had the year we’d had you wouldn’t have any gin left either. I must add it to the shopping list. Does Aldi sell gin?
Last week the punctuation-free sign outside our local school, which normally has messages like ‘WELL DONE YEAR 6 ON MATHS OLYMPIAD’ and ‘SCHOOL PICNIC FRIDAY SAUSAGE SIZZLE OR BYO’, read ‘PARENTS WELCOME DRINKS’. Damn straight we welcome drinks, I thought. Never was a truer word assembled out of black letters and stuck to a sign sponsored by Ray White Real Estate.
Apart from making penne alla vodka, which is delicious but maybe not a dinner for every day, what other uses are there for too much vodka? Does anyone want to come over and do shots with me? I’d have to mix it with something to make it more palatable. Chocolate milkshakes? Kahlua and milk, Lebowski-style? Maybe at around 5 pm, while I steam broccoli and boil dinosaur-shaped pasta and pray for my husband’ swift return from the office?