Why Mummy Drinks

by Gill Sims

  ‘No,’ said Simon. ‘Sadly not. It has made a LOT of money but not quite that much. And you said yourself that sales are dropping off now. But you’ve still done an incredible thing, Ellen. And even after the mortgage is paid off, there’ll be a good whack left.’

  ‘Enough for the other middle-class dream?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Which would be …?’

  ‘A lovely little holiday cottage somewhere. Maybe Norfolk. Norfolk’s nice, isn’t it? OR a lovely tumbledown villa in Corfu. Even if there was only enough for a deposit, then it would still be an investment, Simon, because we could rent it out to other people. And it would be so much nicer an investment than an ISA …’

  Simon droned on for a while about the tax advantages of ISAs versus an adorable holiday cottage/tumbledown villa while I mutinously thought, ‘Yes, but I can’t bloody well swank in the playground about how I’m just popping off to my ISA for a few days, can I? I can’t create beautiful Pinterest boards of my bloody ISA, can I?’

  I tired of Simon wittering about ISAs and said, ‘We should celebrate. Properly!’

  ‘Of course! You’re quite right, I’ve put some champagne in to chill, I’ll just go and get it.’

  Simon returned and handed me a chilled flute of champagne, those lovely little bubbles popping delightfully. I smugly took an enormous gulp of my delicious, celebratory champagne and choked on what appeared to be sparkling battery acid.

  ‘Simon, what the actual FUCK am I drinking?’

  ‘Champagne, darling. I found it in the wine rack.’

  ‘We haven’t got any champagne in the wine rack – if we did, I would have drunk it long ago.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Simon replied indignantly. ‘It was a bit dusty, so I thought it must be something you were keeping for good.’

  A terrible thought occurred to me. ‘Show me the bottle,’ I demanded.

  Simon returned brandishing The Bottle. The Unspeakable Bottle of some sort of dubious German sparkling wine that has been doing the rounds of every school, Brownies’, Cubs’ and sports clubs’ raffles and tombolas since approximately 1973. You do not actually ‘win’ The Bottle, you simply become its temporary custodian until the next fundraiser when you are able to return it to circulation with a sigh of relief. Simon has broken the system. Society may collapse without The Bottle as the backbone of the school fete. Also, what a cheap bastard! The least he could have done was actually buy a bottle of decent champagne instead of trying to fob me off with something he found at the back of wine rack. I grumbled all of this to him at some length until he went to the shops and bought me a bottle of proper champagne.

  By the time Simon returned with a bottle of lovely Bolly, I had obviously come up with many more ways of celebrating our new, grown-up, mortgage-free status.

  ‘Let’s go away this weekend,’ I suggested.

  Simon made his usual noises about ‘thinking about it’ and ‘looking into it’, but I was having none of it.

  ‘Fuck that shit, Simon!’ I announced. ‘We fucking deserve this! I fucking deserve this, and I am going to go away this weekend whether you like it or not. If you don’t want to come, that’s fine, I will take Hannah and you can stay here with the children by yourself. But I am going to go away for a glitzy and glamorous weekend. I am going to go to London and stay at … ooooh … The Savoy, and I am going to drink ludicrously overpriced cocktails while wearing impractical shoes and I shall go to Harvey Nicks and a cool retrospective of something at the V&A and generally I shall have a very fucking lovely time.’

  Faced with the prospect of being left alone with Peter and Jane while I swanned around London off my tits on pink drinks with unfettered access to expensive shops, Simon suddenly decided that maybe we could just go away at the drop of a hat, without his weeks of earnest and intense research first. Unfortunately, this plan meant that there was no one available to take the children at such short notice, so they are going to come with us and have a lovely time, too. We will be like a shiny family in an advert. I shall take them to the Tower of London, like my dad used to take me, and it will be a marvellous bonding experience. They are far more civilised than they used to be anyway, and the hotel has a babysitting service so I can still drink my shockingly expensive cocktails in peace. What’s the worst that can happen?

  Friday, 3 June

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ What’s the fucking worst that can happen, I said. Were there ever words more likely to tempt fate?

  After my insistence that we go away this weekend to celebrate me being so very, very clever and nouveau riche, Simon and I hastily booked time off work, fibbed to the school about why Peter and Jane would not be in today and booked first-class train tickets to London, and a suite, no less, at The Savoy, Simon twitching visibly at both the outrageous price and the trauma of being forced to book a hotel without first having spent at least six weeks reading TripAdvisor reviews about it.

  Merrily we set off, though I did rather wish that I had a matching set of Louis Vuitton luggage instead of my rather battered, black nylon wheely suitcase and the children’s gaudy, vile and dangerous wheely suitcases that they insisted they could not travel without. Simon attempted to bring his extremely nasty ancient rucksack as his luggage, but I vetoed that by dint of a lot of foot stamping and shouting ‘It’s the Savoy! They will think you are an aspirational tramp trying to come in and use the toilets if you take that scabby old thing with you.’

  Simon’s counter argument that they would merely think him another in a long line of visiting English eccentrics did not mollify me at all, as I insisted that a visiting English eccentric would undoubtedly have a battered vintage leather suitcase, with many exotic stickers from far-flung locations and also probably a panama hat, and Simon had already made his views on panama hats clear on Sports Day. He finally consented to bring the little suitcase he uses for work trips instead, while I thought covetous thoughts about vanity cases, but couldn’t get one delivered in time.

  The train was very nice, but ultimately I always find trains a little disappointing. I want to sashay through billowing steam like Marilyn Monroe at the beginning of Some Like It Hot, then have an intense and meaningful romance à la Brief Encounter. I long for compartments, and silk stockings, and adorable hats, and ticket collectors with smart caps, and possibly a brutal yet curiously bloodless murder or two to solve en route (Murder on the Orient Express). The lighting on trains, even in first class, is always extremely Soviet and unflattering. Would it be too much to ask for a little ambience? A little atmosphere? Instead of strip lighting and those weirdly furry nylon seats in distressingly busy patterns, a spot of wood panelling wouldn’t go amiss.

  Apart from my internal laments about the soullessness of the train, the journey passed without much incident, due to Simon insisting we would all have a much nicer time if I just let Peter and Jane log into the train’s Wi-Fi and sit glazed in front of their iPods for the duration instead of chivvying them to hold conversations with us and play I Spy and The Minister’s Cat (actually, we can no longer play The Minister’s Cat since Jane had the very good idea of playing Rude Words Minister’s Cat. Admittedly, it was quite funny, but a visiting child was scarred for life by Jane’s winning contribution that the Minister’s Cat was a cocking, bastarding, arsehole cat. After that, no one really knew what to say).

  The suite was utter bliss. The hotel sent a little man to pick us up from the station. Why does my life not contain more chauffeur-driven cars? I feel this is something definitely lacking in my world. Obviously, because I am pretentiously middle class and pretend to read the Guardian, it was important to me that the little man driving the car knew that I was not elitist or over-privileged, even though I shop at Waitrose, but was in fact ‘down’ with the ‘people’. Thus I insisted on attempting to engage him in conversation, until Simon kicked me on the ankle and made ‘shut up’ faces at me as I politely asked the man how long he had been a chauffeur. Apparently I was being patronising and sounded like I w
as trying to be the Queen, which is unfair, as I was only trying to be polite.

  After we had checked in and I had made sure we had consumed every ‘complimentary’ snack and beverage that came with the suite, we set off for the Tower of London. Simon baulked even more at the entry fee than he had at the cost of the hotel, and it was only under extreme duress that he could be induced to pay extra for us all to have an audio guide each.

  Once inside the Tower, Peter, obviously, was bored and felt the need to remind us every thirty seconds that he was bored, or that he needed the toilet, or that he was bored, or that this was a boring place and he was bored.

  Jane, however, was entranced. She was particularly taken with the torture exhibition and the execution site, becoming more animated than I have possibly ever seen her, as her eyes glowed with zeal at the thought of having anyone who annoyed her either tortured or executed. I attempted to explain to Jane that torture and execution were the tools of bloodthirsty despots and had no place in modern democracy, but she was deep in plans of whose head she would have off first.

  While Jane was plotting bloody revolution followed by world domination, Peter managed to dismantle his audio guide and proudly presented Simon with the pieces, leading to more mutterings from Simon about wasted money.

  By now I had blocked out Simon’s grumblings about money, and when we got back to the hotel I raided the mini-bar – the Sacred Mini Bar! I had never ever been allowed to touch a mini bar before, as my father shared Simon’s parsimonious views on Not Spending Money On Holiday. In a fit of generosity, I even let Peter and Jane have the tiny tubes of Pringles and the bar of Toblerone. Then I looked at the actual prices and decided Simon was right and it was extortionate and declared the mini bar off-limits again. Not before I had opened a bottle of wine, though …

  The plan for the evening was that we would take the children downstairs for an early dinner in the hotel, and then someone was coming from the hotel’s babysitting service to look after them while Simon and I went out and had a grown-up dinner and cocktails.

  As we waited for the lift, it is possible that I was a tiny bit half-cut after the mini-bar wine, which I had insisted on finishing due to the ruinous price, and therefore my attention may have wandered slightly. I was squinting in the mirror outside the lifts, demanding of Simon if I should make my hair blonder, when the lift pinged and we realised that Peter and Jane had vanished. The Savoy is a very quiet hotel, with thick carpets and twisting corridors, and my darling children had sidled off somewhere. After hunting for them for about twenty minutes without any success, we were forced to go downstairs and admit to the reception desk that we had managed to lose our children and request that the staff keep an eye out for them.

  Unfortunately, it turned out that hotels take missing children somewhat more seriously than Simon and I did, and they immediately put the entire building on lockdown until they were found. Many angry American tourists were milling in the lobby, demanding to be released to go and have their dinners as I attempted to explain to the manager that I was sure the children were fine and would turn up shortly, and the lockdown probably wasn’t actually necessary, and no, please, don’t call the police just yet, let’s look a bit more, all while trying to talk out of the side of my mouth so he wouldn’t notice the drink fumes.

  The manager did not share my blasé attitude towards my errant moppets and I think judged me quite a lot when he insisted the lockdown was absolutely necessary, if only so that Peter and Jane couldn’t get out and drown in the Thames, and I cheerfully replied that at least if they fell in the river I would finally be getting my money’s worth for all the swimming lessons I have forked out for over the years, just in case of such an eventuality. He also seemed dubious about my insistence that no one in their right minds would actually try to kidnap Peter and Jane, because Peter’s rancid farting would quickly put them off, in the unlikely event that Jane didn’t just murder them.

  There was a tiny part of me that was concerned that perhaps Jane had lured Peter back to the Tower of London and tricked him into the torture room and was even now experimenting on him, but just as I started to wonder if maybe someone should see if a Beefeater could pop down and check a small boy wasn’t being stretched on the rack by his loving sister, the children were found.

  Apparently they had bolted down the fire escape stairs, and from there they had made their way into the bowels of the hotel and discovered a marvellous store room, filled with all the tiny bottles of shampoo and shower gel and other goodies that Simon complains about me stealing from hotels. They had gathered as much loot as they could carry and were attempting to stagger back to the suite with their booty when they were spotted by a chambermaid and turned in. To their immense disappointment, their swag was taken from them by a now-apoplectic manager and we slunk back to the suite in disgrace.

  After the shame of the evening, and the fact that pretty much every guest in the hotel now hated us, and the fear that if we ventured out someone might take a photograph of us and sell it to the Daily Mail, who would caption it ‘Broken Britain’, we cancelled the babysitter and spent the first night of our fabulous weekend hiding in the suite, eating chips from room service and hoping the staff hadn’t done anything worse than spit on them.

  Saturday, 4 June

  Ha ha ha ha. How cunning I am. I informed the children that there is a swimming pool in the hotel, so of course they immediately desperately wanted to go swimming. But alas! Such tragedy! Mummy had forgotten her swimming costume. But it’s okay, because DADDY has his swimming costume (which I had carefully packed for him) so he could take them swimming while Mummy just went for a little looky round the shops.

  Somehow my little meander round the shops took me not in the direction of TK Maxx or H&M as usual, but towards New Bond Street. So many lovely shops, selling so many lovely things. How convenient that I had happened to transfer all the dividends for ‘Why Mummy Drinks’ into my current account before I left. But of course, I was only going to look, to press my nose against the windows of the beautiful shiny things.

  But as I was pressing my nose, I saw Them. The Most Beautiful Earrings In The World. They spoke to me. ‘How shiny we are!’ they cooed. ‘How pretty you would be if we dangled from your ears! There is literally no part of your life that could not be improved for having us in it. You know you want to. You deserve a treat. A shiny, shiny treat. And we are two treats for the price of one. A bargain really.’

  I only meant to look closer, and perhaps enquire of the price, when I went into the shop. My Preciouses were even shinier and more beautiful close up, though, and even though the price was beyond outrageous and entering the realms of the obscene, somehow I found myself handing over my card and then skipping out of the shop with a stiff and expensive carrier bag clutched in my hand.

  I meant to stop there, I really did, but a little further along was the most beautiful bag shop in the world, and there in the window was a vanity case. A glorious vanity case, one that said steam trains and silk stockings. A vanity case that said swanning into grand hotels in the South of France, with a bell boy running behind trying to carry all your matching luggage while louche men appeared to light the cigarette in the elegant holder that dangled from your bejewelled fingers. A vanity case that whispered ‘Take me on the Orient Express and I will help you solve the murders. Come inside. Stroke me. You know it’s meant to be.’

  I didn’t want the vanity case to be lonely, so I had to buy a matching suitcase. I shall feel like the Queen on the way home. I may demand my own train, just for me and my lovely luggage. The children will have to be dressed in some form of biohazard suits before they are allowed within six feet of my new bags, lest they touch them with their sticky paws. Simon, too, probably.

  This evening, Peter and Jane duly fed from room service again, to avoid any risk of another bunk, and a former Estonian police officer supplied by the babysitting agency to keep them in order, Simon and I are going out for the lovely dinner and expensive cockta
ils we were denied last night. My new earrings are sufficiently bling that even Simon noticed them and remarked on them.

  ‘Oh these?’ I said casually. ‘Accessorize.’

  He may realise I have fibbed somewhat when I spend the whole night obsessively clutching my ears to make sure I haven’t lost one of my beautiful babies, and he is going to do his nut when he finds out how much I have spent today, but fuck it. It will be totally worth it. Maybe I’ll mollify him by buying him another pimp jacket for him not to wear.

  Friday, 10 June

  Right, I decided today that I am a grown-up, and I am going to deal with this Charlie situation. I haven’t actually seen him in over two months, since the day we had lunch before Sylvia and Michael went home, but his messages continue apace.

  The trouble is I manage to be aloof and ignore him through the week, and then at the weekends I drink too much wine and play on my phone while Simon tries not to fall asleep in front of Wheeler Dealers and so then I end up on Messenger chatting with Charlie, because, to be fair, he does make me laugh and also he claims never to have heard of Wheeler Dealers (is this really possible? A man who does not watch Wheeler Dealers?) and so then the next week the cycle all repeats itself and I am clearly a Very Bad Person.

  I need to nip things in the bud, but I am not sure how because it has all got a bit tricky now as Charlie is refusing to be British about things and just skirt vaguely round difficult subjects without ever addressing them head-on and has instead sent me a message getting right to the point, which frankly is just rude. Why can’t he just be emotionally repressed and awkward, like British people are meant to be?

  I blame it on this new habit that everyone has of hugging and kissing people you barely know. Why do we have to do that now? I don’t want to kiss people at parties who I have never met, or have only met twice. My days of kissing strangers at parties involved someone’s tongue down your throat and then waking up the next day with a slight nagging sense of shame, not this pecking on the cheek business. And is it one, or is it two? Then there will always be some clever bugger who goes for three, and then I have ishoos with the people who actually kiss your cheek with their lips instead of just vaguely brushing cheeks with each other, because now there is a very good chance that I have saliva belonging to someone I barely know on my face, and how long can you leave it before discreetly wiping your cheek? But by then it might have dried, and it is all just too much! What is wrong with a brisk handshake?