It’s said that friends bring happiness into your life but best friends bring beer. It’s blokey nonsense, of course, but beer has been a good friend to me.
Unlike spirits or wine, beer lends a friendly foaming cohesion to groups of middle-aged men. At least, it does to the school dads who for 10 years I’ve met monthly for a few cheeky ones. “Dads’ beers” have provided comfort and stability amid the turmoil of Helen’s death.
Tonight, I’m home a bit later and merrier than intended, creeping noisily through the door. Millie is looking after a sleeping Matt. “Hello? Millie, are you awake?” I whisper in the not very sotto voce of the mildly inebriated.
She appears, head on shoulder, appraising me with a look of warm indulgence that makes her seem older than her years. This is prophetic as, with what she must have thought was pitch-perfect timing, given I’ve had a few and feeling guilty at the time, she asks with calculated nonchalance, “Dad, will you buy me some alcohol for Michelle’s party?”
She’s overplayed her hand, as libertine dad is instinctively being substituted for Victorian father. “No! No way! Love you. Go to bed.”
So it has happened. A tough teenage question with a binary right/wrong answer about which I’ve no clue.
The advertising executive David Ogilvy said: “Fight for your queens; let the pawns go.” This has been my mantra on childcare as I seek to run an easygoing ship but one where the boundaries of the deck are well understood and ultimately I remain the captain.
Her question is a “queen” for sure. Too harsh a response and I sow the seeds of rebellion and mutiny; too lax and I am on a course to blow my commitment to Helen not to screw up the kids by crappy solo parenting.
In the cold and sober light of a Saturday morning, Millie’s request for two Bacardi Breezers and a Jack Daniels miniature seems quite modest. My mind – once it has overcome wondering what makes JD attractive to girls in their mid-teens – has less of a problem with her desire to release her personal booze genie from its bottle, or bottles.
After I collected a gaggle of clearly tiddly giggly girls from a recent party, I asked in a non-judgmental way if anyone had been boozing. Only Millie piped up. “Yes, Dad but only a few sips and never of a boy’s in case it’s drugged.”
I guess I should be thankful and perhaps my pleasure at her smart honesty left a door open, which she now shoulders through. “You see, Dad, if I don’t have my own alcohol I’ll end up sipping lots of other people’s, which is worse. If I had my own, I’ll know what I’m drinking and end up drinking less.”
Bugger. It is exactly the sort of dilemma where Helen would know what to do. I’m tempted to take counsel from other parents, but resist doing so in case I offend by ignoring it. I’m likely to get it very wrong.
So I park my prejudices and treat the problem like an academic exercise, running through my checklist: Michelle’s parents present, me picking Millie up, trusting her friends, me not being so tight-assed … etc. I do fieldwork, buying double the amount of booze she’s requested and drinking it in less than an hour, partially through a straw, as they’ve been known to do.
All this in full view because Millie and I have a brilliant but tragically honest relationship. The full horror of: “Your mum’s so very ill she’s likely to die tomorrow” benchmarks subjects we can talk about in a way no conversation about booze, boyfriends, or gynaecological problems will ever get near.
In the end, I relent and am clearly not the only parent to do so. She and her super-heavily made-up squad head off to the party so innocently, bags clinking merrily as they do so.
All goes well. I’ve made the right call, so hurrah for me. It’s a good feeling and I’m a bit smug about it. So it’s annoying when I hear there’s misinformed parental confusion as to the size of whiskey bottle Millie took, “I can’t believe Adam let Millie take a full bottle of Jack Daniels to Michelle’s party!”
So up a long ladder of teenage trust and down a small gossipy snake which, like a few cheeky dads’ beers, I’m happy to stomach.
Adam Golightly is a pseudonym
