Christmas is, of course, the most drunken time of the year. On Christmas Day, for 24 hours, everyone is a rock star – drinking champagne for breakfast, substituting champagne for breakfast and falling asleep face down with your trousers on in the driveway at 2am.
Unless you’re my husband.
I am married to someone who doesn’t drink. I mean, he does – once a year, at a festival, he might have “a nice pint of cold cider” and I’m pretty sure he had a glass of white wine in October – but ever since I’ve known him, Pete has been that rarest and boldest of things: someone who actually admits alcohol is a nasty-tasting drink.
“What’s the best drink? Water,” he said once at a dinner party, totally bringing the conversation to a stunned silence. “It’s delicious! On a hot day, when you’re really thirsty, a pint of water? Oh my God! You can feel it tingling through your body. You’re so excited you’re finally drinking some water.”
Although the doughty alcoholics around the table started to dispute this – “I think I’d rather have a very cold glass of picpoul, Pete” – I did note that, in the ten minutes that followed, one by one, everyone went over to the sink and had a lovely big glass of water. And looked both happy and reflective. He was right. Water is delicious. We’re just so used to it, we take it for granted.
“Red wine is just exhausting,” Pete explained at another party. “You’re supposed to be like a f***ing flavour detective and stand there shouting out, ‘Plum! Peach! Cherries!’ like you’re the Hungry Caterpillar’s shopping list – but you’ve also just drunk something that makes you very stupid. It’s the worst time to be working out some base note cryptic crossword. And besides, the thing that’s supposed to be great about wine is all the different fruity flavours. So why not just cut to the chase and drink squash? Squash even tells you what the flavours are. Look: ‘Raspberry.’ ‘Lime.’ It tells you on the label. Squash isn’t an intellectual obstacle course.”
Pete is a devotee of squash. He even has travel squash – Robinsons does miniature, concentrated squash capsules in bottles the size of an egg, and Pete never has fewer than three in his bag/…….