Wrote a thing

[AliasTheCat]

My first taste of red wine happened when I was of primary school age: a glass, half-full, left on the side table in the living room. A relic of the previous night after my sister and I had been packed off to bed. I had learned the secretive ways of stealth in the tall terraced house on Victoria Street: which floorboards would shriek to give away my movements; how to bypass the treacherous stairs by scaling the bannister on the outside; the hallway outside the laundry room, where I could wedge myself unseen up against the ceiling to drop on my unsuspecting sister. This was far simpler. A quick auditory check confirmed that my mother was in the kitchen, so I seized the glass and took a gulp. A strange, unfamiliar savoury flavour. About to take another sip, I peered into the glass to see the the bloated bodies of two houseflies bob to the surface.
Later, my mother questioned me.
"Did you drink some of that wine in the living room?"
"No!" I replied, wounded.
"You've got red around your mouth."
"The red around my mouth is my lips. Read them: NO."
I had emerged victorious from the exchange, and was indeed so proud of the whole 'lips' riposte that the occurrence is unusually fresh in my mind.

Around this time, my father was employed at the venerable Whiteways Cider factory in Whimple, just outside Exeter. It closed in 1989, though the miles of orchards that supplied it, once the most extensive in the world, survive.
Most famous for its cider (Always spelled 'Cyder' because rural Devon) and its soft drinks Cydrax and Peardrax (Which are still inexplicably available and popular, but only in Trinidad and Tobago), the factory also took on the job of canning some other soft drinks, namely Britvic's Citrus Spring and Britvic 55. As an employee, my father had to pay cost price for alcoholic drinks, but got these soft drinks for free. As such our lunch boxes, otherwise filled with generic supermarket fare, would always contain a coveted can of fizzy drink. In the land of Robinson's Barley Water, the carbonated beverage is king.

After a while, one particular drink began to appear more and more often in my M.A.S.K lunch box. I can't remember now what it was called, though it came in a few flavours: White Grape and Lemon, White Grape and Orange, White Grape and Strawberry, all illustrated delicately on the front of the sophisticated white can. I imagine that the main reason for its increasingly regular inclusion was that it was much slimmer than the usual canned drink, probably roughly the size of a can of Red Bull today, and as such was far better suited to the complicated packing procedure required for the branded child's lunch boxes of the 1980s.

Try as I might, I can't remember why that lunch time was different. My best guess is that it was a weekend, and the class was preparing for our roles on the school float in the local parade. (I was the mayor of Munchkin Town. I had a top hat, tails and a waistcoat with a little pocket watch, a cushion stuffed down the front of my shirt and, at my insistence, a moustache.) Normally the school hall would be full of rows of tables, and the whole school would sit down to lunch together, but that day it was a far more intimate affair, our class clustered on the floor at one end of the hall, almost like a picnic. The sight of me swigging from my can drew the attention of one of my teachers, who asked if she could see it. Having examined it, my beverage was quickly swapped for a blue drink in a plastic cup that was frankly no fair trade. Unbeknownst to me, summons would shortly be made to my parents.

My headmistress, who doggedly refused to see the funny side, asked my parents why I had been drinking white wine spritzers for much of the last year. My parents were horrified: my dad had got the cans for free, and so had assumed that they were soft drinks, but suddenly my recently acquired propensities for belligerence and dozing off in afternoon classes made a lot more sense.
My sister, it emerged, in full knowledge of what the cans were, had been swapping them with boys in her class, which is very much to her character. I, having blindly trusted my parents and therefore never having read the label, had acquired a taste for the drink, which is very much to mine.

Ten minutes ago I called my mother to find out if there was any coda to this story, but other than a single awkward conversation with the headmistress, my parents faced no repercussions of any kind.
"Why are you asking?" She said.
"Oh, I'm just cataloguing the various instances of abuse in my childhood."
"Generally you have to mean to cause abuse, this was simply neglect."
Touché.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Sublime.

[Cleveland Steamer]

Loved it.

Please write more things.

[AliasTheCat]

aw thank you both, I was a bit nervous about posting this.
I wrote a few of these for my own amusement six or seven years ago and just found them in a forgotten folder on my work computer having thought they were lost.

[bgmnts]

More things.

I like CaB efforts of actual things.

[pancreas]

Yeah, very nice. If they're real life stuff, even vaguely, then just put a question at the end and post them in General Bullshit.

[AliasTheCat]

Yeah, very nice. If they're real life stuff, even vaguely, then just put a question at the end and post them in General Bullshit.

Ha! Although I think I already did that once with the one about my wisdom teeth...

Edit: yup: https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=68516.msg3577609#msg3577609

[shoulders]

Also in favour of more of this

[non capisco]

Yeah, that was cracking, Alias.

[madhair60]

someone give me the gist please

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

It's about wine or something.

[Cleveland Steamer]

someone give me the gist please

[AliasTheCat]

someone give me the gist please

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I wrote a thing once