Acts Of Civil Disobedience

Right, they’ve finally all gone to bed, and I’m sitting here with a glass of Tesco’s Finest Chablis. I bought an embarrassing amount when it was on offer at a fiver a bottle before Christmas. The only other items I had in my trolley were a low calorie sandwich and a clutch of children’s birthday cards. I must have looked like the dipsomaniac version of the mad old woman with a trolley full of tins of cat food. I’ll be cutting my own hair next.
Anyway, this wine is crisp, green, and not too oaky, and the condensation is forming nicely on the outside of the glass. I should have time for at least one fortifying glass before my lovely husband returns from the coal face, and I have to cook the dinner. Actually ‘cook’ is too elaborate a word for what I usually do. ‘Assemble ingredients on a plate’ would be a more honest description. I suppose serving up a bit of microwaved fish and a bag of lettuce keeps me off the radar of the healthy food police, but only just.
I’m not really hungry, since I have already wolfed the equivalent of a three course meal in instalments, while preparing the children’s dinner, coercing them into eating it, and clearing away the resultant mess. I’ve also done the packed lunches (when did I start nibbling crusts for fun?) so the prospect of a third round of food preparation doesn’t exactly fill me with joy.
I think a second glass of this Chablis will go down rather well. It will make me feel subversive enough to slip a couple of Jammie Dodgers into the lunchboxes. I know that some parents view them as polonium-210 for kids, but its convenient sometimes to be able to blame a child’s obnoxious behaviour on sugar or food colourings. At least it gets you off the hook as a parent.