Diary of a Wine Writer

This weekend is Daisy’s 3rd birthday, her unofficial celebration today, the official one tomorrow. As a treat, she is allowed to don her reversible Sleeping Beauty/Snow White dress, replete with fake plastic gold tiara and since she is dressed as her alter ego, so her elder sister insists on becoming Snow White/Sleeping Beauty depending upon what mood she is in. As a general rule, we find that they prefer to be the lazy sod that is Sleeping Beauty in the morning and then magically change over at around 3.30pm to Snow White, mercifully without her seven dwarves.

On this rare, bright Saturday morning, I pop into Guildford to purchase a bouquet of flowers to brighten the dining room and two helium balloons from Clintons, one with a giant “3″ and the other with…quel surprise…Sleeping Beauty. At least the bag is light, so much so that I have to weight it down with a CD.

In the afternoon, her two friends come round. Let’s call them “Sleeping Beauty 1″ and “Sleeping Beauty 2″, so that the entire house becomes a flurry of lurid pink satin and sparkly tiaras. Whilst they line up on the sofa like the royal household to watch a DVD (Sleeping Beauty), the parents convene in the other room to discuss such diverse topics as the socio-demographic composition of Guildford, whether Park Barn really is a ghetto and the geological composition of the Congo. Then in the evening, I cook some duck in Chinese 5-spice with not one, but two bottles of Chilean Pinot Noir and Merlot that we somehow manage to polish off in their entirety.

How did we do that?

We are no longer in our bibulous 20s.

Our metabolism is slowing on a daily basis, these days I just have to think of wine and I feel drunk. Daisy will be celebrating her official birthday tomorrow with alcoholics as parents and no doubt, the NSPCC will be calling round by noon to whisk them away to sober foster parents.