It’s another lazy morning at the Old Manor, the smell of bacon, sausage, eggs, tomato, mushrooms and beans having little effect on sleeping bodies. The homely family breakfast I envisaged fades. No matter. Oli arrives with Rex about 10.30 and so we eat together. Rex looks amazing – he’s 13 – 91 by the weird calculation everyone does, so is a couple of years older than Grandma Joyce (Mum).

Ever the Labrador, he shuffles about the kitchen hoovering up the crumbs and slowly people emerge. Auntie Mo takes a cup of tea up to her bedroom and says she will eat when she has showered etc. Alex makes an appearance, and explains that although his girlfriend Liv arrived last night, she packed in a rush and forgotten her makeup, so she can’t come downstairs. I tell him to get mine from Auntie Mo’s room (I don’t have a dressing table in my room) and she can use what she likes, though I doubt that she will be thrilled with my bargain basement Rimmel foundation and The Original Factory Shop lipstick and blusher.

Mum has porridge, Toby finally appears and Liv looks as beautiful as ever, even though I’m pretty sure she didn’t use any of my rubbish offering. We are chatting, mostly filling Oli in on Mum’s Friday night behaviour and the time flies.

It’s past midday before we all decamp, 3 cars in convoy style to Dunwich beach, to walk Rex and blow the cobwebs away. Auntie Mo, Mum and I all have walking sticks and the kids and I run a little sweepstake to see how many shits Rex will have on the duration of the walk.

Rex is a social shitter. You can empty him all you like, but put him on a beach, in a park, in a field or (god forbid) on a street with other dogs and other people and you can bet your bottom poo bag that he’s gonna find one and squeeze it out.

I opt for 4, and am joined by Toby and Oli. Alex opts for 3 (amateur) and Liv goes for 5, which I think is OTT, even for Rex. No sooner are we on the beach than he cracks one out. Oli picks it up, runs back to the poo bin, and hasn’t even got back to us before Rex is onto no. 2. Again, Oli picks it up and runs back (this time a little further away) and so it continues.  After no. 3, we all think he’s done and he’s happy to sit for a photo op.

The walk is lovely. At one point Auntie Mo and Mum are walking side by side, chatting. Too far away from the rest of us for us to earwig their conversation – I wonder whether to catch them up and join in, play the full UN peacekeeping force, but decide to let them be. I don’t know what they talked about, but it was all good. No stomping off, no raised voices, no pointing fingers or windmill arms.

After about half an hour, we turn around and head back to the carpark. Toby has dressed inappropriately for a late November walk alongside the North Sea and has had to borrow my headscarf. He looks like he could be auditioning for The League of Gentlemen.

Alex thinks he’s won the sweepstake, but Rex, somehow sensing that his opportunities are running out, cracks out a 4th. I am jubilant in victory, and so busy rubbing Rex’s fourth shit in Alex’s face (not literally, that would be gross), that I only just notice that everyone else is cheering Rex on for going for a 5th. Liv takes home the trophy, I suspect deep down Rex is seriously proud of himself. Maybe he did it because he knows it’s always polite to let the guest win?

It’s now about 39 hrs since Mum had her last pint. At breakfast, having been told about the impending walk, she asked if the beach was near a pub. I skirted the issue, and she said she’d like to get some money out. Was there a pub nearby which would give her cash back? No, I said, but I can take you to the cashpoint. Well ok then, she said, but is it near a pub? Then came the cheeky laugh, which I know after all these years carries the subtitle,  If You Haven’t Figured It Out Yet, I Fully Intend To Go To The Pub Today.

Everyone else makes their way back to the house, I take Mum to the cashpoint in the garage, not near any pubs at all.  Approaching home, she starts making more pub noises. Can we just go for one? Well why not, on a super day like today, we could go to the place we went to on Friday night (she can’t remember the name), maybe everyone else could join us? What could be better than to get all the family together and all enjoy a drink together. She starts huffing. Dark clouds encircle us. I wonder what is best? Take her for a drink and then hoik her out again just as she’s getting a taste for it, or take her straight home and risk a full on fault-picking mission because she hasn’t got her own way.

I give in. I say I’ll take you to the pub but you have to promise only to have one and by the way no-one else wants to come and join you.

The landlord gives us a warm welcome, but Mum is puzzled at the things he is referring to. She has absolutely no recollection of anything after pint 4 on Friday night. She remembers the food (once again, if only pubs in Yorkshire served food…), but has to be re-introduced to the chef as she can’t remember chatting with him at length on Friday. She has also not acquainted them with her hearing loss. She lets the landlord ramble on merrily for quite a while, nodding and smiling, making complimentary facial expressions but as soon as she catches my eye she mouths I Can’t Tell A Word Of It. Only she doesn’t mouth it, so much as says it loudly, like a deaf person wanting to be heard.

I go to the loo and while my back is turned, she orders pint no. two. I put my foot down and collect my things. No, I say, I am not staying for another, and neither are you. Your grandchildren have all taken time out to travel long distances, as has your sister, to spend time with you and you are not going to spend all day Sunday in the pub. She is chastised and I’m on dodgy ground. To drag Mum back from the pub when she wants another drink is not going to do Auntie Mo any favours, as she’ll pick a fight with anyone and Auntie Mo is an easy target. Plus, she could hit my gin straight away, and we all know what that can lead to (she put the hoover through my father’s bedroom door once and wasn’t allowed gin in the house ever again).

So, considering all options, I decide that a carry out is the best way forward. The landlord has a plastic firkin supplied by one of the breweries which holds 4 pints. Excellent. Armed with 4 pints of Gospel Oak, and carrying the pint she’s just ordered, I usher her out of the pub and into my tiny car and get her home.

I had meant to cook dinner for everyone, but of course I haven’t been able to. Fortunately Auntie Mo and Oli have been hard at work in the kitchen and have prepared  everything. We sit down to eat almost straight away. Mum was going to shuffle off into the other room but I tell her no way José, I don’t care if you don’t want to eat, you’re sitting at the table with the rest of us. So while the 6 of us tuck into a lovely Sunday roast of local duck, roast potatoes and celeriac, Mum sits with her pint, steadfastly refusing to even have a plate in front of her.

After lunch Alex and Liv have to head back to Northampton, and Toby manages to disappear entirely, leaving Auntie Mo, Oli, Mum and I in the living room with a lovely fire and something on the telly box.

It’s dodgy ground. We’re definitely on pint 4 or 5, it’s hard to tell as the firkin isn’t seethrough and she’s pouring her own. I’m sitting opposite Oli texting him, while Mum is quizzing Auntie Mo about various things. We devise a plan that if it gets edgy, he will summon Auntie Mo out of the room and I will guide Mum onto more favourable territory. Like how good the food was in the pub on Friday night.

Auntie Mo clearly senses danger too, but I think she may be wearing a false sense of security, namely a couple of large vodka’s she had after lunch. She doesn’t seem daunted by Mum’s tone, which is turning slightly interrogational. Instead, she seems overly brave, like she’s decided to tackle Niagara Falls in a dustbin. I am worried.

Fortunately on the telly box there are, according to Mum, the couple she met at that show I worked on, when she came down to the studio that day, and her, she was lovely, even though she’s supposed to have that thing where you forget everything you wouldn’t have known it and him, well he was lovely too and he chatted to her (Mum) and told her he came from Bradford, would you believe?

We watch Timothy West and Prunella Scales revisit her old school in the Lake District and marvel at what a lovely couple they are. Then, on a roll, Mum mentions all the other things she’s done which I’ve engineered. That time she came down and was on that show which that woman used to host, what was her name, she used to sing and reunite people from all round the world and she (Mum) got a bottle of champagne (Surprise Surprise 1996). And then there was that time she was in the audience for that show, you know the one with the one from the Nolans on it, it’s on at lunchtime, and I brought the Nolan lady, what do they call her now, over to meet Mum afterwards. (Loose Women, 2014)

 

And so we gently paddle our way out of the rapids onto calm waters of days gone by, where she’s been treated to lovely things, met wonderful people and generally been indulged by me.

Mum is sailing into the sunset and her heart is full. If we ever need anyone to look after Rex, all we need to do is ask. The fact that she lives 212 miles away seems irrelevant to her. Oli and I thank her for her offer, and hope she doesn’t press us too much on why we never take her up on it.

Then suddenly we hit turbulence. She asks Auntie Mo where she flew from. Newquay, answers Auntie Mo, but there is also an airport at Exeter.  Mum’s face cannot hide her disbelief.  She needs clarification. Yes, we all say, there is an airport at Exeter.  With Auntie Mo on firm ground, and Mum digging her heels in because she’s never heard of it, we could be in for trouble.

But soon she switches, inexplicably, to Prince Charles, and the time he stopped our planning application up in Scotland (we have no proof that he did this). It was a full page in her Daily Mail at the time (we had no idea, we were on holiday when it was printed), with our photos etc. She calls Prince Charles a Bloody Idiot. Frankly, we’re all a bit relieved that it’s Prince Charles getting the flack tonight, and not one of us.

Then everything is su-perb again. We all relaxed a bit. I’ve not even finished exhaling my sigh of relief when a tiny alarm bell rings. Mum’s glass is empty. The beer has run out. She looks expectantly at Oli. He looks at me. I look at my phone. She wants gin. Oli is going to refill our glasses and she wants a gin. I text frantically.

So my lovely clever first-born, pours a tiny amount of gin into an egg cup. He dips his finger in it and runs it around the edge of a glass, then fills the glass up with ice and tonic. He is a genius. It smells like gin and tonic. It tastes like gin and tonic, but it’s like 99.9% tonic and the gin is merely your imagination. I secretly wonder if he’s been doing this to me for years…

And so it’s time for bed. We’ve done it. Auntie Mo and I hug each other and laugh quietly with relief that we’ve got through the evening – the severely alcohol fuelled evening (Mum has been drinking now for 9 hours, although she’s only had 6 pints and several non-gins) with no majors. We’ve passed. We toss our L plates up into the air and practically chest bump each other.

I’m aware that this is the most dangerous territory of all, of course. The bit where you think you’re home and dry. Like all those 80’s movies which loved to get you with the second ending, the corpse rising up one more time, this could be us at our most vulnerable.

But as it turns out, this isn’t one of those movies. I put Mum’s hot water bottle in her bed, help her upstairs, remind her where her bathroom is, turn off her radio as it’s on way too loud, open her window, pour her some water and turn in for the night, exhausted.

Day three, we’ve done it.