My mother’s funeral took place on Zoom during lockdown, and attendees were encouraged to remember her by smoking indoors and drinking vodka. I think I was thirteen when a doctor first explained that maman would have to give up drink completely. It didn’t happen. Empty Smirnoff bottles used to clink around the bottom of her wardrobe when the cat crawled in there to hide from...
We require reproductive workers and feminised people in general to be on call, 24/7, just in case hubby or baby or the boss requires our attention. Breaking out the rosé signals an interruption to the (double, triple) shift. Worse, it hints at a desire to go on strike. It has always struck me as revealing that a popular gauge for alcoholism is whether a person’s drinking interferes with their work – rather than, say, being the thing enabling them to go to work.