CHRISTMAS is coming, and with it the obligation to collect a large range of alcohol nobody truly wants. Go through our checklist:
Tia Maria
Like Baileys, Tia Maria comes in an opaque bottle and is only bought at Christmas, but unlike Bailey’s, it doesn’t always get drunk. So this bottle could be from last year, the year before or 2010. You only find out when an unpleasant lump touches your lips.
Malibu
A lightweight tropical girl drink that someone, whether a great-grandmother or a nephew’s girlfriend, will unfailingly ask for so you might as well keep it in to stop them drinking the good stuff. Turns devotees bawdy and violent after four.
Mulled wine
Mulled wine, or cooking wine with a festive label on, is a Yuletide shopping basket favourite but a faff to prepare. So it will lurk, undrunk, until a teenager pours themselves a glass or five and then performs a red wine sick on the new rug.
Pernod and/or Cointreau
The French stop themselves drinking too much by downing one of these foul liquids before and after every meal, the overwhelming flavours of aniseed or orange even cutting through the garlic. Ideal to keep for when there’s nothing else.
Unidentifiable foreign booze
Ouzo, raki, grappa, schnapps, Slovenian aquarium cleaner; normally you’ve bought a bottle on holiday already. But this year you’ve been nowhere more exotic than Aberystwyth so you’ll have to order blind off the web. Or better yet the dark web.
Angostura bitters
A key ingredient in all cocktails, this herbal concoction masks jarring tastes by being remorselessly unpleasant in itself.
Blue Curacao
You haven’t been pissed until you watch your own cobalt-blue vomit spiral into a toilet bowl. And it will.
