T for Tequila

Last week crawled by as I awaited another assessment morning on Friday, this time for a better-paid railway job, with a proper roster, that I could walk to in under twenty minutes.

The English and Maths tests were easier than I'd feared, and the group discussion went unremarkably. Three of the five of us got pass marks in the tests, so were called into another room with a dartboard in it to await our individual interviews.

This is where it unravels for me -- I'm very poor at doing these, for reasons I don't really understand.

They contacted me by email today. Even before you open it, you know that's not going to be good news. The one they want, they ring.

To L---, my mum's home town in Sussex, a gorgeous-looking place with a great deal of pre-Victorian architecture in a homely, southern style. Unless they've inherited somewhere to live, the indigenous working class has largely been ousted by people with non-geographical accents in semi-aristocratic eccentric dress: heavy long skirts, yellow flannel trousers, gaudy waistcoats.

My mum wanted a family get-together that wasn't a funeral. We sat in a church hall without alcohol, and I tried to rustle up conversation with a group of people I barely know. We were encouraged to bring some food. Hardly anyone wanted my cheese and cucumber sandwiches made with homemade olive bread; I've been ploughing monotonously through them since.

One of my brothers revealed that he'd found out that my paternal grandfather was almost certainly a gypsy -- this to add to the information that my maternal grandfather was an illiterate Irish tinker. For some reason, this news of our gypsy blood was unwelcome to my youngest, who kept trying to find possible errors in my brother's careful researches.

Later a small party of us went tramping through the overgrown part of a cemetery trying to locate my grandparents' grave. It's unmarked, so in thick grass, we were trying to look for "a small black or grey pot with the word 'memories' on it." The mood became listless and the search was called off.

After four hours of endless cups of tea -- I don't know why my mother doesn't strap an urn of it round her waist with a tube directly into her mouth -- I was glad to escape to the pub with Kirsty, two of our daughters, and my trendy drummer auntie.

At Victoria station a man was swigging some sort of tequila mix drink. "You've got the right idea," I said. He thought I was going to say something critical as he lives in Philadelphia now, where public drinking attracts more disapproval than it does in London. He offered me a swig; it was delicious, tasting all the better for the temporary camaraderie.