Drinking like Lady

First published as part of 26 Memory Maps

January 11, 2025

My sister’s face was still red from crying. She’d been told off for sucking the raisins from her cheesecake and spitting them into the fruit salad.

Now she was thirsty, and coffee was all there was on the table.

The grown-ups were arguing on heavy oak dining chairs, bums on olive scuffed velvet seats. The dachshund gladly followed us, wagging her tail.

Grandma’s kitchen smelled of onions and dirty dishcloths. Some Saturday mornings she’d say, “today you’re allowed to help me,” and I’d take a bit of cotton wool and clear out the air grille under her fridge. The smell never changed.

My face ached with disgust as I tried to reach past dishcloths, to the kitchen taps, to fill my sister’s beaker. Nearly — there — no — fingertips slipped off.

“What’s this!”

I turned.

Grandma, filling the doorway. Sister, lapping water from the dog’s metal bowl.

“Drinking like Lady!”, she crowed.

Creative journey

As I was drawing the map of that once-familiar place in Germany, I realised how much the images in my mind relied on the stories that happened there. No story, no memory.

Grandma would have been 103 this year, and I think of her a lot. She had dementia and only remembered the good old times in the end. She didn’t remember how old she was. But I’m sure she remembered this story.

I hope so.

Hand-drawn map of the area where my grandmother lived, including annotations about where I walked her dachshund Lady, where I decided to never run again, where I had milk straight from the cow, where my friends lived and other important landmarks.

In 2017, I wrote and edited creative responses to that question – as part of the project 26 Memory Maps.

As Neil Baker explains on the 26 website, the project revolved around the following challenge:

First, create a “Memory Map” of the place you are from. It might be a rubbish pencil sketch with little artistic merit. Or a beautifully crafted topographical masterwork. Either way, it will be fascinating – because it is uniquely yours.

Second, write a “memoir” about that place. To provide a focusing constraint, it must be exactly 150 words. Many of the writers also recorded a reading of their work.

Third, tell us about your creation journey. How did you find the map-making and memoir-writing process? This must be exactly 100 words.

And as a creative variation…. if you like, sit with someone else and make their map instead. Then write their memoir.

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