A Case of Honest Theft

Eating in a restaurant in Dublin at the weekend, I was delighted to be served After Eight mints. I remembered fondly how sophisticated these chocolates seemed when I was a child.

So expensive and exclusive was the After Eight that most middle class families always seemed to have a half-empty box squirreled away in the sideboard somewhere, alongside the china and cutlery which were also reserved for special occasions. The box would come out only when honoured guests were visiting, and each diner would consume a single mint before the box was retired to the sideboard for the season. In those days a box would never - as now - be devoured in its entirety, the table deluged in a pile of spent paper wrappers.

I remember on one occasion we were visiting my parents' friends Peter and Margaret in Abingdon, and my brother and I were left in the company of their children, Katherine and Steven. After the usual tiresome day of discovering that none of us liked the same ball games and that computers still sucked, the four of us got to chatting about pulling off an elaborate After Eight heist which - in our heads - was about as daring as the Thomas Crown Affair. We drew diagrams on paper and worked out elaborate ways of sneaking past our mothers in the kitchen - crouching behind the armchair, taking it in turns to run from hiding spot to hiding spot - so that we could break into the dining room and help ourselves to the treasure chest of delicious mints that waited inside.

It was clear to us that our subtefuge would not go unnoticed for long, and for each mint we ate we insured our risks by placing a single penny piece in the empty black envelope and returning it to the box, in part payment for what we had consumed.

The weeks passed and the theft was only discovered the next time we were visiting, months later, when we children were awoken from our slumber upstairs by the roaring laughter of our drunken parents. We had, of course, wholly forgotten about the prank.

I recall on another occasion - when Margaret and Peter were visiting us - that Steven told me that tonic water tasted just like lemonade, and he encouraged me to steal some from the pantry. An impressionable wee dolt, I duly trotted into the kitchen, opened up the bottle and started pouring it directly into my mouth. I was not quite prepared for how effervescent tonic water can be, and the fluid erupted like a minature Vesuvious in my mouth and out in all directions across the kitchen.

The theft was on this occasion difficult to disguise, as my mum came racing into the room upon hearing the sound of her son's head being blown off, and found me standing drenched in the middle of the kitchen, an empty bottle in one hand and a dozen g&ts worth of tonic soaking into the carpet.

[Time: around 1986]