Ask Audrey: My teenage daughter is breaking my heart — I just can’t get her to drink with me

You can ask her for advice, but don't expect her to be nice — it's Ask Audrey. What's your problem?

Models from the iStock photography service, possibly pictured yesterday, re-enacting Belinda from Montenotte's average Friday night.

What’s the craic? I’m a first year student in UCC and I don’t like it at all. 

I’m a proud Mid-Cork lad and I was really looking forward to meeting people from all over the world, sure aren’t we all the same. 

Well, not according to a city clique in my class from fee-paying schools - they’re the biggest pack of snobs I ever met in my life. 

Every time I try to talk to them it’s the same – when they’re not taking the piss out of my Donoughmore accent, they’re mocking my mullet. 

I have more in common with a lad from Jakarta in Indonesia than I do with this absolute trout from Sunday’s Well, who keeps trying to get me to sing Wagon Wheel after a couple of pints. 

I can’t walk into the lecture hall now without a gang of entitled posh-boys singing th at song at me. 

They have the nerve to mock my accent when they all sound more American than IshowSpeed on TikTok and they’re more annoying than him too. 

I’d avoid them but the girls in the clique are fly, bro (it’s fecking contagious) and they’ve adopted me as their pet culchie. 

How can I get them to love me?

— Tadgh G, Magazine Road.

My niece sounds like one of those girls, she’s doing Arts because she has no interest in ever getting a job. I said, would you go out with Tadgh? 

She said, I’d sooner lick the sweat off a baboon. (At least I think that’s what she said – it can he hard to tell with the American accent.)

My daughter is breaking my heart. It’s booze related. I just can’t get her to drink with me. 

You know the way it is with family life Audrey, you get cut off from your friends and it can be hard to have a good time at the weekend. 

I got into Pinot Grigio during covid, maybe a bit too much. My sister says I have a problem but she’s no friend of mine compared to a glass of Pinot G. 

Anyway, five o’clock is wine o’clock every Friday (I never drink during the week, that’s a bit Glanmire.) 

I used to enjoy drinking with my husband, but he listens to a lot of World War Two podcasts and it’s hard to have sex with a man who thinks I should have an interest in the Battle of the Bulge. 

That leaves my daughter. I cracked open a bottle last Friday evening and said to her, “Come on, we’ll go on the piss.” Her reply? “But Mom, I’m only 15.” 

Talk about ingratitude! Sorry now, but if my mother suggested I join her in gallon of Baileys when I was 15, I’d have been firing them into me. 

How can I persuade my daughter there is nothing wrong with a drink on a Friday night?

—  Belinda, Montenotte.

I hate drinking at home. There’s almost zero chance someone will lob the gob at me on my way to the jacks. 

Unless it’s My Conor. Disgusting .

Hello Audrey. I come from what my mother would have called the the top family in Wiltshire, but to me it was a strait-jacket of conformity and Hunt Balls, so I escaped to the Beara peninsula in the 1980s, where I met up with a refugee from the top family in Devon, we took a load of drugs, started our own cheese business and ended up with three kids. 

It doesn’t get much more West Cork I’m sure you’ll agree. 

Two of those kids have been a dream for us. They have their own sustainable hemp businesses, their kids are feral, love it. It’s the middle child, Asteroid, that is causing me sleepless nights. 

She is in her final year in secondary school and, wait for it, she wants to become a Project Manager. 

I said, you bloody fool Asteroid, you will be an untouchable in the cheese-making community down here, with your desk and your spreadsheets. 

Your father and I didn’t scrape by on our 10 grand a month allowance from his father, just so you could go work for The Man. How can I persuade her to do something more meaningful with her life?

—   MoonShadow , Beara.

It’s awful to see someone wasting her life. 

To think she could be flogging crystals to tourists every summer. #InTearsHere

C’mere, what’s the story with skyscrapers. 

The old doll was reading her phone last night when she said there is a new skyscraper going to be built in Cork, starting soon, on the site of the old Sextant bar. 

She then told me there will be 24 floors in this skyscraper, as if this was amazing. I said, come here girl, stop wasting my time. 

Cork people couldn’t give a hoot how many floors are on a skyscraper. There is only one question on our minds and it’s this – will this new building be bigger than anything they have in Dublin? 

She didn’t know Audrey. So I said I’d ask you – will this be the tallest building in Ireland?

—  Dowcha Donie, Blackpool.

My Conor is interested in this kind of carry on. I said, will this be the tallest building in Ireland? 

He said no, but size isn’t everything. I think you can guess what I said next.