On my head is a very small bowler hat.

No, my fellow inebriates, my parents wouldn’t just buy me a hat. The hat in question came perched atop a long-awaited treasure—a product that’s been absent from BC Liquor Stores for over a year and has finally been restored to its rightful shelf thanks to the heroic efforts of Business Development Manager Julia Gale.

If you’re new to this blog, you can’t possibly know what an odyssey the wait for Broker’s Gin has been. Why did BCLS cease to stock Broker’s? We’ll never know, but the bureaucracy involved in reinstating it seemed, at times, Sisyphean. Oh, MFI, if you could only know the suspense, the suffering, the torture! The holdout for Broker’s here at LBHQ! The resultant desolation and uncomfortable sobriety followed by bludgeoning despair when the product failed to reappear! The debauched embrace of at least six other brands of gin, all drowning the sorrow of one who’s had one’s heart broken repeatedly—a descent that spiraled into multiple gin shootouts, documented and otherwise, until finally last year’s hot weather ended, at which point my parents declared “gin season over” and we consoled ourselves with nothing but beer, wine, rye, Scotch, Canadian Cream, and whisky balls. OMG, MFI, I went through all five Kübler-Ross stages of grief over Broker’s Gin, plus a couple of others (fixation on thongs, washing-machine paranoia, Scarybear-provoked apocalypticity, stalking Julia Gale beyond ordinary levels). And FINALLY the wait has ended.

But you never get a totally happy ending at LBHQ. Just ask Dolly. According to my evil parents, it is still not warm enough. They don’t feel like a gin & tonic yet. And here I thought they were spiraling downward with me into seasonal indiscriminateness. Apparently not.

So I will update you when we crack that bottle, which is, of course, foiling my thumbless little paws. For now.