Just a Family Affair Read Online Free PDF

have a fucking clue about business; he wouldn’t know a strategic alliance or an early adopter if he fell over it. Patrick might not be Alan Sugar, but he read the trade papers and surfed the internet religiously to see what their competitors were doing. Mickey didn’t even have an email address, and only just about knew how to go online. Some might think it was an affectation, a pretentious attempt to appear a Luddite, but Patrick knew it was pure laziness. If Mickey didn’t have an email address, then he didn’t have to deal with anything.
    Patrick sighed. Sometimes he thought he was a lucky sod. After all, not everyone was handed the chance to go into the family business. And a brewery was slightly glamorous and romantic. Everyone liked a drink, after all, and there was a history to Honeycote Ales that filled him with a sense of pride. He adored the old buildings, whose very bricks and floor-boards were suffused with the sweat of his forebears. It was one of the reasons why he was so desperately keen to hang on to the brewery and not see it slip out of the Liddiard family. It would be a crime against their heritage. People like them had a responsibility to the nation. If they didn’t fight tooth and nail to hold on to their history, the whole country would become homogenized, dominated by a handful of brand names, all the character wiped out and replaced with wipe-clean, EECCOMPLIANT machinery.
    At other times, however, Patrick wished fervently he’d never been handed this legacy, or had chosen to walk away from it when he’d left school, when he’d been free to make a choice. But a lack of academic qualifications had left him with few realistic alternatives, and now he was too firmly entrenched. He was emotionally attached, as well as financially beholden. And he had a genuine interest. He loved the pubs, their place in local society, the fact that everyone from the merest farmhand to the grandest landowner for miles around rubbed shoulders at the bar and drank thirstily from their pumps. He’d learnt a lot in the past four years, once he’d started taking his position seriously and hadn’t just spent his time drinking and womanizing.
    Now Patrick had a very clear vision of where Honeycote Ales should be headed. But he couldn’t do it without Keith. If Keith was disillusioned, if he had fallen out of love with Honeycote Ales - which he had every right to do, for he wasn’t a Liddiard and owed them no loyalty - then Patrick had to take steps to convince him to stay.
    If he married Mandy, then Keith would stay loyal to the brewery to protect his daughter’s interests. And if there was a baby too . . .
     
    Patrick emerged from the supermarket, blinking in the unexpectedly bright sunshine, swinging the carrier bag containing not just the nappies but a huge box of Belgian chocolates, a tub of Maltesers for the kids, a bottle of Bollinger - it was his dad’s birthday, after all, so they needed a toast - and a copy of the Eagles’ Greatest Hits. One of Mickey’s party tricks when drunk was a heartfelt rendition of ‘Hotel California’ but Patrick knew the cassette he’d had since the dawn of time was worn out from incessant rewinding. Now Lucy had put a state-of-the-art integrated sound system into the kitchen, they were gradually replacing all their favourite cassettes with CDs.
    The new kitchen was a further cause of anxiety for Patrick. Lucy’s extravagance was evidence that Mickey hadn’t even hinted to her that times were hard. Lucy wasn’t a spendthrift, but she’d thrown herself wholeheartedly into the project and hadn’t held back at all. Patrick knew that some of the invoices for materials and work still hadn’t been paid, and were sitting in the in-tray at the brewery office. Lucy would be horrified if she knew.
    Never mind, he thought. He wasn’t going to worry about unpaid bills today. He had a far more interesting item on his agenda.
    It was the first day to remotely resemble spring, so