Grandma at Large

I don't claim to be a good parent. Far from it. I've made many mistakes and I'm still making them. In fact I'm now making mistakes as a grandparent. I recently tried to encourage my grandson Niall into developing a passion for stamp-collecting. I bought the poor boy a bag of mixed stamps from Australia. Under my dictatorship he spent one night of a recent weekend visit sorting the stamps into little piles. There was a Koala pile and a Kangaroo pile and a Famous Aussie Athletes pile. The next night he was encouraged to stick the stamps into a stamp album – I was quite strict about how exactly he stuck the stamps in.

The boy did as he was told, but I could see that he wanted to ask ‘Why? What is the purpose of this mindless, repetitive activity, Grandma?’ He politely kept his mouth shut, but when I suggested that he might have had enough, he jumped down from the table and was in the other room watching television before you could say ‘koala’. His sister, the five-year-old blonde bombshell, was already in there drinking a cocktail and watching Lolita on the television. (Before you report me to the NSPCC, let me say that the cocktails consisted of virulently coloured pop, ice, a drinking straw, a plastic palm tree, a monkey on a stick and a paper umbrella; and as for Lolita, I've seen more eroticism in Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.)

It was very late when we retired for the night. The bombshell wanted to sleep in my bed because (according to her) there is a ghost that lives on the upstairs landing of my house. I was too tired to give her a talk on the lack of statistical evidence as to the existence of paranormal phenomena.

In the morning, they took advantage of me and forced me to agree to take them to see the film Muppet Treasure Island. Later I watched them enthusiastically pour cereal into their bowls. I stood by with the milk and sugar bowl. ‘We do our own milk and sugar,’ they both said indignantly, so I left them to it. When I turned round again I saw that each child had a small mountain of sugar on the top of their cereal. Kilimanjaro sprang to mind. ‘How could you?’ I cried.

‘I just said not too much sugar, didn't I?’ ‘But it's not too much sugar for us,’ they said reasonably.

We took a taxi to the cinema. On the way, my grandson asked me in a loud voice several difficult questions about the solar system. The taxi driver laughed in a horrible, sneery way at my inept replies. He dropped us off at one of those dreary out-of-town leisure and entertainment complexes. As I looked around at the dull, low, red-brick buildings, I felt a deep loathing for the whole idea of formalized leisure and entertainment, and an urgent need to be at home reading a book. We went to a restaurant before the film started. But when I say restaurant, I want you to know that I use the term very loosely.

We stood obediently by a sign that said ‘Please wait to be seated’, but after a few minutes of being ignored by the teenage waiting staff, we got bored and made our own way to a table. We studied the menu. Half an hour later, after much changing of minds and heated discussion among the three of us, a youth arrived with a hand-held computer to take our order. He apologized cheerfully for the delay. ‘Nobody knows what they're doing, we're all nutters,’ he added, nodding towards his colleagues who were larking about round the serving hatch.

The bombshell's choice, a jacket potato with cheese, drew a shake of the youth's head. ‘Not after three o'clock,’ he said. I wondered for a moment if a new law had been passed while I'd been out of the country. Was there now a curfew on baked potatoes?

My grandson gave his drink order: ‘A chocolate milkshake, please, extra thick so that the straw stands up in it by itself.’ I was proud of his attention to detail, and sad for him when the drink eventually came and the straw needed help to sit down, let alone stand up. The food was unbelievably vile and I now understood why so much of it littered the restaurant floor.

When the youth came to take our almost full plates away, he asked with a gormless smile, ‘Everything all right?’ ‘No, it was horrible,’ I said pleasantly. Equally pleasantly he replied, ‘We're always busy on Sundays.’ Still pleasantly I said, ‘We won't be coming back on any day of the week.’

We filled up on popcorn and cola in the cinema. For the next ninety minutes I watched sourly as Kermit and Miss Piggy now cavorted about on Treasure Island, but I did turn every now and again to watch my grandchildren's lovely faces as they stared at the screen. I was happy to be there with them. And I vowed to myself that I would be a better grandmother. I would read them Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece, Treasure Island, when we got home. I would put the damn stamp album away, I would scare the ghost from the upstairs landing and, finally, I would put three potatoes in the oven to bake.