Past Chats

Son’s hair still looks like a bird nest and he’s just returned from a couple of days with the grandparents:

ME: Nice time? What did you do?

SON: Oh, they took me for my dinner at Morrisons cafe. It was amazing. I had a bacon butty with about 6 slices of bacon on it and I said that it was a normal amount of bacon and not like the 1 slice my mum puts on my butties because she takes after Grandad.

ME: Oi!

SON: Yeah, I think Grandad sulked too.

ME: Oh dear.

SON: Well, I let him beat me at dominoes, to cheer him up.

ME: Nice one, I suppose. Do anything else?

SON: Yeah, I had to go shopping with them for a new washing machine as the old one broke.

ME: Wow.

SON: Yeah. It was so exciting that I started hyperventilating and Grandma had to revive me with a quick slap and a pack of Wet Ones.

ME: Right.

SON: So, I helped her with the washing when the new machine arrived. But Grandma has very unsustainable pegs, you know.

ME: Yeah?

SON: Yeah, but they’re not single use plastic so they’re probably okay. Anyway, it’s not like the old days when you were little, when the world was in black and white and when gypsies and travellers used to come round selling wooden pegs from door to door.

ME: Yeah – they did! And the Rag and Bone man sold them too. He had a horse and cart. You’d hear them clopping down the street, shouting out to you.

SON: Was he the one who shouted “Bring out your dead!”

ME: No. That was the bubonic plaque. Before my time.

SON: Hey, that sign that Grandad has on the front door doesn’t work, y’know.

ME: ‘Hawkers – Do Not Incur My Wrath’?

SON: Yeah, he says whenever the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons ignore it and know, he just tells them everyone in the house is Muslim and they immediately go away.

ME: For an athiest he’s very keen to claim a faith when put under sales pressure.

SON: Well, I think that Grandad is of the mind that an Englishman’s home is his castle and if you’re going to invade peoples’ privacy, you should at least be prepared to hear that the other side are winning.

ME: I think that you’re spending too much time with him. You’re making religious differentials sound like a Stalybridge Celtic versus Hyde United match.

SON: I hope I’m as grumpily weird as my grandad when I’m old. But with more hair. Obviously.

ME: You need to stop pointing out peoples’ hair loss. It’s tempting fate.

SON: Actually, it wouldn’t be so bad. You wouldn’t get folk moaning at you to go for a haircut all of the time.