Tag Archives: family

Twisted Fire Starter

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Drama at my Uncle Stephen’s house this week after his neighbour set fire to his runner beans!

‘He’d been nurturing those beans for months,’ said my mother, recounting news of this terrible incident. ‘He’d grown them since they were little seedlings.’

It emerged that Uncle Stephen – quite the eccentric himself – was tucked up in bed when his pyromaniac neighbour decided to strike.

But having taken out his hearing aid, Uncle Stephen was oblivious to the fact his prized vegetables had gone up in flames.

‘I was in me jim jams snoring my snout off, when I heard lots of banging,’ recounted Uncle Stephen.

‘I peered out of the window and the whole street was full of people.

‘They all waved back at me!’

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This isn’t the first time Uncle Stephen’s crazy neighbour has started a fire. On five separate occasions, she’s burnt down her garage, her back wall, wheelie bins, compost bins, and a row of conifers.

With his runner beans and bins reduced to ash, Uncle Stephen now fears for his onions and Brussel sprouts.

‘She’s a tiny woman but she does a lot of damage,’ said Uncle Stephen.

‘And when you tell her off, she just shrugs. She’s barmy!’

Living next door to a pyromaniac is real worry, mused my mother.

‘Mrs Smith, the neighbour, wants to remove those other conifers,’ she advised. ‘They’re too tempting for a local arsonist.’  (see video clip below!)

‘You’d think her husband would come round and apologise,’ my father chipped in.

‘For emotional damage as much as anything else!’

‘Her husband’s ugly as sin,’ said Uncle Stephen. ‘He’s the ugliest man I’ve ever seen.’

Time And Tide Wait For No Man

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It’s the annual family excursion to Cornwall and we are back in our rented house opposite Dawn French’s gothic mansion. But alas! After last year’s ‘Dawn Watch‘, well-placed sources inform us that Dawn is currently on a world tour of her stand-up show.

Still, this does not stop my father training his binoculars on her house every five minutes – ever hopeful that the cheery comedienne might make an appearance.

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Luckily, there’s plenty of other fixations to keep the parents happy. Namely, my father’s new boat. I say ‘boat’ but really its a souped-up dinghy – the type of inflatable that one might use to get from one’s yacht into the harbour (for my father, the dinghy IS his yacht. See previous blog here).

In fact, the husband and I have been known to disembark the dinghy and wave vaguely at a fancy vessel in the distance, on the pretence that we’ve just popped ashore on our tender.

So, my father finally invested in a new dinghy this summer – after spending six months meticulously checking out potential boats in a shop in Garstang. On his fifth visit, he finally decided to commit to the purchase (much to the weary shopkeeper’s relief).

Let me introduce… Chrismick III (and a rather ungainly image of the husband’s backside).

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One might think that this would mean that original Chrismick I (purchased in 1973, gnawed by mice in the garage, and covered in puncture patches) and Chrismick II (purchased circa 1985, world’s most well-travelled dinghy, and part of many a childhood adventure) might have been resigned to the scrap heap.

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But, oh no, father is now smugly driving around with not one but TWO boats folded into the boot of his car, while Chrismick I languishes in the garage at home – per chance it might be called upon to sail the seas once again (in the unlikely event that the parents should ever require the use of three dinghies simultaneously).

As we cruise down the River Fowey on board Chrismick III, my mother likes to recite a series of her favourite stories: the time her and my father got stranded in Polperro when a drunk ferryman never returned to collect them; how the trees down the river used to be covered in white China clay from the huge ships that entered the estuary; the time my father ambitiously headed out to sea in Chrismick I, where ferocious waves lapped over the dinghy and she was forced to frantically bail out water with a milk carton.

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Another of the parents’ favourite hobby horses is tide times. My father has an unhealthy pre-occupation with the tide and studies his tide times book several times a day. When the tide is coming in, it’s possible to travel all the way up the Fowey estuary to Lerryn and Lostwithiel – as long as you’re in a small boat. (No problem there!)

My mother has a series of oft-used phrases to explain tide times, such as, ‘it was like someone had pulled the plug out!’ and, ‘it was nothing but mud flats!’. The parents occasionally like to run the gauntlet with the tide, claiming it’s all part of the fun. Nothing pleases my father more than chugging up to Lerryn, having a pint in the The Ship Inn and racing the tide back to Fowey again (following the route of the channel on his special Ordnance survey map)

On one such visit to Lerryn this week, my father was delighted to find it was an extra special Spring tide, meaning the car park was flooded and water was lapping rather worryingly at the front doors of some of the pretty cottages lining the river.

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There’s also a little bridge going into the village of Golant; at high tide the gap between the bottom of the bridge and the top of the water is pretty slim. Everyone has to duck on the count of three. It’s all part of the fun.

The Fowey Hotel is a slightly down-at-heel Victorian residence teetering grandly on the cliff above the estuary. I have fond memories of enjoying cream teas on the lawn there during those endless childhood summers where there was never a cloud in the sky.

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The parents first visited the Fowey Hotel in 1973, after a friend recommended it to them. In those pre-internet days, they simply drove down to Fowey, having no idea what it would be like.

They were so taken with the Fowey Hotel and the area in general, a love affair was born. They even sent my grandparents down the following summer.

But after driving 350 miles, my grandfather arrived to find the Fowey Hotel had closed down and all the furniture was being auctioned off!

Luckily, it re-opened sometime in the late 80s/ early 90s (with a much higher-price tag) and though in latter years my parents couldn’t afford to stay there, they would check-in to strange Keith’s B&B on the road above and visit the bar each evening for their supper.

Now, the parents love nothing more than having a drink in one of the large windows, as they reminisce and watch the boats come and go from the harbour below.

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As time has gone on, I’ve grown to love the Fowey Hotel too. Not least because of its air of slightly naff old world glamour, the rattling original period lift and framed yellowing letters from Kenneth Grahame to his son (he reportedly wrote Wind in the Willows at the hotel) in the lobby, and the seemingly never-ending stream of quirky guests.

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On leaving day today, my mother pushed the button on one final obsession: the need to eat up everything in the house.

As the daughter of a post-war disciplinarian, she simply can’t bring herself to throw any food away. Last year, she was left with a tub of margarine that hadn’t been fully consumed and she actually toyed with the idea of buying some bread just to ‘use it up’.

This morning, my mother managed to empty the fridge, save for a pint of milk: first, she forced my Uncle Stephen to drink a glass. She then drowned my father’s Weetabix in twice the normal amount, and stood hovering nearby, desperate to whip the bowl and spoon off him to wash it up.

Satisfied that the milk was gone, the cupboards were bare, and the ‘boats’ were safely packed back in the car boot, it was time to bid farewell to beloved Fowey for another year.

 

She’s Got A Ticket To Ride

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I took a trip back home on Thursday to spend the day with my mum. I miss hanging out with her and enjoying her everyday idiosyncrasies. She’s a lot of fun.

Isn’t it funny how you still refer to the family homestead as ‘home’? Even though I haven’t lived at my parents’ home for 16 years and they’ve since moved house from our childhood domicile, I still have their number programmed in my phone as ‘Home’. I suppose it always will be home to me.

Pulling up on the driveway, I ventured round to the back garden to find 67-year-old mother slide-tackling her grandson in a competitive game of football. When I said I was spending the day with my mum, I actually meant my mother and her little partner in crime aka my four-year-old nephew Max. As my mum loves to say, there’s no show without Punch.

‘You’re back!’ cried my mother, clutching hold of the garden bench to regain her breath. ‘We’re just having a quick kick around.’

My mother is the most virile 67-year-old you’ll meet. Having never learnt to drive (despite a top qualification in backseat driving), she still cycles everywhere on her trusty bicycle; her day is just one long list of energetic escapades.

In fact, nephew Max complained to my sister that after a day with my mother, he is absolutely exhausted. His favourite phrase at bed time is, ‘I’m so tired. Nanny’s worn me out – again!’

Inside the house, my father’s original inflatable boat ‘Chrismick’ was laid on the floor of the kitchen, sad and deflated.

‘Your dad’s been trying to pump it up but it keeps going down,’ said my mother. (I hope she was referring to the boat!). The parents seem oblivious to the fact that they bought the dinghy in 1976 and it would struggle to stay afloat in a swimming pool, let alone the sea. Even Max looked sceptical.

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Despite replacing it with Chrismick II in the early 90s (more on that here), my father seems unable to discard his original Chrismick (pictured in its heyday below), preferring to carry on adding more and more puncture patches, in the hope it will once again make a glorious return to sail the River Fowey (and stalk Dawn French).

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Over lunch, I made enquiries as to the welfare of my mother’s best friend Val. Every other Friday, Val and my mother head out to the local bingo hall (they’ve been meeting on alternate Fridays for the last 40 years). Unbelievably, they manage to play two hours of bingo without spending a penny.

I’ve never really got to the bottom of how this is possible but I think it is something to do with bingo hall offering free games of bingo, thinking that they will make money on drinks at the bar.

However, they’ve clearly underestimated my frugal mother, who doesn’t drink and gets by on glasses of tap water. Sometimes, they actually win at bingo so end up coming back in profit. This is my mum and Val having a boogie at my wedding (Val on left; mother on right).

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The trips to bingo have been a little few and far between recently after a terrible incident befell Val on her annual holiday to Benidorm. On the second day of the holiday, her husband Laurence took a tumble and took all the skin off his shin. He had to have a skin graft and was admitted to hospital for week.

During Val’s visit, a patient in the bed next to Laurence asked if Val would be so kind as to lift his suitcase down from the cupboard above. Unfortunately for Val, this particular patient appeared to be harbouring several slabs of concrete in his case. As Val struggled under its immense weight, her kind deed ended up giving her a hernia!

Poor Val was instantly admitted to hospital herself and found herself laid up in the hospital bed next to her husband. She went from hospital visitor to fellow patient within an hour. It was the holiday from hell.

Val now does all the driving in the family, my mother went on. But for inexplicable reasons, she is only able to turn left in the vehicle, being too fearful of right turns. This means that every journey she takes has to be meticulously planned so that the car only travels in an anti-clockwise direction.

In other news, the days of riding the Blackpool tram using a pensioner’s bus pass have come to a sad end. My mother, father and Uncle Stephen (pictured) used to regularly ride along the promenade for free, using their bus pass.

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They weren’t the only ones; scores of grey-haired pensioners would clamber aboard and ride up and down all day at tax payer’s expense. At the end stop, they were forced to alight the tram for 10 minutes for the driver to take a toilet break, where they would stand grumbling and shivering until the tram re-opened in order for them to repeat the journey all over again.

Naturally, Uncle Stephen drove up to Blackpool the day before the new ‘no bus passes’ rule came into force, and went up and down a few times on his own: one final free hurrah.

After watching one episode too many of Homes Under The Hammer, my family have recently invested in a bungalow and is in the process of doing it up. My mother was keen to show me how it was coming along.

We pulled up outside and my mother and Max tiptoed out of the car in an exaggerated fashion, like two pantomime characters.

‘What are you doing?’ I hissed.

‘Trying not to alert the neighbour that we’re here,’ said my mother in hushed tones. ‘She’s a bit S.I.M.P.L.E.’

Max nodded sagely, in agreement.

As I’ve mentioned before, the number of simple people my mother encounters on a weekly basis is disproportionately high.

‘What do you mean?’ I whispered back.

‘She not quite all there,’ said my mother, reciting another of her favourite phrases. ‘She keep asking me if I’m a farmer!”

Driving home from the bungalow, we hit rush hour traffic and I suddenly realised I was going to be late to meet my friend at Starbucks.

My mother foraged feverishly in her pocket. ‘Don’t worry,’ she cried triumphantly. ‘I’ve got my bus pass!’

‘Just drop us off here and they you can get to Stardrops!’ she continued, leaping out of the car.

‘Stardrops is what you use to clean the carpet with!’ I called out of the window. ‘It’s STARBUCKS!’

But she didn’t hear me; she was already marching purposefully in the direction of the bus stop, Max trotting obediently at her side.

With a free bus pass in her hand and an open road ahead, it was anybody’s guess where she might end up.

New Kid On The Blog No More

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Happy 1st Birthday to the blog.

That’s one whole year of whimsical witterings, narcissistic natterings, and very first world woes. Thank you for suffering through it.

Here’s what I’ve learnt about blogging:

1. People read the blog but never, ever comment.

I seriously thought no-one read my blog apart from two friends and my sister. Then, I kept meeting up with random people who would say, ‘I like your blog by the way’. Apparently, some of the husband’s work colleagues read it too (much to his alarm). When you’re writing to a largely silent audience, you would just never know.

So, without wanting to write a gushing Gwynnie-style Oscar speech, thank you to the small band of people who do like, share and comment on a frequent basis. It really is appreciated.

2. Friends live in fear of me blogging about them.

My friend’s husband – a loveable hybrid of a harried Hugh Grant and a bumbling Mr Bean – is a walking calamity, frequently getting himself into sticky situations and social awkwardities. As a result, he lives in a perpetual state of fear that I’m going to blog about him.

He should be worried.

I mean why wouldn’t I want to write about the time he leapt up from the seat in our local bar and got a lampshade stuck on his head?

Or the time he came bounding out of his house – arm outstretched – to meet The Husband for the first time, hollering: ‘Great to meet you Phil, I’ve heard SO much about you,’ (The husband’s name isn’t Phil).

Or just the other Saturday, when I was conversing with him in Caffe Nero, he absent-mindedly STOLE another man’s £10 note off the counter, popped it in his wallet and ambled off with his cappuccino.

3. People actually want to be written about.

Contrary to point 2, people do actually love a name check. My friend Anna (actress/ psychologist/ Jacqueline-of-all-trades) said, ‘If I’m not in the blog by Christmas, something’s gone awry.’

Shortly after, she clambered up on to the bar, started dancing, and then set her hair alight with a nearby candle.

Another zany friend Abi – owner of the boisterous dog, a yacht that she impulsive purchased in St Tropez, and many other loveable qualities (terrible tardiness not being one of them) – also longs for a starring role. Given the amount of material I have on her, I think she should be worried.

Here’s a taster: This Saturday, Abi was hungover, tired, and faced with the prospect of cooking dinner for five people. So she did the only sensible thing: throw money at the problem.

Following a trip to Marks and Spencer’s – in which she somehow managed to part with £106 – she threw all of her vacuum-packed purchases into ceramic pots to give it a homemade feel, and passed it off to her dinner guests as her own three-course culinary concoction.

4. The blog evolves over time.

My Family And Other Oddities (inspired by Gerald Durrell’s famous novel of a similar name) began as a little way of charting my parents’ quirks and foibles, which I found so endearing I believed they deserved a platform of their own.

Over time, this kind of progressed to little stories about other eccentricities, including our nosy neighbours, strangers in the coffee shop, yours truly, and, of course, the long-suffering husband – poking fun at our largely middle class lifestyles.

Last week, I made an impulsive decision to change the name of my blog. I happened to be ordering my usual latte, when One Shot Extra Hot sprang to mind.

On a whim, I emailed the helpful people at WordPress and before I could say one-shot-extra-hot-no-foam-soya latte, they’d transferred the whole site to its frothy new name.

Things seemed to be going well until I was faced by a host of technical issues: lots of images hadn’t made it across in the transfer; my tiny fan base (Hi Ted!) couldn’t get the link to the latest post via their email; and all my old links were broken.

Things might not have been so bad, had I not have met up with friends Anna and Sam that very evening, who took one look at my new blog name and said curiously:

‘One’s Hot, Extra Hot?!’ (note the apostrophe).

Yep, depending on how you viewed my new URL oneshotextrahot, it could be read as either:

a: the way the author orders her coffee.

or

b: a posh mentalist proclaiming how ‘hot’ she is/ the Queen having a hot flush.

I hastily emailed WordPress back, who managed to switch it all back again (thank god!). My Family And Other Oddities is currently back in business.

I’m still thinking of new names… Cheese At Fourpence (a proper Lancashire saying) is a favourite. It means to be left standing awkwardly, as in ‘I felt like cheese at fourpence’. Lancashire folk actually do say it as well (my mother included). I like it.

5. People don’t like what you write.

Blogging about everyday stuff and escapades of your nearest and dearest invariably leads to upsetting the odd friend or two. I’m still living in fear of our busybody neighbours-at-large SuDick getting wind of my posts.

And who could forget Barry Scott the man who turned his shower power spray on me? ‘I’ve never read such vacuous, self-indulgent nonsense in all my life,’ he wrote.

I thought I was a pithy Carrie Bradshaw but it turns out I’m more of a loathsome Liz Jones.

I had a little read back through my posts. Old Cillit Bang Barry has got a point. The blog is frivolous, vainglorious and any other self-seeking synonym you want to throw my way.

But I hope a healthy dollop of self-irony still makes it through.

To quote another of my mother’s favourite phrases: you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

I suppose if you don’t like what I write, there is a simple solution: just don’t read it.

(But please let me know if you do!)

A Pearly White Christmas

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I have a small confession to make: in the last two years I have spent £750 on toothbrushes. Please don’t be alarmed. At the time, it seemed perfectly rational. But now, in the cold light of day, I can see how things got a little out of hand.

My poison pen nemesis Barry Scott already think I’m the most frivolous and vacuous person in blogosphere. And when he reads this latest spell of frivolity, he’s going to have a field day.

My addiction to toothbrushes began innocently enough. In November 2011, my sister texted me to say that she’d like an electric toothbrush for Christmas. This might seem strange in itself but if you knew my family, this is the kind of thing we buy each other (see My Parents… and the Christmas Wishlist).

Unable to simply hop on Amazon and click ‘buy’ at the first brush I saw, I immediately set about researching the best electric toothbrush. It’s quite normal for me to spend up to three weeks reading reviews and researching voraciously. At the end of this research spell, I might be finally ready to commit to the purchase – but then spend the week ahead of its delivery racked with anxiety that I might have Bought The Wrong Thing.

In the case of the toothbrush, it was fairly clear from the onset that there was only one contender to the crown of Best Brush In The Business.

Let me introduce you to… Philips Diamond Clean – aka The Daddy of Dentistry.

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Beautiful, isn’t it? I’m not quite sure which of its many merits I should mention first: its supreme sonic cleaning action with five different settings from whitening to polishing; the glass it sits in which automatically charges it; or the fact that you can charge it up through your laptop when on the move.

I was so taken with the reviews that I decided to buy myself one as well as my sister.

And then I bought my dad one.

And then – in a moment of extreme madness and possibly because it sprang up in my inbox as part of a £95 flash Amazon sale – I bought my father-in-law one too!

The Husband came home, took one look at the credit card bill, and had to sit me down for ‘a chat’.

It wasn’t normal behaviour, he said, for me to be spending £100 – £150 on toothbrushes for members of his extended family.

The husband likened me to a deranged milky bar kid, handing out over-priced electric toothbrushes to distant aunts like toffees.

He couldn’t stay cross for long though because awaiting him in the bathroom was his own shiny new Diamond Clean toothbrush: a limited edition black bad boy – matt finish and with a sleek black carry case; basically, the Ferrari of the toothbrush world.

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Have you ever seen anything quite like it? I haven’t.

After one use, the husband said he couldn’t believe he had ever attempted to brush his teeth with anything else. And while he didn’t exactly endorse spending half of my monthly salary on top-dollar toothbrushes, he grudgingly admitted that he could certainly see its benefits.

As for the father-in-law, I’m not sure whether he even uses his brush. He did look a bit perplexed when he unwrapped his Christmas present last year. When I asked how things were going in the dental department, he muttered something about the brush being too tickly for his teeth. Too tickly?!

Last time I visited the in-laws, I peeked in their bathroom and it was nowhere to be seen. Sometimes I lie awake at night worrying that it’s lying abandoned in a dusty cupboard somewhere and that his teeth will never know what they’re missing.

I went to the dentist the other week. He took a peek in my mouth and, as usual, declared my teeth the best set of pearlies he’d seen in a long time.

I’m strangely proud of the fact that I have reached the ripe old age of 30-something without a single filling, despite my twice-weekly Haribo gorge in petrol stations across Leeds.

I thought I should let the dentist in on the secret, given he’s in the trade and all that.

‘It’s all thanks to the Philips Diamond Clean brush,’ I said. ‘Currently retailing on Amazon for a bargainous £99, RRP £250.’

He looked completely non-plusssed by this news.

I paid my usual £18 fee and trotted off, relishing the fact that I wouldn’t need a check-up again for another year.

The Barry Scotts of this world might scorn my toothbrush splurge.

But when I think of what my teeth could be costing me, £150 seems almost a bargain.

My Mother-In-Law… and the Towel Obsession

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Rule no 1 of the blog: Never write about the mother-in-law.

Rule no 2: If you are thinking about writing about the mother-in-law, refer to rule no 1.

Rule no 3: If you really are hellbent on writing about the mother-in-law, make it light-hearted and humorous, and on no account mention behaviours that could be deemed obsessive or eccentric…

I think my mother-in-law has developed an obsession with towels.

I’ve been observing her growing abundance of towels for some years now. But it was only on a recent visit to the in-law’s house that the full scale of her towel-hoarding frenzy was revealed.

As I plonked my weekend bag down in the spare room, the mother-in-law said, ‘I’ve left some towels out for you… but if you need any more, there’s plenty in the spare bathroom.’

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This comment in itself was slightly concerning. There were already four towels on the bed – beautifully matched to the decor. Just how many towels did she think we’d get through in two nights?

In the en-suite, there was another pile of colour-coordinated towels neatly stacked.

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Out of curiosity, I headed to the main bathroom to see the state of play. I flung the large cupboard doors open to reveal…

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… many, many more spare towels – in every possible colour you can imagine.

It was a petsetaphobic’s worst nightmare (that’s someone with a deep-seated fear of towels btw).

Glancing around, I spotted even more towels, nestling in neat piles.

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In total, there were 37 spare towels at my disposal.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my mother-in-law collects towels like one might collect stamps or thimbles.

But I’m not sure how you would wean yourself off a fixation with towels. Cut down on the trips to Dunelm Mill? Steer clear of the towel aisle in old Johnny Lewis? Wean oneself off gradually with say the purchase of a large bath sheet, rather than a whole ‘nest’ (incidentally, who ever really wants a ‘nest’ of towels? There’s always at least two towels in there of an indeterminable size – too small to dry one’s body and too big to pass off as a hand towel.)

As far as addictions go, I think my mother-in-law’s love of towels (petsetaphilia?) is pretty harmless.

At my parents’ house, you’re lucky if you get handed a bobbly old towel, which is usually the size of a postage stamp and as stiff as cardboard (owing to the fact that they don’t believe in costly tumble dryers).

So who I am to turn down a fluffy towel or two – or even 37?

Little Lord Fauntelroy… Comes To Stay

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It’s half-term and my three-year-old nephew Max is coming to stay. Max is the apple of my eye but I still like to think that I’m a firm aunty – able to say ‘no’, when he reaches for a gingerbread man in Caffe Nero.

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The Husband, on the other hand, is a soft touch, and it took Max all of about two minutes to realise this. It’s no longer, ‘Aunty Katy, can I have a gingerbread man before lunch?‘

Oh no, he heads straight to Uncle Pushover and minutes later, re-appears, grinning like the cat that got the cream – tell-tale crumbs scattered around his mouth.

I left The Husband in charge of getting Max dressed for the morning and he managed to put his shoes on the wrong way round (Max’s shoes that is, not his own – although that isn’t beyond the realms of possibility either).

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Having Max to stay is a lot of fun. From the minute he wakes up at 6am to the minute he goes to bed, his conversation is one long series of zany questions.

‘Why do dogs have bones in their body?’

‘Can submarines live in reservoirs?’

‘What would happen if Buzz Lightyear went all the way through space and kept on going?’

‘Where do you buy your multi-grain bread from?’

‘Have all the apartments got taps like your kitchen tap?’

He also has a strange condition called Barry Scott Tourette’s – where he is prone to suddenly shouting out ‘Barry Scott’ at random, usually in a public setting. Given my recent dealings with the hate-mailing Barry Scott impersonator, the irony of this does not escape me.

My sister had drilled it into me that Max needed to go to the toilet just before he goes to bed, in order to avoid to any nighttime accidents.

‘Now, you need to go to the toilet before bed,’ I said, having overseen bath-time, pyjama-dressing and teeth-brushing.

‘I’ve tried,’ he said. ‘But nothing would come out.’

‘Can you try again?’ I pleaded, having visions of my pocket-sprung Habitat mattress being stained for ever.

‘Okay, Katy,’ he sighed, with an air of world-weariness.

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That night, there was a wail at 1am.

‘Aunty Katyyyyyyy!’

Alarmed, I scurried down the corridor. ‘What’s wrong?!’

‘I can’t see Big Ted,’ he said. Big Ted is a big teddy bear that I’ve had since I was 2 years old. He was safely ensconced under the sheets next to Max (you can see his head in the picture).

‘He’s right next to you!’ I said.

Two hours later, and there was another wail. I hared down the corridor like a scullery maid.

‘I’d like some freshly-squeezed orange juice,’ he said.

I didn’t have any oranges and I didn’t have a juicer. I fetched him some water instead.

4am. Another wail. Back down the corridor I went.

‘What is it now?!’ I said.

‘I need my curls flattening,’ said Max, patting his hair.

Curls flattening? Freshly squeezed orange juice? This was like dealing with Little Lord Fauntleroy.

The next afternoon, Max said he wanted a tuna sandwich for lunch. We bought him a tuna sandwich but it wasn’t up to Fauntleroy’s exacting standards. Apparently it had cucumbers in: slimy, green things that his delicate palate just couldn’t contend with.

‘Can’t you just pick them out?’ hissed the husband.

Driving frantically around Leeds, looking for another tuna sandwich (sans cucumber), it slowly dawned on me that far from being the firm but fun aunty, I had lost all control.

Later, I phoned my sister to tell her of Fauntleroy’s demands.

She was flabbergasted.

‘He’s running rings round you,’ she said. ‘You need to GET FIRM.’

His lordship arrives tomorrow and this time I’m determined. There’ll be no flattening of curls in the night; no thoughts of feverishly juicing ripe Valencian oranges in the early hours, and certainly no careful removal of cucumber from Fauntleroy’s dolphin-friendly tuna steak sandwiches.

He’ll be lucky if he gets a bowl of gruel before being parceled off to bed early.

You might wonder how I’m going to resist these angelic blue eyes.

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But NO-MESS aunty’s back in town. And this time, she’s getting tough.

My Parents… and the Christmas Wish List

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My phone beeps. It’s a text from the parents: ‘Please can you text us your xmas present lists.’

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Every October, my mother requests a christmas present list from me. If I don’t comply, she will keep texting every week until I give in and text back: ‘I don’t know – just get me a book!’. It’s stressful trying to come up with gifts they can buy for me.

The Christmas Present List works both ways. The parents are not keen on receiving random presents for birthdays and Christmases – for fear of ‘unwanted tat’ taking over their home. So, every year, they present family members with a wish list, that usually contains a series of strangely-practical gifts.

This was my mother’s recent Christmas present list:

  • Prestige 24cm frying pan. Argos catologue no. 861/7134
  • Egg Poachers: Lakeland catalogue no. 12116
  • Nivea face cream
  • Hand cream (Body Shop)
  • Slippers (leather)

The funniest part of this long-held family tradition is that once you’ve sourced the items off the present list, wrapped them up and popped them under the Christmas tree, my mother pretends that she has no idea what she’s getting at all.

As the presents are passed to her, she shakes the box with a convincingly quizzical expression, before feigning mock shock when she finally unwraps her egg poachers: ‘Egg poachers?! My goodness – just what I wanted!’

Despite the parents’ detailed present list, there’s still the occasional surprise come Christmas Day. Uncle Stephen (my mother’s brother) went ‘off list’ last Christmas and splashed out on one of the strangest gifts for my mother yet: a blood pressure monitor (him and my mother are a little obsessed with their cholesteral and blood pressure).

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No sooner was it unwrapped, than the whole family were strapping it onto their arms, in a strangely competitive game of ‘My blood pressure’s lower than yours’.

For my birthday in August, I was forced to provide my own present list. In the end, I asked the parents to get me an ‘Jawbone UP band’ (for more details on this device see Curse of the Cankles – my mother is completely bamboozled by its purpose), and from the sister, I requested a new hairdryer.

Being an obsessive control freak, it didn’t want just any old hairdryer. I wanted a Parlux Ionic 3200, which I had decided on after several hours of reading reviews. I even sent my sister the Amazon link to make things as easy as possible.

I suppose that if was feeling truly helpful, I could just have purchased the presents myself, cutting them out of the equation altogether, and then just getting my sister and the parents to give me the cold hard cash.

But that would mean I wouldn’t be able to slowly unwrap each present with a well-practised look of pseudo-intrigue on my face, and say, ‘Hmm, I wonder what on earth this could be…’

My Parents… and the World Wide Web

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Some time ago, my parents heard about something called the World Wide Web and decided that they might want to become involved in it. They contacted ‘a nice man from the church parish magazine’, who came round to the house and got them up and running with the internet, choosing the trusty Post Office as their internet provider.

I didn’t even know that the Post Office did internet connections. But it does, apparently. And my mother dutifully cycles there each month to pay the bill in person.

To say my parents haven’t quite got to grips with the digital age would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Only the other week, my mother asked me, ‘What is the difference between eBay and email?’.

My mother once tried to move the cursor using the laptop’s touch pad and five minutes later, she had only just made it half way across the screen. She hasn’t been near the computer since.

My father is a little more advanced. He has an email account that he checks roughly every six months. I think he once looked at our house on Google Earth. And there’s been rumours of him attempting a Google search on Bob Dylan.

The other week, I visited them for the night and foolishly mooted the prospect of using the internet. My mother shook her head nervously and my father looked baffled. After a bit of a conflab, my father appeared with his dusty laptop, switched it on and told me that it might take ‘a little while’ to load up.

45 minutes later, having watched Coronation Street and drunk two cups of coffee, my father returned and peered curiously at the laptop. It was STILL loading up. He appeared to think this was perfectly normal.

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‘What on earth is it doing?’ I wailed.

‘It’s okay,’ said my father. ‘We’ve got the hourglass. Something must be doing… something.’

‘This isn’t normal Dad,’ I said, clicking at the start-up menu furiously. ‘There is something SERIOUSLY WRONG with it!’

My father stared at the desktop.

‘What is a P…D…F?’ he said.

I couldn’t for the life of me think how to explain what a PDF was.

‘I don’t have the energy for this, Dad,’ I said. ‘I am LOSING THE WILL TO LIVE.’

‘Well, what does P.D.F stand for?’

‘It’s complicated,’ I replied.

We both sat there for another 10 minutes. My father occasionally peered suspiciously at the screen.

All of sudden, a plethora of blank Internet Explorer screens sprang up, with the message ‘Not Responding’.

‘Aha!’ cried my father, triumphantly. ‘It’s working!’

‘But why are there 10 blank screens?’ I said.

‘It’s because you’ve been impatient,’ said my father. ‘I told you not to jab at the keys!’

‘Impatient?! It’s been an HOUR!’

There was still no sign of getting onto the internet. Alarm bells should have rung when they first mentioned the Post Office.

‘Right, that’s it!’ I said, leaping up. ‘I’m sorting this out once and for all – I’m phoning Sky in the morning.’

The parents looked utterly terrified.

‘Please don’t,’ my mother begged. ‘They’ll make us set us set up one of those direct debit things and we only want to pay in cash.’

(The parents don’t believe in banks, cash cards or direct debits, preferring to store their life savings in the local building society – or, for all I know, under their mattress. See: Cash Is King)

The next morning, I drove back to Leeds and dropped the ailing laptop off at the local computer repair shop. An hour later, they phoned to confirm the worst.

I rang my father.

‘It’s bad news,’ I said. ‘The laptop has a serious hard drive failure.’

‘A… hard… drive??’ said my father, in a bewildered tone.

‘What on earth is one of those?’

Great Uncle Keith… and the Scotland Road Trip

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I’m not sure quite how it happened but I found myself on a 600-mile road trip to the far recesses of Scotland with a toothless 85-year-old in my passenger seat.

We hadn’t seen my Great Uncle Keith for 25 years so it was a bit of shock when the phone rang at my parents’ house and a feeble voice rattled down the line, saying, ‘Hello, It’s Keithhhh.’

Great Uncle Keith, my father’s uncle, had slipped off the radar some time in the early 90s. He met a ‘lady friend’ called Valerie, who had seemingly wanted him all to himself and as a result, he had severed ties with the family.

A quarter of a century on, and with grasping Valerie having passed away, Great Uncle Keith had decided to re-connect with my father, his long-forgotten nephew – from all of 25 miles away in Manchester.

My father is an only child but his father George (now dead) had two other brothers – the aforementioned Keith, and Jack, who married Jill (!) and moved away to Scotland to lead a hardy life of hiking and extreme outdoor pursuits.

We hadn’t seen Jack and Jill for years either but would occasionally receive a postcard from them, usually from far-flung places like the Himalayas, accompanied by messages such as, ‘Did a steady 30-mile hike yesterday; tomorrow tackling Everest…’ or, ‘On the Inca Trail. 40 degrees. Terrain easy.’

Given that Keith hadn’t seen his brother Jack for many years either, I rather generously offered to drive him up there for a Scotland for a family reunion. My parents, never ones to miss out on an adventure, were to accompany us on the trip also, in order the provide some light relief or drive me to despair, depending on how you looked at it.

The first shock was the kind of surprise that you can only get when you haven’t seen someone for 25 years. Far from being the sprightly piano-playing uncle that my father fondly remembered, Keith was now a dithery old man, with only a few silver wisps of hair and, more worryingly, a distinct lack of teeth. He was to stay at my parents for the night before we embarked on the Great Road Trip to Garelochhead.

Somehow, at 2am in the morning, he managed to bring a whole glass shelf crashing down in the bathroom, causing my father to nearly have a heart attack and my mother to get terribly flustered indeed and make statements such as, ‘What on earth was he doing, CLATTERING around in the dead of night?!”

Morning came and the great road trip had begun. I was behind the wheel, with toothless Great Uncle Keith safely ensconced in the passenger seat. My mother was giving a running commentary of the scenery, while my father sat studying one of his Ordnance Survey maps. Four hours later, with a short lunch break (in which gummy Keith attempted to eat a sandwich like a gurning Les Dawson), we arrived at Jack and Jill’s little house on the edge of Loch Lomond.

I vaguely recall Jill from my childhood. She was rail thin, terribly fit and as sharp as glass. A retired headmistress through and through, she didn’t suffer fools gladly.

Jack was much more affable, very quiet and extremely fit also. Now 89, he was – unbelievably – still running up the fells and back before breakfast.

As the car pulled up, Jill waved a spindly arm. And the first thing she said as she greeted her long-lost brother-in-law was, ‘My goodness Keith, where on earth are your TEETH?’

It was a question that all of us were itching to know the answer to. We never did really get to the bottom of it.

She cast a shrewd eye over all of us and turned her attention to my father, who was visibly attempting to hold his stomach in.

‘And Michael,’ she went on. ‘Haven’t you put on weight?!’

Somewhat ironically, given her obsession with how porky we’d all become, she emerged from the kitchen with a mountain of cheese scones and insisted that we all tuck in immediately.

Jack, who had been out doing a spot of windsurfing on the loch and also appeared to have grown a handle bar moustache, arrived shortly after, and they both proceeded to regale us with tales of Pensioners Do Extreme Pursuits.

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Two hours later and having been force-fed several more cheese scones, the parents and I began to make noises about leaving for Glasgow – thankful that we’d had the foresight to book into our own hotel – and telling Great Uncle Keith that we would return to collect him in 48 hours. He looked petrified.

Driving back two days later, Keith was already waiting on the path with his battered suitcase. He had never looked so pleased to see us. As we bundled him into the car, Jill peered in and said, ‘Now Keith, remember what I said. Straight to the dentist as soon as you get back. And then you must consult a dietician immediately.’

Privately, I thought the chances of Keith, who only ever ventured as far as the corner shop, consulting a dietician were extremely slim (excuse the pun) but I didn’t dare voice this under Jill’s steely gaze.

‘No Teeth’ Keith just smiled compliantly, showing his gums.

On the journey back, Keith told us that Jack and Jill had marched him several miles up a hill – not to fetch a pail of water – but to explore the former residence of Glasgow-born designer Charles Macintosh (famed for those silly chairs with an elongated back). Reaching the summit, they found that the house had yet to open for the day.

‘Never mind,’ they said. ‘We’ll just walk several miles into town for lunch and come back in a couple of hours.’

On the verge of collapse, puffing Keith had to plead not to be taken back up the hill, at which point Jill expressed her horror at how unfit he had become.

Overall, he’d enjoyed his mini-break, Keith concluded. But he was glad to be getting home.

‘Perhaps you’re getting a bit long in the tooth for these trips away,’ my father quipped.