Always just used to wave at the house when we left it to pretend she didn’t live there and she was visiting someone every time…to foil burglars.
My nana would leave the radio on for this exact reason. As if they could hear it from outside!
Genius woman
ooh yeah my gran also always used to fall asleep to the world service on radio 4. she’d listen to it alllll the time.
Also drawing, I said draw-ring
She was very upper middle class and did not like people saying things wrong.
At my family hen do, my mum did advice for the bride cards and my nan’s one was interesting.
It had prompts like “never…” and you’re supposed to put “go to bed angry” and she wrote “talk to your friends” ok Nan I’ll ditch them all when I get married
As a teenage goth I had some of those shag bands but in black barbed wire. My nan clocked them and went “TAKE THEM OFF, YOU’LL BE ARRESTED!”
pillar of calm reason, she was. god love her.
ah shagbands
‘Don’t eat food in the street, people will think you’re a scruff’.
these days if you go out in your barbed wire shag bands, they’ll throw you in jail
Is she secretly Brian Blessed and she meant YOU YELL AT THEM INSTEAD?
someone gave me a shagband once, I thought it was so romantic
for some interminable reason i am now singing this thread title to the tune of riders on the storm
Put a coat on or you’ll catch cold
Don’t go to Belfast or the IRA will blow you up
Standard nan stuff tbh.
Other favourite nan meltdowns
the time she heard someone use the hand dryer in the loos and thought it was the sirens announcing the shops were closing(?!) and we had to pack up and go home (it was about 1pm)
The time we accidentally leant her wheelchair cushion against the stairlift wall button so she was just going up and down
When she went off on one about it raining outside a shop in Lakeside but it was just the floor being very shiny
Any time we tried to recite a telephone number she needed
Was always giving me money because “there’ll be no pennies from heaven” i.e. she would be dead within the week
Honestly I think I nearly passed out laughing, fucking hell
I don’t remember any warnings, but I did used to get asked, “Are you sure you’ve had enough to eat?” several times a day when I used to visit.
Later on when she lost her other leg, we got an actual lift installed that took her from her living room up to her bedroom. About a week after it was installed my mum got a call from my uncle:
“wanna hear something funny? The lift’s broken down with mum stuck in it.”
“OH GOD, is she alright?”
“Yeah, she can see right the way down to the end of the road”
Oh god I just remembered some dating advice. I was telling her about a dress I was getting and i said “it shows off my back” and she went “boys don’t wanna see your bloody back, they wanna see your front”