Grumpy old women....

What with the dire weather, Fereday and I find that many of our "summer" evenings are ending with a hot cuppa in front of the idiot box rather than a restful hour in the garden while the sun sets with an investigating rabbit providing the requisite arcadian touch to the scene.... Recently, we've been catching reruns of "Grumpy Old Women" on BBC2. For those of you unfamiliar with the format, its a bit like a televised gathering of your Mum and her friends around a bottle of gin - home truths and secrets are shared, recipes exchanged, children and husbands clucked about, and - as the bottom of the bottle approaches - the laughter moves from jolly and throaty to dangerously near the hysterical. As a child of eight or ten years old, you are invariably drawn to the outer edges of these gatherings,... harmless amusing tidbits of chatter reach out, drawing you in closer...., the maternal aura is soft and orange in hue, oozing safety and warmth,... then there's the inevitable whisper,... just loud enough for you to hear it, and familiar to you like a sheep's bleat is known to her lamb,... it's your mother drawing others into her confidence by sacrificing at the altar of female solidarity a deep, dark, embarassing family secret.... She has prepared you for watching "Apocalypse Now" and understanding deep at your own core what Kurtz means when he says, "The horror, the horror...." Usually, she's just told her friends about the time you put your pants on backwards, but our "embarassment sensors" are usually a little more sensitive the younger we are. By the time you are 25, you've put your pants on backwards so many times, that it's a regularly featured sub-plot when relating stories about the "MAD, BAD and DANGEROUS TO TAKE PART IN" weekends you had a Uni. Sometimes there's a plot twist where you actually put them on your head....Anyway, back to Grumpy Old Women (the show, not my Mum and her friends). It's caused me to introduce a new house rule - Fereday and I will no longer watch it in the same room. It's very disconcerting when you are nodding sagely to Jenny Eclair relating how she is awful to shop girls by being "overly polite" in order to make a point or Germaine Greer expressing her NEED to collect plastic carrier bags or Anne Widdecombe's obsession with glass jars or Dily Keene's obsession with deadheading the roses only to look over and see Fereday rocking back and forth, open-mouthed with that silent laughter (the stage which comes just before wetting yourself), and POINTING at me! POINTING!!! So, yes, it is a funny show.... and we both enjoy it.... and we both laugh at it.... just not at the same times. He'll be watching it downstairs in the lounge from now on.Moving on.... I had a lovely email from my Mum last week. She says her gardeners are so slow, they move like treacle. Apparently she was going to hit one of them with a spade, but managed to restrain herself. Trying to complement Fereday and make him feel even more a part of the family, I told him that my Mum would probably love to have his expertise and hard graft in the garden.I didn't tell him that, as he is part of the family, she probably would have hit him with spade if he wasn't working fast enough!

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