Since I’ve turned about 60, I don’t have the possessive anxieties that I used to have about objects. When one of my grandson breaks some precious ornament, secretly I’m rather relieved. Another bit of baggage (as one’s past is now known) thrown into the bin.
But I can’t go as far as some old friends of mine who have just moved into a new house. They have pared everything down to white-washed walls, a few chairs and a couple of architectural magazines on a coffee table. No books, no pictures stacked against the wall waiting to be re-hung, re-strung or repaired, no funny little plaster orchestras picked up in India in 1975, no photograph albums. No books.
Continue reading ‘Grannie Annexe - September 2008′
One grannie I know has got the folding travelling cot that she bought when her baby grandson came to stay, still up in the spare room six years later. The reason? She is, simply, unable to undo it. The instructions have long been lost, and although every so often she goes up to wrestle with it, and has, at least, been able to fold up three of the sides, the fourth remains obstinately rigid.
There are practically no disadvantages to being a grannie, as far as I’m concerned – expect the obvious which is the fact that, however much you love them, small children are totally knackering. (Is patience actually a tiring emotion? Or is patience itself not a moral virtue but actually a sign of total exhaustion?) I’m told that grandchildren are the reward you get for not killing your children and I’m certainly not one who only loves mine so much because I can hand them back at the end of the day.
Continue reading ‘Grannie Annexe - August 2008′