Random reminder

Press, 2 September 1983, Page 22

Random reminder

WINSOME, LOATHESOME

Grandparents are popularly supposed to be geriatric, but while it is true that we shall all in the end be wheel-chair-bound if we live long enough, it is not true that you have to be old to be a grandparent. One Waltham woman felt young enough and angry enough the other day to chase her teen-age grandchildren, throwing carrots. She is pleased to have clobbered them both. One teen-ager collected half a kilo of flying Umbelliferae in the middle of the back — hardly an honourable wound — and the other was lucky to duck as a missile dashed his glasses — not his head — against the concrete. That will teach them to tease their poor old Gran. Grandma is a eco-freak. She is one of those intensely annoying persons who would rather be well-read than dead. She gave up using foot X-ray machines in shoe shops while the rest of us were still queuing up to see our toe-bones wriggle. She doesn’t think that the French test sites are as safe as they are cracked up

to be. She would rather that Lyttelton did not get crisped. She respects politicians as much as gainma-radiation respects politicians. She — what? . Anyhow, the kids had come round to help with the garden. Gran! they called. You know the weather’s been lousy, and you reckon its the Bomb? Are you sure the soil isn’t radio-active as well? Gran came out and looked in horror at the carrots the kids were harvesting. Grotesque, misshapen, malformed, the vegetables lay in ugly rows. Twin tops bulged from a single stem. Weak roots trailed from a degenerate crown. Cancerous, fissured, split, with swollen lips crying only for re-burial, they writhed, a devilish obscene parody of all once wholesome things. You wouldn’t actually eat this stuff, would you? said the kids. Grandma looked around her garden and began to cry. The kids were ashamed. They confessed. A friend — riding stables — sacks of “horse carrots” — cheap — picked out the worst — Hey! — Ow! That was when they started running.