Granny's Blog

Just when you thought you had heard everything that Granny could possibly make a mess of, Diane decides to go and try the Self-Service Checkout at Sainsbury’s. Now I am not trying to suggest that Diane is thick but… things do tend to happen when she’s around.

First of all she marches up to the Self-Service Checkout with her shopping in the trolley and joins a rather long queue. As she gets nearer to the front, more people have joined the queue and most are in a hurry to get home with their shopping. However, Diane is not about to be hurried.

Her turn soon comes around and the first task is to read the instructions. Now unfortunately Diane has lost her glasses somewhere amongst the array of pockets, containers and crevices about her person. Diane being Diane, she cannot search quietly she has to tell everyone else in the queue what she is doing and then explain to them that she has had Laser Eye Surgery and her eyes are now even worse. She is not exactly a walking advert for Laser Eye Surgery as she can’t even find her glasses!

Eventually she finds them but this is not the end of the effect her glasses have on our story. You see, Diane likes to partake of the boring things in life while listening to music on her iPod – except it’s not really an iPod because Diane found a bargain make of MP3 Player that isn’t exactly an iPod. Diane does have an eye for bargains that end up to be wild turkeys. However, that is a different story for a different day.

So, the next disaster is about to strike. Diane gets her glasses tangled up in her non-iPod player wire and then proceeds to drop both on the floor. Eventually she manages to untangle the mess of wires and glasses frame to enable her to finally get her glasses onto her face. Now she can read the instructions.

She finally gets the hang of this Self-Service Checkout malarkey and proceeds to put her articles through the checkout. Once she has finished up flashes the total for her shopping and unfortunately Diane has not quite got enough money with her. Diane now has to ask the Self-Service Checkout Assistant, who has been watching proceedings from afar, how she can take some items off the total.

In the middle of all this, Diane’s phone goes off and she has to hold everyone up even further while she answers the phone. At this point the vicar who is third in the queue behind Diane is heard to mutter some swear words which we cannot publish on a family orientated blog!

She finally gets off the phone, removes a couple of items of shopping and tries to pay for her shopping. At this point she drops her purse and money all over the floor! She does manage to pick it all up and pay for the remaining items and the end of the tunnel is now in sight. She starts packing everything away into her shopping bags when the Sainsbury Self-Service Checkout Assistant recommends that in future she might like to do her shopping in Tesco.

Just when you think things can’t get any worse, Diane now has to find a pocket, container or crevice to replace all the things she has removed while originally searching for her glasses. Fortunately this only takes a few extra minutes much to the vicar’s relief.

Diane now heads for the exit happy in the knowledge that her first foray into the mysteries of Self-Service Checkouts hasn’t been too bad. She starts walking off along Woodchurch Road when she hears someone calling her – It’s only the Sainsbury’s Self-Service Checkout Assistant… Diane has only left her phone in the shop!

She is definitely Granny’s daughter!

It is a whole month since I gave you a Granny story, which is a little scary as it seems like yesterday. Tempus fugit gathering pace I suppose, but anyway…

The other night I noticed that I had had two flat bottles of Diet Pepsi sitting on my bedroom floor which granny had not moved. She was obviously trying to prove something by ignoring them in the hope that I would move them myself. There is no end to my laziness!

So as I was going to bed with yet another bottle of Diet Pepsi when the devil got the better of me. I decided to remove the two dead bottles from my bedroom and place them either side of the bannister at the top of the stairs. There they stood at the top of the stairs like guardian demons guarding the stairway to hell.

Now the reason I tell you this story is not to try and prove how funny I am but to demonstrate how word can quickly spread when Granny has anything to do with it. By the time I got out of bed at 9am the whole of Borough Road knew about the Pepsi bottles at the top of the stairs. The girls and staff in Curves, everyone in the local Co-op store, the people on Borough Road who happened to be out at that time of the morning not to mention the girls in Sayers who are always up for some of Granny’s gossip.

Doctor Richards would also have heard about it but unfortunately Granny couldn’t get an appointment.

I have said it before and I will say it again; there are three ways to quickly spread the word in this world. Firstly there is telephone, then there is television but by far the quickest is just to tell Granny!

There is nothing Granny likes better than watching quizzes on the television. She obviously admires people with brains because, having popped to the toilet when God was handing out the IQs, she wouldn’t know what it was like to be brainy.

So the other night she was sitting there watching The Chase when the devil got into me and I decided to wind her up. “Do you know if the contestants fail to beat the chaser, then the chaser gets to keep all the money,” I told her. She was astonished and questioned me as to where I had heard that. She even went so far as to accuse me of telling lies… me? Never!

She went on about it so much that in the end I had to come clean and tell her that I was indeed making the whole story up just to see if she would believe me – you wouldn’t believe some of the stories she believes. She whacked me once again (Childline have been informed) and proceeded to tell anybody listening that I was the biggest liar on the face of the planet.

The next day Granny, who has a goldfish memory and usually forgets everything from more than two minutes ago, spent the day telling everyone that The Chasers get to keep the money that the contestants don’t win!

The daft mare had only forgotten I had told her it was a joke but remembered the part about the chaser keeping the money. Talk about selective memory.

She gets worse!

Granny was meant to be making an appointment at the doctors this week to go and have an Alzheimer’s Test… she forgot to go!!

Back in September I told you of the day when Granny left her car outside Sainsbury’s while she went into the store to do some shopping. Nothing wrong with that except Granny not only left the keys in the car but she also left the engine running while she spent her normal hour or two gossiping and catching up on the latest coming and goings at Sainsbury’s.

The other day Granny paid a return visit to Sainsbury’s for some more shopping. For those of you not familiar with the area, the store is at the top of Swan Hill on Woodchurch Road. Those of you who do know the area will know how steep Swan Hill is – Granny only parked the car and forgot to put the handbrake on!!

There is an old saying about how you cannot teach an old dog new tricks but today Granny and I disproved that. While running round doing some last minute Christmas chores we passed a KFC and Granny asked did they do breakfasts. I thought at the time it was a bit of a daft question because who wants chicken for breakfast but because it is the season of joy [sic], I decided to let it go.

I explained to Granny that they didn’t do breakfast and then the realisation hit me…

GRANNY HAD NEVER IN HER LIFE EXPERIENCED FAST FOOD!

Determined to bring Granny kicking and struggling into the 21^st Century we headed for McDonald’s so Granny could experience her very first Maccies Breakfast.

Upon arrival at the drive-thru Granny decided she would have a Sausage, Egg & Cheese Bagel Breakfast meal. I drove forward toward the machine that takes your order and Granny nearly jumped out of her skin wanting to know who I was talking to!?!?!

Granny enjoys her Maccies

Within 30 seconds we had driven forward to the first window, paid for our breakfasts, collected our food from the second window and were on our way out. Granny was shocked and wanted to know how they got our breakfasts ready so quickly because when we drove in they didn’t even know what we wanted. Surely they couldn’t have cooked our breakfast that fast?

We drove round the corner to Monks Ferry to eat it and Granny was shocked. It was nice it could even be described as the future. So on Christmas Eve 2011 at the ripe old age of 67, Granny has finally had her first McDonald’s experience!

Granny was lovin’ it!

From time to time items disappear from the kitchen. Regular readers will know that Granny hates to use her bin, as rubbish makes it dirty, so she bags up her rubbish and deposits it down in the council bins near the local shops. Hence, if things disappear we assume that she has scooped them up in the bags of rubbish and deposited them in the public bins.

Potato peelers, knives, tea spoons, etc., have all previously gone AWOL assumed lost in the council bins.

However, this week Granny has surpassed herself; she has managed to lose a pint coke glass!

How on earth do you manage to scoop up something of that size and “accidently” throw it in the rubbish? Surely you would notice something of that size in a carrier bag of rubbish meant for the bin. This was not a small glass it was a full one-pint coke glass courtesy of the last McDonald’s free coke glass promotion.

I don’t know how she does it!

Granny always seems to get things mixed up. Everything you say gets turned around inside that head of hers and comes out as something completely different.

She was just sitting there watching one of her favourite daytime telly programmes, Loose Woman, when I noticed that the host Andrea was sporting one of those wide eyebrows from Desperate Scousewives. You know the one – where it is really wide towards the centre of the head and then narrows as it gets to the sides. On Desperate Scousewives they call it a “Scousebrow”.

I told Granny; “Look at that, Andrea’s got a Scousebrow!”

Sometime passes while Granny is trying to look busy in the kitchen and eventually she comes out and looks at the telly. Granny takes one look and says; “Andrea hasn’t got a Scousebrow, her forehead moves she hasn’t had Botox!”

I give up!!!

Granny went to the shops today to get some more of her styling gel. As you can see from the bottle on the left she had run out. Now Granny being Granny she didn’t want to come back with the wrong stuff so she took the empty bottle with her and erm…

…came back with the bottle on the right.

Granny

Yes Granny, they are definitely the same as we can all tell!!!