Old sayings

A school mum called me once and said she was running late from work to pick up her child on a playdate with The Dark Lordette at my house.

“No worries, why don’t I just run her over?” I said.

She went quiet, then said: “Seems a bit harsh.”

“Sorry, I mean drop her over in the car,” but it was too late – the parent clearly thought one of my family’s old Northern Irish expressions meant I wanted to squish her child under my wheels!

Reader Jim Kennedy’s dad would come out with some corkers.

“If we were messing about and making a noise, he would say, ‘Behave yourselves, do you think it’s outside you’re in?’,” says Jim in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire.

“And if ever I complained, ‘I’m bored’, he’d say, ‘Stick your bum out the window and go outside and throw stones at it.’ He was a bit peculiar at times, my dad.”

Ha ha! My father used to go and tell me to go outside and dig a hole, Jim, so it’s clearly a dad joke.

Still scratching his head over his mum’s old sayings, Stan Thompson says: “My mum was an old Liverpool Irish Catholic lady and she used to say to me, ‘Never let it be said, your mother reared a jibber’,” recalls Stan in Ruthin, Denbighshire.

“I still don’t know what it means, except it doesn’t sound very complimentary.”

I think it’s a way of telling someone to be braver, Stan, and probably encouraging you to do something difficult.

While Trevor Jones’s mam made it quite clear what she meant when her lad got in the way of her chores.

“When my mam was doing any of her many jobs and anyone was standing near and stopped light getting through to her, she’d say, ‘You make a better door than a window’,’’ remembers Trevor in Gainford, County Durham.

“And if she was asked to do something but she could not do it immediately, she’d say, ‘I’ll do it in two shakes of a lamb’s tail’.”

Let’s hope no lambs’ tails were hurt in the making of ‘shake’ an unofficial unit of time!