Mum’s the word for engaging eccentricity
ENOUGH ABOUT me and my travails. Let me tell you about my mother and her friends. Why? Because they’re funny. “We’re not funny, we’re just old,” my mum corrected me on Friday night as she fumigated her kitchen for the umpteenth time. I had, only an hour earlier, descended on her with the kids and the actually-not-that-unclean dog. But still, there she was, furiously polishing it (the kitchen, not the canine) to its original showhouse shine.
Old? It’s one letter away from OCD. So that’s where I get my obsession with hygiene and order from. Like my mother, I have a physical aversion to mess and dirt. And my germophobia has worsened over the years to the extent that nowadays I tend to avoid public transport.
Surprisingly, mum likes to travel by bus. Chooses to do so, in fact, despite having a car. But driving everywhere doesn’t allow her to engage perfect strangers in conversation, and she loves to do that.
How else would she have been able to hear the torrid life story of the psychiatric nurse whose first husband had an affair while she was pregnant, whose second husband physically abused her, whose third husband died tragically last year and who, despite being Irish herself, loathes the entire population of the benighted Emerald Isle? And this was before the bus arrived.
My mum loves to chat to what are referred to, in colloquial speak, as “randoms”. It means that what would normally be a 20-minute trip to the shops can often take several hours. Sometimes she likes to get busy. The other week, she approached a street cleaner to inform her that she wasn’t doing her job properly. As if the poor cleaner didn’t have enough problems, she had an elderly Jewish woman offering unwanted advice on the optimum method for removing leaves from drains.
They know her by name at Marks & Spencer in St Albans. I would say “see her coming” but that doesn’t quite do her justice. No, they offer her drinks and check whether she’s all right. Maybe I should complain more regularly about the quality of their products — I might get that sort of five-star service.
In Boots, she gets treated like a local dignitary, especially after she marched up to the counter and demanded water for an upset child. She’s like a cross between Mother Theresa and Maureen Lipman.
She’s not the only character in her crowd, for which eccentric is the
She rang me up to wish me happy birthday. I was live on LBC
word. There’s the one with a limerick for every Jewish occasion who predicted my sister’s divorce in rhyme at her first wedding. Then there is the one with a cavalier disregard for the rules of the road who refuses to signal at roundabouts, with consequences both farcical and near-catastrophic. Oh, and the one who, when introduced to her daughter’s new boyfriend, was for some unfathomable reason wearing a pair of outsized plastic bosoms that she had found on the floor.
My mum, though, definitely wins the award for wackiest seventysomething in south Herts. She once rang me up to say “Happy birthday, Paulus!”, which would have been perfectly acceptable, had I not been 35 at the time and broadcasting live on LBC Radio. She recently left a barmitzvah at 2am and got flashed speeding on the way home, the kind of thing a teenager might do in a souped-up Clio, not an OAP in an entry-model Daihatsu.
But then, she has what you might call a youthful outlook. Either that or she’s suffering from a severe case of juvenile dementia. She is very possibly the only 77-year-old to reference YouTube when most people her age are still only just getting their head around the telegram. She posts messages on Facebook and discusses the pros and cons of Presidential selfies.
I even overheard her discussing with my kids the other day the latest street argot. Now everything is “swag” and “sick” round her way. Next week, expect to read in the JC about the seventysomething Jewish granny who recorded tracks on GarageBand, uploaded them to MySpace, and took her own press photos using Instagram.
Oops, did I say MySpace? How very 2009 of me. I meant Bandcamp. Sorry, mum. Please don’t diss me in a tweet.