Friday, August 10, 2007

The Nanna Part 1

It's amazing the wealth of information that you can amass in one short weekend spent with a family member of superior wisdom and an awareness of the general state of the world around her like none other

Such was the knowledge we gained during our weekend with "The Nanna"

Following is the first in a series of a general account of our weekend with The Nanna.

After choosing not to heed our taxi driver's warning that we were about to commence on an unusually long trip of almost three miles, we arrive in Pinhoe, Exeter shortly after 11 pm on Friday. George Washington greets us at the door and then proceeds to keep us standing in the doorway for a good 10 to 15 minutes until we manage to sneak past her earlobes and into the living room. Adam refuses the first of eleventy-hundred cups of tea offered to him over the next 40 hours, and we escape to bed shortly thereafter.

Saturday dawns bright and early at 6 a.m. (for The Nanna) and 11 a.m. (for us). The Nanna isn't sure whether to serve us breakfast or lunch and is concerned on our behalf that we might have run out of time to go anywhere or do anything. Over breakfast, The Nanna declares the EEC to be a dictatorship that is trying to ban Bramley apples. We also learn that Hungarian gypsies are also taking over London and nobody’s wallets are safe from the pickpockets.

After breakfast and lots of careful deliberation, we set off for Exeter taking care to avoid all underground parking lots (for obvious reasons) and finally finding an open air lot that's only three miles outside of town. We gallop past the old roman walls of the city (no time to stop because there's only 3 hours left on the meter) and over to the cathedral.

We decide to have a look inside but are quickly hustled back outside as soon as The Nanna sees that the suggested donation of £3.50 per person. (In all honesty, the donation collectors did look rather menacing.) We are led to understand that, while a £2.00 donation is ok, any cathedral asking for £3.50 is really just shooting themselves in the foot. We are then led to understand this several more times as we debate whether or not we have the time to walk five minutes down to the quays with only 2 ½ hours left on the meter.


Next time: We drink beer and The Nanna drives

3 comments:

JDizzle said...

So glad your nana is crazy too. When Beeps and I visited my nana a couple years back we made a list of things she was afraid of. Here are a few i remember: the red tide, cruise ships, MySpace, Japanese people, and killer bees.

Nocturnal Admission said...

The fact that your Nana has even heard of MySpace means that she's futurecrazy. Mine is retrocrazy

JDizzle said...

My Nana just watches too much TV and at a volume that scares residents 2 towns over.