THE GRANDFATHER WHO NUMBERS EGGS...

It slowly dawned on me that my parents weren’t quite as normal as everybody else’s when my friends and I used to swap stories of what we did in the holidays or at the weekend. Nobody else I knew had parents that lay in a circle on the living room floor with Mum’s head resting on Dad’s stomach as a pillow, my sister’s head on my Mum’s tummy, my head resting on my sister’s tummy and my little brother’s head resting on mine. And there we would lay, in the dark of an evening, telly off, just talking…

I soon stopped telling people that we only went to the seaside in the winter specifically because nobody else was there, or that we developed a list of unusually named trusses for men with hernias, or that we would spend afternoons hunting for interesting names on gravestones making note of the best ones. I used to think that when I grew up I wouldn’t think that my parents were as weird as they seemed to others the time, or that I would perhaps find out that other people’s parents also did odd things.

But no. My friends’ parents were civil servants and tax officials who had dinner parties and drank sherry. The Mums wore aprons and did housework. Our Mum didn’t think much of housework, she preferred sing us funny songs when she had a bath, her voice drifting across the landing at night to our bedrooms singing three children to bed at once.

But as they both aged and we moved to the other end of the country [these two facts are not related] we saw our parents less and less and assumed that they had grown up at last and had become more normal. I also hoped that my father would behave himself in a mature manner on formal occasions.

I was mistaken:

The day came when they moved near us so we could once again keep an eye on them. Apart from my Mum’s habit of saying the rude things to people that normally people only think but don’t say, and my Dad’s habit of drawing cartoons of two words that make a funny picture [you have to see it really], we thought we were home and dry. Then this happened:

He takes eggs home, and unable to place complete confidence in the date stamp on the egg box within which his eggs are placed, he carefully takes each egg out and writes the date on the shell.  He doesn’t just scribble the number on with any old biro, or use the pencil he keeps behind his ear which is useful for crosswords. No, he gets out a superior marker pen and prints the numbers in a perfect script as if they will be photographed for posterity.

This was understandable at least from a perishable point of view, but then he moved on to margarine tubs. With margarine tubs, I think he realised that the date stamp on the tubs could be trusted, [margarine is indestructible] but how many had they opened since they moved in? This was a question that needed to be answered.

The problem obviously preyed on his mind. These tubs should be numbered so that they could be progressed through in an orderly fashion:

But, eighty three? I’m only slightly more concerned about his state of mind, than the sheer volume of synthetic butter he has consumed…

So, I have to become resigned to the fact that I have slightly weird parents and I must stop trying to hide them from the outside world. After all, something must be right judging from a comment passed by an old neighbour when all us kids were still living at home;

'You could often hear laughter coming from your house. You seemed to be having such a good time.'

Oh, we were.....