Wednesday, June 24, 2009

love you nanny

My Grandmother, Patricia, is getting kicked out of her house by the Government so they can build an overpass. NICE ONE. Patricia is a very small, yet surprisingly robust, old lady. I love her dearly so I spent the morning there helping her pack up. This was hilarious for a number of reasons which I shall now document for you in list form:

*My Grandmother has just recently learnt the word "Fuck". She now endeavours to use this word in every sentence that she reasonably can. Example:
"Do you want some fucking lunch dear?"

*Patricia has far too much money. She is also a hoarder. Which basically means she has a house full of expensive and pointless crap, yet she is strangely precious about what she keeps and what she throws away. Example:
Keep: 15 different novelty ice trays with amusing shapes varying from cats to coke bottles.
Throw away: Half empty, dusty bottle of Chanel No. 5 and Burberry scarf with glue on corner.

*Patricia wanted me to box up her collection of jars. An argument ensued:
Jessie: Why do you have all these jars?
Patricia: I like to keep them. I like jars.
Jessie: Can't we just throw them away?
Patricia: No.
Jessie: They're heavy, ugly and useless and you don't have room at your new house for them.
Patricia: Shut the fuck up.
Needless to say, I fucking packed fucking up fucking all the fucking jars.

*Patricia has a burmese cat called Chardonnay whom she loves more than she loves me. Chardonnay is silver, NOT grey. At lunch I had to move Chardy off the deck chair so I could sit down. The devil-feline-whore swiped at my precious face. Later, Patricia threw a box of cat-food at my head.

*Patricia is still driving. She just bought a new car. It is abominably small and light yet somehow she is still not very good at driving/parking/starting it. She is so distressingly erratic behind the wheel that I had to force her to pull over and swap seats with me. She took this to mean 'Grandmother, please sit in the passenger seat, turn up the radio and drown out Leon Byner by complaining loudly about my driving'.

*Patricia really likes toys and buying weird and stupid (read: awesome) things from Asian-full-of-crap shops and those stalls at the Markets. She gave me a little fake fire extinguisher that is actually, get this, a WATER PISTOL. A-mazing.
Artist's impression:




*I suspect Patricia of entertaining fanciful delusions. Taking another load of stuff to her new house I trusted Patricia to drive more sensibly. As we pulled away from the curb I heard her mutter "new house" under her breath. As it turns out Patricia believes her car to have magical-navigation powers and that telling it where we're headed means it practically drives itself there. Safe to say she was not Car-Pilot for long.

*Patricia calls the bonnet of the car the "Boot-Lid". No matter how many times I try to explain to her that this makes very little sense, she continues to erroneously label the bonnet.

*Patricia wanted me to help her clean out the laundry cupboard. I thought that would just be towels and sheets etc so I was all like "Sweet, I'm gonna thieve me some egyptian cotton". The reality of helping her clean out the laundry cupboard was me crouching on the floor while she threw old, cracked bottles of chemicals at my head.

*Patricia has a selective memory. She was reminiscing about one night when she was driving me home and I was cold so she gave me her fur coat. That's nice, isn't it? So then I reminisced about the time she was looking after me and I got hit by a car. Strangely enough she had no memory of this incident whatsoever.

I would have posted a photo of Patricia but she doesn't show up on film so picture this...