On Sundays, the Underblog household usually goes to my grandmother’s house for lunch. She’s the sort of old lady that witters on endlessly about distant relatives, friends-of-friends, and various things of little consequence that she has heard about them: who is is marrying who, who has a new job, who’s just done their exams etc. She’s the sort of person who has to finish a story even if you politely inform her that she told you it last week. Occasionally it is interesting, sometimes it gets a bit tiresome, but usually I can just tune it out. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a lovely granny, and does all the cherishable things a good granny should do: bakes nice cakes, cooks a great sunday lunch, has a ready supply of biscuits (ice-cream in the summer), and she even used to bung me the odd fiver when I was younger. But I suppose that since my grandfather died she gets fewer opportunities to talk to someone who’s willing to pretend to listen (I suspect Grampa used to turn off his hearing-aids). So when we visit we get it all. Twice.
When you’re young you think that your grandparents are magical. They spoil you, have full-cream milk instead of skimmed, and a nice garden with tree-climbing and bonfire opportunities. I’m generalising a bit, of course, but you know what I mean. They are like your own personal Mr and Mrs Gandalf. Well, mine were. As you grow up you realise that, alas, nobody is perfect. One of my grandmother’s tiny imperfections is that she is a card-carrying tory. Another fault of hers was evident yesterday.
She was talking about some ancestor who had bought a house (or sold a house, or letted a flat, or had god knows what business) in “Bradford… This is before it became paki-land”. She laughed as she said it, as she tends to when she’s nervous. I left the telling off to my Dad and resisted the urge to leave the table, because to be fair I hadn’t actually been listening to converstaion. I have to say, though, that I didn’t have much respect for her at that moment. I’m willing to accept that she doesn’t always remember the PC terms for different groups of people, and I’m quite aware that an 80 year-old woman would have grown up in a different time with different prevailing attitudes on race. But I can’t fathom what Bradford having acquired an asian population could have had to do with whatever she was prattling on about.
After lunch I saw her tutting over some vile “Gypsy” headline in the Sunday Express. I got ready for another dose of lovely-old-granny disallusionment. “I don’t know why the government can’t provide them with decent areas around the country with decent facilities, so they don’t have to squat on private land and make a mess”. She’s not all bad, I suppose. And I did get a Jaffa Cake swiss roll.
Anyway, if my granny is a racist, she’s not the sort of racist that worries me unduly. Let’s face it, an aging population of prejudiced stick-in-the-muds with rose-tinted memories of colonial times isn’t a long-term problem for British society.
Last Sunday, London Zoo were offering a 2 for 1 ticket deal for red-heads. The special offer was to celebrate the birth of Laa Laa, a criminally cute Francois Langur monkey. Monkeys of the species are born with bright ginger fur to help their parents to keep an eye on them and turn black after a few months.