My family and I recently went away for a short break and during that time we got talking about inappropriate things members of our family do. Not inappropriate like flashing in public, but inappropriate like they shouldn't be doing it. Obviously I'm not condoning flashing in public places, I'm not condoning flashing anywhere, but what I'm talking about as inappropriate is more like things you've been told explicitly that you shouldn't do. Like someone with a nut allergy shoving a handful of coconut or peanuts in their mouth, or a grandma giving chocolate to their grand-child.
I'm not brilliantly sure how we got on to the subject, but at some point someone brought up my grandma and I thought her faux pars were so spectacular, they perhaps warranted their own blog post, but I guess we'll just see how this goes.
Firstly, a memory I have- and probably one of my earliest with my grandma- is when she used to come on holiday with us. A combination of my parents not being able to handle 4 children under the age of 8, one potty training and one intermittently in a wheelchair, my grandma being too old to travel and us going on holiday every year, enabled my grandma to come with us each year. For me it felt like an eternity of having my grandma holidaying with us, but I'm told that she only came for a few years. I think maybe I was just so traumatized that time stood still. This might be a slight exaggeration where your generation is concerned, depending how old you are and how much you dislike. What you have to understand about my grandma is that, like my dad, she is always right. So if my parents say 'no seafish' and she says 'seafish', chances are, you're getting seafish. This happened because my grandma used to love the nostalgia of picking muscles off of sea walls and my siblings and I thought the shells were pretty. We had no idea there were actual, live creatures inside the shells, else we probably wouldn't have picked them. But we didn't know, so we did pick them, and my grandma told us she liked to cook them and eat them. At this point my parents caught on to what she was doing with her two grand-daughter-minions lugging around three sandcastle buckets full of muscles and told her, very clearly "If you want to cook those and give yourself food poisoning, be our guest, but do not give any to our children." I've checked with my parents multiple times since then and they said it was very clear that she wasn't to give us any. They were most shocked when we informed them a few weeks ago that she had, in fact, given us the muscles regardless. But hey, she apparently cooked them properly because my parents surely would have noticed if we- or my grandma- got food poisoning.
Me and my brother were sat in the carvery with our mum at this point talking about how badly the muscles smelled. It was like the smell was ingrained in our brains- it was horrible and it lasted for hours (but apparently they were only cooked for 6 minutes?) We both remember her using a tonne of salt and practically forcing the slimy, liverishly-textured seafood down our throats.
The second memory I have of my grandma on holiday is when she decided to help my parents out by giving me and my sister our bath before bed. She used to make us cry and scream because rather than laying us back to rinse the shampoo out of our hair, she used to dump the water on top of us, both rendering us unable to see, or breathe, whilst the suds filled all the crevices of our face. This really was a traumatic experience, and when we told our parents about it she was reprimanded and told how we were usually laid down and the suds rinsed with her hands from our locks. But sure enough, next bath time she not only dumped water over our heads, she used a fucking saucepan.
Nothing says retaliation like a saucepan. Just watch Tangled. The kid uses a saucepan to defy her 'mother' and also the law, thus her real mother and father. That girl's just a badass with a saucepan. I bet they based the film off my grandma- I don't remember a saucepan in the original. In fact, I don't remember a lot of the little prettied parts of Disney's version being in the original.
While we're talking about how badass my grandma is, I should tell you the toaster story.
Same holiday as the muscles I think, at least same location, the toaster was jammed the whole duration of our holiday. There was one day we didn't leave the house the whole day because- I'm informed- my brother was in hospital and no one felt like doing anything. In the afternoon my grandma fancied a snack and a break from what I can only assume was the longest game of snakes and ladders the poor woman had ever had the misfortune of playing. She was fed up of not only having her toast burnt but also catapulted across the room so she timed thirty seconds on her watch and made my sister and I wait by the toaster. Once her watch hit 30, I pressed the 'stop' button on the toaster. My grandma, who had been waiting across the other side of the room with a plate, lifted the plate into the air and, like a ninja catching a fly, caught the toast.
Ladies and gentlemen, my grandma. *takes a bow*
Next story is her being inappropriate in a different way, similarly to the muscles incident. My aunt was always adamant her children would have no e-numbers, organic, steamed and local grown everything with no preservative and additives. And above all, they would eat no chocolate until they were old enough to make the decision to wreck their teeth themselves (I should imagine). My grandma knew this and, being her, immediately had to defile the rule and rewrite it with her own reasoning. She would take my cousin out every now and then, away from my aunt, and force feed the child chocolate buttons. She would give him as many chocolate buttons as he could hold in his chubby little additive-free cheeks, and once he'd choked them down, she'd fill him up again. Once the buttons were gone, my grandma would nicely clean him up and return him, presumably in a sugar-coma, to his doting mother who would be left none the wiser as far as my grandma was concerned. When she told my mum about the grand chocolate endeavor, my poor mother was horrified, telling her how inappropriate it was, but my grandma shook her head in denial. "He likes them! They're good for him, a bit of this and that, you know?".
So folks, if you want my grandma to do something, tell her she's not to do it under any circumstances. Tell her that doing it would be putting the fate of the universe in grave danger, and could actually re-write history, including human life ever existing on earth. She'll be instinctively drawn to doing it. Honestly, she's just programmed that way. Probably part of her genetic 'badass' makeup. She's one of the world's risk takers. She's so badass, she likes the fate of the universe hanging in the balance of just one too many chocolate buttons.
I'm not really sure what else my grandma's done that's classed as inappropriate by you civilians. She's probably robbed a bank at some point. At gun point. And got away with it. She probably has a stack of alibis for every evening, her neighbours saying 'oh no, she falls asleep every night at 7:30pm bang on when Corrie starts. She's the most peaceful neighbor ever' when really she's just placed a crash dummy there from her entrepreneurial days as a jetpack designer and tester, and is out looting the local jewelers and performing other risk-taking behaviour. I bet she's a trained skydive instructor as well.
One thing I do know though, is she wouldn't be out saving the day for children who want to play with their dolls but forgot a vital piece of kit. These days, all dolls have hair. I had a Cindy doll with hair on one of the occasions we holidayed with my grandma and had taken the doll to the beach where we had paddled together and now needed to restyle our hair- brush it an let it dry. My grandma happily handed over a hair brush when I asked, but snatched it violently back when I went to brush Cindy's hair with it. My parents could never understand why she'd been so against her 3 year old granddaughter role-playing parental responsibilities and showing a sophisticated and educated level of play at such a tender age. Same holiday, my grandma went into a grumpy stupor when she'd smashed her flask in a hurry to get her tea out. We always went to a bowls field for a pot of tea and biscuits when we went to this holiday area, but my grandma was adamant that her tea was the only stuff she wanted, and it was a really nice tartan flask with a glass insulating chamber. Unfortunately, glass is very delicate and once broken could be fatal if ingested. I later found out that it could cut your throat and drown you in your own blood if you drink from a broken glass flask. I mean, considering my grandma's risk-taking tendancies, it does surprise me that she hadn't persevered with the flask. Perhaps my parents flippantly told her to just go for it when she told them she'd smashed it. If we're going with the logic that she does the opposite of what we ask, that would also be a reasonably explanation.
Anyway, I haven't got any more badass stories of my grandma, unfortunately. Probably because they happened when I was younger and my memory is patchy from my childhood and she is an old lady now so is probably hanging her badass hat on the hook for now. I think when the time comes, she'll pull something super awesome out of the bag, but for the time being she's masquerading as a fragile lady with intermittent memory lapses, like most badasses her age. (I think it's best to keep her antics on the DL at her age, don't want the press hanging round all the time you know?)
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