This Is This

When I was about 5 my dad was driving my sister and me around round near our house when we stopped at some traffic lights. We pulled up behind a car which looked familiar, being driven by a tuft of hair I couldn’t quite place. Dad put us in the picture.

“Hey look,” he said,”It’s Nana’s car.”

Sure enough it was my maternal grandmother out and about, no doubt on mission to buy Smash. Smash was powdered mashed potatoes, very big in the 1970’s, and she always had lots of it whenever me and my sister went round.

We waved to her, but she didn’t notice. Or at least the wisps didn’t move. Was she dead? Imagine dying at a red light, waiting for it to change, being mocked by a flashing green man. But she wasn’t dead, I throw that in merely for comic relief.

“She hasn’t seen us,” my dad said.

He tooted the horn. She looked left and right, which is kind of a granny thing to do since we were on a single lane road so logically the tooting would have to come from the line of cars in front of or behind her.

We kept waving, but she didn’t see us, or even check her rearview mirror. As the lights changed to green, my dad gave one last friendly toot before we pulled away. You know, one of those short “pip-pip” ones you do when you leave someone’s house.

At that point my grandmother reared up, turned around and gave my dad the traditional British two fingered “fuck you” salute. She mouthed something I was to young and innocent to understand and she drove off in a cloud of blue smoke, blue rinse and bluer language as she took a friendly greeting to be a stranger’s criticism of her driving.

Nearly 30 years on, I still don’t have the guts to bring it up with her but I often ask my dad to tell me the story again for a laugh.

Also on This Is This
Dear Mr. Rusbridger,
I run a blog entitled This Is This and I am working on a feature about newspapers. I, like many of my readers, are fascinated in this phenomenon, as many people consider 2006 to have been the Year of the Newspaper.
Read this post...

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 at 8:50 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or leave a comment yourself.