Mothers, eh?

My Mum now refers to herself as 'Wicked Gran.' This is because she forgot Heather's birthday. Heather, being a mature adult of 23, was a little disappointed but did not become grudgeful or hysterical or wracked with abandonment issues. She put it down to Gran's age and we all know that age brings on forgetfulness, don't we?

(Don't we what? Age brings on what??)

I, on the other hand, aged 45, was a tad narked at this forgetfulness. This is because my Mum will periodically phone me and during the course of the conversation say something along the lines of 'The next time you speak to your rat-bag of a son, tell him he could have remembered his old Gran's birthday/ Christmas/ existence.'

And until fairly recently I would say to Chris, 'Your grandmother has been on my case because you forgot her birthday etc etc blah, blah, blah,' and he will look at me blankly, and make some vague comment about some random subject (usually to do with a car or work) which bears no significance to the fact that it isn't that difficult to put dates on a calendar and buy a card and a stamp, attach one to the other and put them in the post. (Only not in any post boxes that stand on random street corners and in which I am convinced live gnomes with arsonistic tendencies who set fire to letters as soon as they drop through the slot.)

But then he (my rat-bag son, not the post box gnome) is like a lot of young people these days, raised in a digital-texty-world-wide-webbly-existence, in that he 'doesn't do cards.' An increasingly common, if rather sad, phenomenon and I know this because I work with young people.

After Christmas my Mum made her 'rat-bag grandson' phone call as she hadn't received a card from Chris, and I said, 'Don't take it personally, I'm didn't get one either, and I'm his mother and have cleaned up his sick.' I was on the verge of saying, 'And please don't moan to me about it, moan to him. He's a grown-up now; he can take it.'

But I didn't, but I might do next time.

But will there be a next time? Now that Mum is 'Wicked Gran' who forgot one of her grandchildren's birthdays?? I wonder...

And I wonder if she realises that the only reason she got cards from her own rat-bag son in the past was because, until I left home, it was me who did all the remembering of birthdays and anniversaries etc etct blah blah blah, and bought the cards and made him sign them.

Probably not.

On a less acidic note, because it is WORLD BOOK DAY and I have already found homes for 43 of my 48 copies of 'The Curious Incident...Dog...Night Time,' I would like to say 'HURRAH' for books as the ultimate in educational tools, and hands up who else laughed like a loon when they watched David Starkey reduced arguing with a child on 'Jamie's Dream School' and completely losing his credibility as an intelligent adult in the process?

Magic!