My grandad
used to tell the same stories to us again and again and again and again and again. And again.

This might have been interesting, had they been enthralling stories about how he had killed seventeen soldiers armed with a toothpick or how he had sailed across the Atlantic in seven minutes. Sadly, most of the time they were mindnumbingly boring stories about the time he had been to Table Mountain in South Africa during the war ("It's not actually flat on top of Table Mountain - it's quite rocky, in fact...") and how he had seen Lulu riding along in a float in Coventry, singing her head off ("She couldn't sing a note, I can tell you that...")

After a while me and my family learned to switch off whenever he started rambling. However, there was one time when I couldn't avoid it.

In his sitting-room, he always used to sit in a chair facing the centre of the room. The chair I sat in was opposite where he sat - and above this chair, there was a hook where the calendar hung.

I always used to go round to his house on Sundays for lunch. One such Sunday, he looked at the calendar, and said "That dog looks evil, it does." I craned my neck to see the dog, and indeed, it did look slightly evil - it had a menacing "Touch me and I'll bite" look upon its face. We then had a conversation about it for a few minutes, as you do.

This was all well and good, but the next Sunday, he looked at the calendar and said "Hey, Chris, that dog looks evil, doesn't it?" Again, I craned my neck, and the dog was no more or less evil than it had been the last week.

"You told me that last week," I told him.

No use. He said exactly the same things about it as he did the last week.

This happened for the next three Sundays. Every week, he would look at the calendar, and say "That dog looks menacing" or words to that effect, and would then attempt to innitiate a conversation that I wanted no part of, but was forced into simply because of where I sat.

Sadly, he died a few years ago. However, I will always remember one thing he said a few months before he died that I shall cherish for a long time:

"Anne Robinson - she's a bitch."

I couldn't agree more.
( Chrico is a bounder and a cad, Thu 11 Mar 2004, 14:55, Reply)