" My Scottish mate, Jock, was having a winge session.
“I canna make my wife oot”
First she says “Aye fine, have a tattoo if you want”
“Noo she’s moaning aboot aw the pipers in the garden.”
Gidday Jack,
I have to admit that it took me a moment or two before the penny finally dropped & i got the joke, it made me laugh out loud.
I think that the only reason that it finally clicked was because of a visit that i made to my mothers house several years ago.
This was a time of her life when she was living alone, very hard of hearing & with worsening dementia. ( it was only a few months later that we finally convinced her to sell up & move to a nursing home )
I clearly remember the visit as i knocked & banged loudly on the front door but there was no response, ( nothing unusual about that as by this time despite the most expensive hearing aids, she was deaf as a post )
So i let myself in & walked into the lounge room to see her sitting on the spare chair from her sewing room which was now positioned about 2 feet from the television with her head craned forward, & a big smile on her face as she tapped her feet in sync with her hands tapping on her thighs.
As i came into her line of sight she jumped up to give me a hug & thanked me for the flowers.
Mum just loved to have fresh flowers sitting on the kitchen window sill or as the center piece of the kitchen table or on the display cabinet in the lounge room so i rarely visited without a bunch of fresh flowers even if they were only a cheap $10 bunch from Woolworths.
She would always make a big deal about it " why are you wasting your money on more flowers "your last bunch is still going strong because i look after them & put sugar in their water. '"( apparently that makes them last longer ?) Give me these new ones & i'll put them in water strait away.
So i was a little surprised that on this occasion, she threw my new bunch of flowers on the table " i'll put them in water later " but right now you have to fix up my T.V, because its broken & i can barely hear it.
I had bought mum a DVD player a few years earlier & i can remember just how proud she was that after just a couple of hours/days of repetitive tuition she had mastered how to control both the T,V & the DVR with their individual remote controls.
As time went by & Mum became a bit confused, i had to label each remote with brightly coloured stickers which corresponded to the applicable device along with a step by step letter for each device.
Of course the problem on this day was simply that she was trying to use the DVR remote to operate the T.V,
Ok Mum, it's all sorted, i'll just chuck this chair back in the sewing room & you can get comfortable back on your lounge to watch your show, with the volume turned up as loud as you like.
For the next couple of hours we sat side by side, smiled at each as we clasped our hands together & tapped on our thighs to the Royal Military Tattoo.
I