Author Virginia Ironside describes all the ways her grandsons contrive to make her the butt of a joke - and applauds the grandparent who can laugh at it too.
Virginia Ironside
Grandparents: the butt of all jokes
Posted on: Thu 05-Mar-15 14:33:39
(17 comments )
Virginia's grandsons employ all their greatest pranks.
There is nothing a child likes to do more, particularly during the foolish month of April, than make his grannie look like a complete idiot. Indeed, there is nothing anyone likes to do more than to make some powerful figure in their lives fall flat on a banana skin. Never have I seen my son laugh quite so much as when I slipped into our tiny pond in my dressing gown. I cannot remind him of it now without him becoming reduced to helpless giggles, tears pouring down his face.
"Wouldn't you like to sit on this chair, grannie?" said one grandson, almost unable to contain his laughter, pointing to a chair with a pad on it, underneath which was a very obvious whoopee cushion. I duly sat and pronounced myself astonished and embarrassed at the resulting fart. Then the other one got hold of the cushion and stuck it under another chair, and I was invited to do it again.
Interestingly, although they knew I knew all along what was going on, they still found my pretended reaction hilarious. I spent about twenty minutes sitting on farting cushions and pretending to be amazed, and the response was always the same. Helpless laughter.
"Would you like to shake my hand, grannie?" the older one asked, putting a hand out that contained a shiny metal buzzer. "Would you like to smell my flower?" said the other, pushing in, displaying a very wet plastic flower that had clearly just been filled with water.
There is nothing a child likes to do more, particularly during the foolish month of April, than make his grannie look like a complete idiot.
"Look, there's a fork beside your plate to eat your sausage with," they said, falling off their chairs at the prospect of my picking it up and being astonished when the hinged object fell into two pieces.
Finally, "Are you hungry? Would you like a peanut?" they both said, almost wetting themselves at the prospect of my unscrewing the cap of the tin and being sent into completely disarray by a caterpillar on a spring that jumped out at me.
Whether you go along with such jokes or not is, I think, a sign of being a mature adult. When they insisted on playing their tricks on a friend, I was delighted that he went along with every one, looking round confusedly after sitting on the Whoopee Cushion saying "Oh dear, was that me?"
Of course I used to find the whole thing hilarious myself. A friend of mine and I used to glue half crowns to the pavement outside my house, and then fall about when we saw innocent passers-by desperately ruin their fingernails as they scrabbled to pick them up. We even constructed false parcels and left them on the pavement, again beside ourselves if anyone came along and took it away. (I suppose today, if a parcel were found on the street, the whole area would be cordoned off by machined-gunned police, and helicopters brought in to monitor the situation from above.)
It's one thing, of course, to join in the April Fool fun with one's grandchildren. But had I ever been the victim of one of those Jeremy Beadle type jokes in which blokes would return from work to find their cars smashed to bits, or their favourite dog dead in the fish pond, I would have found it hard to put my hands on my hips and guffaw with laughter when I realised it was "only a joke".
A trick is only really funny if the perpetree is in on it as well. Woops - oo-er! Do excuse me. What that me?
Virginia's new book Yes! I can manage, Thank You! is published by Quercus and is available on Amazon now.
,and have reached an age which commands a certain amount of respect.
