My mum, Granny Essie unfortunately died in February, however she is still making us laugh. Some of you may remember the anecdote about her little incident with the dried apricots. Granny underwent surgery for SCC on her lip many years ago and as a result had difficulty keeping her mouth closed. (I’ve had that trouble all my life without the SCC) and therefore suffered from a dry mouth at night. She swore by some old wives tale that the solution to a dry mouth is to place a jumbo raisin (Aldi 69p) between the upper lip and gum over each eye tooth, which she used to do every night. She said she must have eaten them during the night because she could never find them in the morning, the exception being the day she ran out of raisins and used a dried apricot cut up, she said when she work up she found this thing on her chin and thought her mouth had fallen off. Well, she didn’t eat the raisins, we found them, my sister in law and I stayed at Granny’s to clear her house. When we moved the bed, it looked like a rabbit run with hundreds of ‘rabbit droppings’ varying in colour and freshness.

During the last few months of her life, although she was far from senile, she (we thought) imagined strange things. One was that she saw creatures on the floor and blossoms everywhere, it turned our that it was a side effect of a degenerative eye disease which was causing her to go blind. Another was that a cockerel crowed and sounded as if it was right there in her bedroom every morning at 5.30 am, we thought this time she was really losing the plot, then a neighbour said that there was someone who kept hens just down the road so it was quite possible.

The morning after our first night’s stay I asked my sister in law how she had slept, seeing as she was sleeping in Granny’s room. She said ‘I slept very well till about 5.30 when that bloody alarm clock went off and I couldn’t get it to stop’ I asked what alarm clock, she said ‘the one that crows like a cockerel’ I told her the story about Granny and reassured her that it was in fact down the road, to which she reached under the cushions on the sofa and retrieved Granny’s speaking clock where she had tried to silence it and said no, it was this. Upon investigation, it was indeed an alarm which had been set to go off at 5.30 am to the sound of a cock crowing.