OCCASIONALLY people ask me if I'm ever tempted to make things up for my weekly column.
They don't, for instance, believe it possible that I once lent my garage to someone and then discovered they were keeping a horse in it. Or that I once had a telegram which read 'iguana arriving Plymouth station 2.45pm August 28 - please ring to confirm collection'. But It's true.
I don't have to make things up. They just happen.
Take Sunday afternoon teatime for instance. I bet nobody else in South East Cornwall spent an energetic ten minutes wrestling with a three foot long fluorescent green plastic snake and a vacuum cleaner did they?
No, they didn't. But I did.
The facts are these. I had had sole charge of my grandchildren for the weekend while by daughter and her husband had a couple of days away. I had somewhat neglected the housework, an understatement if there ever was one, on the grounds that it was easier to leave it until the last moment and do the lot at once. This is a lifelong theory which I am still convinced is workable even though I have yet to prove it.
Anyway, at around 6pm I was to be found belting round with the vacuum cleaner.
All might have been well had I just stuck to using the brush, but because my granddaughter had been making a pasta picture earlier that weekend, and the floor looked like there had been a fight in a macaroni factory, I had taken off the brush head and used the nozzle in order to suck up enough pasta to make a bolognaise for a football team.
Reaching over the side of the sofa to bag a particularly large pile of the pasta I failed to noticed the tail of the said green plastic snake and in the flash of an eye it had disappeared up the pipe.
With a certain amount of alacrity but certainly very little elasticity I instinctively dived over the arm of the sofa, grabbed the head of the snake just as it was about to vanish and just as instinctively let go of the pipe which then began thrashing around in a fairly threatening manner..
You might ask why I didn't just let go of both. Well firstly I didn't relish having to explain to my daughter why her fairly new and expensive vacuum cleaner had been demobilised by a green plastic snake and secondly the snake had been given to my little grandson earlier in the week and he was sitting on the sofa watching the proceedings with a ready to cry expression on his face. I had visions of his parents arriving home to find a child screaming 'nanny killed my nake (sic)' and a horrid smell of burnt plastic in the air.
I eventually subdued both snake and cleaner and with only a few bruises to show for it too, one of them on my toe which had somehow contacted with the cleaner.
Until then we had had a successful weekend. I'd armed myself with all the necessary things to entertain two children for two days. Ice cream, chocolate chip cookies, three family sized packs of Wagon Wheels and a lucky bag cone each. The latter might have been lucky for the kids but wasn't for me because one of them contained a very noisy toy gun with an apparently inexhaustible battery. But apart from that it was fine.
We went to the South Hill show where the pasta a picture won a second and I had the ignominy of discovering that my rhubarb, although the only entry in its class, only got a third.
Talking with friends afterwards we agreed that vegetable shows don't always bring out the best in people. You just can't help walking round sneering at other people's carrots and bemoaning the fact that the judged marked down your tea loaf because of that tiny little crater in the middle.
But it's fun, and very British. Cream teas, flower arrangements, displays of vegetables, fruit, jams and cakes. There used to be as show in Devon where the longest runner bean was measured against the leg of the prettiest girl, which is so unpolitically correct it runs right off the scale, but who cares.
The next day we had lunch at my friend Bobby's house where we ate some of the show's rejects, including my failed rhubarb which Bobby's granddaughter had made into a delicious crumble, which just goes to show that looks aren't everything.
On Saturday afternoon I had given in to pressure and taken the children to MacDonalds, which they, of course, adore. I don't. I've never managed to work out who they test out the adult meals on to see if their portion control is adequate but I suspect it must be someone with a very small stomach. Perhaps Naomi Campbell? And however clever it is to mark everything with adjectives meaning 'big' - ie 'whopper' - it doesn't fool those of us who know what a square meal is. It may be called a 'quarter pounder' but four ounces of mince is four ounces of mince in my book. And why so mean with the little sauce sachets? In the USA you at least get to have as many as you need, not one tiny one each. I also noted that my grandson carefully ate the top of his bun then turned it over and ate the bottom, leaving the disc of meat on the side of the plate. Loved the toy, hated the burger was the message.
And so to Sunday evening, where after the little contremps with the snake I was managing to look cool calm and collected while we waited for Mum and Dad to return.
And then both cats decided to throw their own pussy spanner into the works by climbing right onto the roof. And wouldn't you just know it that the parents chose the moment to arrive at the very second the cats were sitting in the gutter and wailing piteously while a bedraggled grandmother was hanging out of the upstairs window with an aluminium ladder in one hand and a tin of tuna in the other.
See what I mean about not having to make anything up?