Granny feels rather out of touch with the late realisation that so many grandpeeps have gone in search of an alternative (C8) to the tried and tested, but the examples keep coming. Take Bruce Roberts of Guildford who recalls, “with the birth of my first grandchild, I was slow in deciding what my new name would be. It was taken out of my hands, and I was assigned Groppy (an amalgamation of Grumpy and Poppy). How rude! And of course, never true.”
Jim Pollitt of Wahroonga says that his wife, Chris, “decided to be known as Crispy (Chris P, geddit?) by the grandchildren, but the eldest kept saying Pispy, so my wife settled for Pipi, and I am Papa.”
“When my great-grandson was learning to speak and was calling my son Pop, it was obviously too confusing for him to also call me Pop, so it was somehow determined that I would be named Fossil Pop, and naturally, it’s been shortened to simply Fossil,” writes David Roberts of Dondingalong. “Gets plenty of laughs when out in public!”
Barry Lamb of Eastwood enjoys “trying to visualise legislation being ‘struck down’ in the same way as imagining hospital beds being closed and figures released.”
“Not content with a simple column, Granny took over a whole page in Friday’s Herald ,” notes Nola Tucker of Kiama. “Is this the beginning of a Netanyahu-inspired grab for more territory? An ambitious old lady can do a lot with a pair of knitting needles. How about getting rid of those boring sports pages? And maybe the editorials? Unnecessary. Grannies always know what is going on; mostly scurrilous. Who reads the business stuff except to become depressed? Grannies Rule! Go, Granny, Go!”
“What a legend of the Columneighters,” says Daniel Low of Pymble. “George appears in the feature article and then gets an encore as the last contributor in the actual column. I’ll be lucky if I get a look-in for congratulating him.”
“Not using the toilet while the train was stationary (C8), was certainly necessary on the steam trains I used to catch to and from boarding school in South Africa in the ’60s,” recalls Ken Arnold of Leura. “Flushing those toilets operated a flap that opened directly onto the track below. I believe the toilet in the Artemis ll spacecraft operated on a similar basis. I wonder if they had the equivalent, space age, signage?”
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