Calum Grant

Are everyone's parents mental?

I have been on a boat trip with my parents today, and saw lots of lovely houses on rocky forested little islands.

I am convinced that they are completely mental.

The evidence against my mum:
- My mum drives like a snail and got beeped twice today.
- In the car she put the fan up to level 4 for 20 minutes, but can't drive with the sunroof open.
- Needs car sweets or she will end up around a tree-trunk
- Speaks English with a Swedish accent
- She likes swimming naked
- She stays in her dressing gown until 11am
- Writes scribbly notes about everything, which turns into a huge pile of disorganised and indistinguishable scrap.
- Is obsessed with ecology and nuclear disarmament
- Writes to her MP
- Never looks where she puts her feet
- A very poor and begrudging cook. Fails to remember any of my likes and dislikes.
- Is extremely underweight
- Spreads urine in the garden (part of the territory of having a biological toilet).

The evidence against my dad:
- His pronunciation of foreign words (especially Swedish words) is atrocious.
- Has a loud voice
- He blurts out words. E.g. "Look, a dwarf" at a dwarf. (This actually happened)
- He mixes languages, mispronouncing and misquoting words.
- He has failed to string even an elementary Swedish sentence together, in spite of going on dozens of courses, being in Sweden for a total of 10 years of his life, and having a Swedish wife for 35 years.
- He goes to bed at 2am, then can't get out of bed in the morning
- He has piles and piles of paper that just keeps on growing
- Has a big nose
- Spreads urine in the garden.

The evidence against me: (Hey, where did that come from?)
- Imagines he is cleverer than he really is
- Loves reading and listening to everything Swedish, yet never has, and probably never will, live in Sweden
- Spends far too much time on the computer
- Gets really annoyed with religious belief and creationism
- Keeps not one but three blogs.
- Imagines he can write a compiler to make Perl run as fast as C++
- Needs thick curtains or he can't sleep
- Mildly autistic? Not really a problem apart from that time I got dumped for not being empathetic enough.
- Looks at his feet when he walks. My excuse is because I got bitten by a snake once, and don't want a repeat visit to hospital.
- Wrote a visual programming language
- Has a parrot (okay, 49% of a parrot)
- Tries to play badminton, buts gets beaten every time. One day Pareem...
- Tries to climb but always cheats on the difficult routes
- Can't decide whether skiing is better than snowboarding
- Spent an hour today fishing for mosquitos in the water barrel
- Puts up with a mad girlfriend, which leads nicely on to

The evidence against Charlotte:
- Has 51% of a parrot
- Buys everything organic
- Loves catalogues, e.g. Argos and Next
- Shuffles a deck of cards one card at a time
- Needs thin curtains or she can't sleep
- Has a Micra with really bashed-up wheels. This is why I have never let her drive my TT.
- Talks a lot about shakra points, especially when drunk.
- Forgets to water plants. Pah! Ecology starts in the home...
- Thinks tidying is moving one pile of clutter to another.

posted by Calum Grant @ 5:39 PM