Occasionally you need to qualify a comment and, for the sake of her dignity, I need to qualify this one. My mum is 88 and sometimes what she means to say is not what she actually says. Put it down to the depredations of age …
An example from a recent trip to Newcastle springs to mind. What she meant to say was something like: “Two shandies and I’m three sheets to the wind”. So, what you really don’t expect your elderly mother to say to the assembled mourners towards the end of a funeral tea is: “Two shandies and I’m anyone’s!”.
