As usual, the annual Boxing Day visit with my grandfather was brightened this year by his 82 year-old girlfriend.

“I like a tall man,” she shared, “None of these goddamn little squirts. Annik, how tall is your boyfriend?”

“I’m not really sure. I think he’s about 5’9″?”

“Well that’s no good. You should get a new one.”

My father treats a lot of old folk in nursing homes around the Hills, and they are all nuts. Based on the anecdotes he shares about these visits, I am definitely going to stuff him and Mum into a home the moment one of them loses their glasses and then finds them on top of their head.

Some snippets:

• At a certain Christmas Carols charity concert one year, a mature lady did not feel she was being given enough attention as everyone was looking towards the performers on stage and not at her. In an admirable effort, she stripped down to her birthday suit and strutted up and down the aisle of the nursing home’s dining hall while waving her arms above her head. Obeying instructions from staff to ignore this particularly attention-seeking patient, the other geriatrics simply stared ahead and continued to watch the carols. Undeterred, the naked lady walked to the side of the stage and unplugged all the speakers, then climbed on top of one of them and began singing her own carols.

• One blind patient was admitted after she fell and broke a hip while frantically going through her house searching for her missing husband. When the paramedics were called to attend to the blind lady, they discovered her husband hiding in a wardrobe, giggling at his visually-impaired wife’s inability to win Hide and Seek. In an apparent attempt to make amends, the husband would visit his blind wife at the Home for lunch every day. The nurse would place a plate in front of each of them and explain to the blind lady, “Your peas are at twelve o’clock, your potatoes are at three o’clock, your ham is at six o’clock and your carrots are at nine o’clock.” The old man would smile at the nurse, wait for her to leave, and then reach over and spin his wife’s plate forty-five degrees.

• Foolishly, I accompanied my father on a call to a nursing home when I was about eleven. Bored and wandering the halls, I got talking to an old bird who pulled me into her room with the promise of a gift. As I silently assessed my nearest emergency exits, she shuffled around her kitchen opening and closing cupboards and muttering to herself. “Why don’t you let me go and we’ll just call it square?” I suggested, but she had apparently found what she was looking for and pressed an apple and a pear into my hands. ”I got these for you,” she lied as I backed away. Out in the hall, I shoved them into the nearest fruit bowl and then made my father take me home.

• Another lady ate all her blankets, then bitched about being cold at night and having a sore tummy.

Earlier this year, a blogger friend asked me to be a bridesmaid in her upcoming wedding. Deciding that this was probably as close as I would ever get to my lifelong dream of being a Flower Girl, as there is not an overly high demand in the current economic climate for twenty-two year old Flower Girls, I accepted.

A frequent visitor of bridal forums, my blogger friend had come to learn many new acronyms. Most of these were fairly self-explanatory (eg MIL = mother-in-law, and so on), but some were already deeply ingrained in my brain as something else entirely.

“You will be fabulous as a BM,” my blogger friend said to me in an email.

And all I could imagine was myself being eaten, and then defecated, by a giant monster.

Concerned about the oddities of my family, I recently asked my boyfriend whether he likes my parents.

“I like your dad,” he replied.

My brother, trying to explain dungeons and dragons to my mother:

“It’s like telling a story, but it takes fucking ages.

So one nerd says, “Holy shit, there’s a big scary dragon over there!” and the next nerd says, “Well I’ll shove a rocket launcher up its arse,” but the first nerd says, “You can only shove a rocket launcher up its arse if you roll a six or more….nope, sorry, you’re dead.”

Then they wish they had friends.”

When I was a kid, my mum befriended a lady from church who had two daughters either side of my age. Preferring to be stronger, faster and more intelligent than my playmates, I chose to spend most of my time with the younger daughter, Kate. We would dress up her dolls and take them into the garden, then climb onto the roof while our mothers weren’t looking.

One afternoon, we were crawling through some bushes when Kate suddenly turned to me and said, “I did a poo in my pants.”

“Flush your undies down the toilet,” I advised.

“Alright,” Kate agreed and walked gingerly back into the house. I followed her and stood outside the bathroom door for a few minutes.

“Kate?” I called out, “What does it feel like? The poo in your pants.”

She paused for a few seconds, then answered, “Bees.”

It wasn’t until much later that I wondered when she ever had a pantload of bees to contend with.

As an adult, I seem to have a knack for getting in trouble with the law. Not that I do anything particularly bad, but anytime I do disobey the rules, I get busted at an extreme level. The second my car creeps over the speed limit, I become blinded by the flash of a camera or see a police car in my rear view mirror. (This is likely to happen on a long weekend so that I’ll lose half my license.) And whenever I park in the wrong spot, I cop a ticket (always the $180 ones.) We all break the little rules whenever we can and usually it goes unnoticed. But when I do it, I get fined.

I attribute this to a brief, yet intense, stint of shoplifting as a young teenager. My friend Brooke and I would waltz into Kmart in our school uniforms, fill empty McDonald’s cups with make-up and earrings and layer on underpants in the change room, then saunter out casually. But while Brooke relished the adrenaline rush of walking through the store’s security gates with her hidden booty, the whole thing made me ill with anxiety. I imagined the police breaking down my bedroom door and hauling me out from under the doona. (“That’s her, there’s the Lip Gloss Thief of Castle Hill!”) I lay awake at night, dreading the day we would eventually be caught. Fortunately, once we’d accumulated enough Max-Factor to last us until menopause, Brooke and I decided to quit while we were ahead and resumed our life as generally-law-abiding citizens. I’ve totally used up all my ‘get out of gaol free’ cards though.

Around this time every year, my mother sits at her computer for a day and types up her annual Family Newsletter. This usually opens with a witty anecdote about how domestically inept she is, describes something stupid my dad has done, bitches about the fact that my brother still lives at home, and then reveals everything embarrassing I’ve done during the year. Mum then prints out 400 copies and mails it to all her friends, family, neighbours, co-workers, bible study group, TAFE classmates, hairdressers, therapists and accountants. It’s up to me to avoid all those people for the following 12 months.

Past newsletters have included the following:

• Annik has stopped going to church in order to pursue a life of sin (2001)
• Annik lost her virginity (2002)
• Annik went drinking instead of studying for any of her HSC exams (2004)
• Annik got alcohol poisoning (2004)
• Annik has been dumped by the same boy three times (2005)
• Annik has begun experimenting with drugs (2006)
• Annik failed her uni degree (2006)
• Annik has gained a stack of weight (2006)

…and so on.

I wonder what little gems Ma will choose to include this year? She has quite a selection to choose from:

• Annik has quit no less than five jobs throughout 2008
• Annik got her nose pierced and refused to remove the ring despite various infections
• Annik lied to an entire South African community in order to exempt herself from completing a volunteer work assignment and gain compassionate priority for an international flight
• Annik had a seizure and wet her pants in front of a thousand odd people at the Hordern Pavillion
• Annik can’t remember her own birthday because she was so intoxicated she spent 3+ hours straight sitting on the same couch in front of a fan