You now no longer have any grandparents.
You miss them.
You were interested to discover yesterday that your new packet of paracetamol came encrusted with Braille, but it reminded you that you will now not be able to ask Grandma whether she finds the little bits of Braille on the buttons you press on the buses to tell the driver when to stop as pointless as you do. I mean, it’s a button exactly where you’d expect to find a button to stop the bus, assuming you can find that. There are no other buttons to confuse it with because there are no other buttons to press. And frankly, without verbal announcements of each upcoming stop, a blind person wouldn’t know when to press it anyway.
Admittedly, some buses now do announcements, but only, you think, after someone has pressed the button. The only thing that might be helpful, in fact, would be to get buses to pause, with an announcement, at every stop as a matter of course.
Which would also allow blind people to get on in the first place in order to press the button. Can’t put out your hand at a request stop if you can’t see the big red bus coming, can you? The fact that this would also prevent people newly arrived from Russia seeing lots of buses sail past them on a regular basis because they’ve forgotten to put their hand out again has nothing to do with your ire, of course.
And then there’s Grandad. You were gutted not to be able to share McGonagall with Grandad when you discovered him this Burns Night, particularly as, when his house was being cleared, your Aunt found a McGonagall book, with newspaper clippings about the great man preserved inside.
This now has pride of place on your bookshelf, but it’s not the same. Obviously.
It was also something of a relief that Proms season passed you by in a bit of a blur this year. The first thing you normally did after they published the list the last few years was to get on the phone and see if there was something you could go to together.
And recently you also realised that you were finding it odd not to have Granny Rod’s legendarily long phone calls to rely on now you have the Star. No longer than that. No really very much longer than that. Everyone in your family keeps a chair by the phone even now. The woman never left her village, but she sure knew how to keep in touch. She’d have loved the Internet.
Anyway, it’s not that Granny would have been glad to listen to you burbling about the Star’s latest achievement – you suspect that Granny was somewhat uninterested in really small babies qua babies – but more that your weekly trips to the doctor’s could have been dissected. You never realised how much her obsession with small ailments has rubbed off on you and how irritating it is that no one else in the family seems particularly interested.
Except perhaps your Uncle. Hmmm.
