’It’s as if obesity is a disease you can catch, like chicken pox’

MY mother’s gone radio silent; it’s Tuesday afternon and her Monday morning phone call that has punctuated my life as inevitably and reliably as the weekly shop, never arrived. 

And I know she’s not “traipsing round the world like a Romany, visiting my children god knows where,” which might mean she’s at home, putting her feet up, as she likes to say- though this is a preposterous image if ever there was one.

I can’t talk now love,” she answers, when I call her, “I’ve got six old people to collect from the Majestic.”

I’ve heard of The Royal Duchy and Greenbanks hotels, which she frequents from time to time for lunch and, of course, St Michael’s, where she swims in the morning, but I’ve never heard of the Majestic.

“What hotel is that?” “Hotel?” she says, “fat chance of that. The Majestic is a wine warehouse.”

“And which old people? And how old is old?”

“They’re all at least ten years younger than me,” she says, with so much indignation in her voice you’d think they could help it.

Her old friend arrived in Cornwall two days ago, she explains, “she’s taken a house just up the road but she’s come with an entourage of in-laws for a family reunion. Though why I’ll never know – all they do is bicker. And none of them can walk properly, and as for their alcohol consumption, God only knows how they get up in the morning. I’ve never seen such bad habits and sloth.”

My mother is as much a fan of bad eating habits and sloth as you’d imagine the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey to be and just as disinclined to withold personal opinion on these matters – particularly when talking to her children, with whom she feels entirely free to give even less of a fig about political correctness than she usually does.

“I mean the way people talk – it’s as if obesity is a disease like chicken pox,” she says, “like it’s something you catch. But if I ate as much as they do I’d be on a zimmer frame too. It takes me two hours to get them down the stairs and into the car in the morning. And it takes even longer at night to get them back up.”

Her friend is doing her best, she says, but there are six of them. Anyway, now her friend has “taken herself off in high dudgeon, because her in-laws keep looking out at the harbour and saying, “well it’s hardly St. Tropez.”

My mother, who disapproves of bad manners quite as much as she dispproves of bad eating habits and sloth says, “I mean really, it’s very rude. I don’t blame her at all. I’d be in high dudgeon too. What’s wrong with the harbour? It’s a lovely harbour.”

“And the drinking!” she says, “I mean I’m all for a glass of wine. Haven’t I always encouraged you to drink in the evening? And now look at you? Drinking has done you the world of good. But let’s be honest, there’s such a thing as excess,” which is the only thing my mother dislikes more than bad eating habits, bad manners and sloth.

“I’ve had to taxi them backwards and forwards to that Majestic and I tell you, there’s nothing they don’t load in their trollies – it’s not just beer and wine, it’s shorts [sic].”

“I think you mean ‘shots’.”

“And the shorts go into their trollies along with the rest of it, and then into the boot of my car – clank, clank, until I drop them back to their house and the next morning it’s all gone and it’s back to the Majestic again. I mean what on earth are old people getting up to with shorts anyway?”

“And as for looking presentable,” she says, becoming doughtier and doughtier, “I know it’s more difficult as you get older but...”

“But what?” I say.

She pauses. “All of them wear elasticated trousers,” she says, recoiling as if elastic trousers, unlike obesity, might be catching, “and before you say anything, I am nearly eighty,” she continues, “and no one is going to convince me there’s any excuse for that.”

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