Generation games (From The Northern Echo)

Generation games

4:12pm Thursday 1st September 2011 in Mum At Large By Ruth Campbell

WE were a bit reticent about leaving two of the older boys with Granny and Great Uncle Peter for a few days while we took the younger two away. But they all assured us it would be fine.

The boys love having the oldies to stay. Both in their 70s, their dad’s mother and uncle were brought up in a very different world. They don’t understand new technology, the bizarre fashions or the strange music they listen to nowadays.

But somehow, across the huge gulf that is the generation gap, they have made a connection. The oldies love watching the comings and goings of the boys and their friends, hearing what they’ve been up to and laughing at their antics.

The teenagers love the fact that Granny will wait on them hand and foot, discussing with them over breakfast what she is going to make for their tea, which always involves huge amounts of meat with vegetables and lots of gravy “because they’re growing boys”.

The boys and Great Uncle Peter also enjoy playing tricks on poor Granny, usually involving ringing her up on the house phone from their mobile and pretending to be someone in authority, which she always falls for.

It helps that Charlie is a gifted mimic. But if he called me up pretending to be an irate headmaster or the man from the local Indian takeaway telling me that they were waiting for someone to collect our order and that I owed him £70, I would probably tell them off and ground them for a week.

Granny, even after returning from the takeaway empty-handed, just laughed. “You boys,” she said, shaking her head.

When she offered to take them out for tea to her favourite restaurant – the cafe in Morrison’s supermarket – as a special treat, they took her at her word when she said they had to change into “something smart”.

“They came downstairs dressed in their suits with shirts and ties,” she told me over the phone, still laughing.

Granny is constantly amazed by the amount of new technology, from iPhones to laptops to iPods, the boys have and is baffled by what they can do with it all. “You boys, you all have computerised brains,” she says.

The truth is, it scares her. She has had a go at sending emails once, but was convinced every time she pressed an incorrect key she was going to blow the computer up.

Also, she worries about all the dangers of the internet, particularly identity theft. She even has her own personal document shredder at home to destroy everything with her name on it, just in case.

The boys’ dad thinks this is hilarious.

“Who would want to steal your identity?” he tells her. “If someone ended up with your identity, they would give it straight back.” (You can tell where the boys get it from).

“But, mark my words, it’s a serious problem,” she is always cautioning us. “I’ve read about it in the Daily Mail. You really can’t be too careful.”

Which is why, while we were away, there was a huge panic when Great Uncle Peter went into the living room to watch TV when the boys were out and discovered something quite disturbing on screen.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but Charlie’s bank account details are on the TV,” he told granny.

Granny had a look. She panicked and called Charlie. “Your bank account details are all over the TV, your name and account numbers and all sorts,” she told him.

Charlie was baffled. He rushed home to find out what all the fuss was about. It turned out that he’d forgotten to turn off the screen after he’d been playing a FIFA 2011 PlayStation game, which involves managing a football club.

So what Granny and Great Uncle Peter had seen was Charlie’s name and the breakdown of his account as manager, with detailed figures of transfer fees and the amount he’d made from sponsorship deals and ticket sales.

“I know I got some money for my 18th recently, but they must have thought I was absolutely loaded,” he told us later over the phone. “It had my total budget – £46m – on the screen.”

Still, just for a moment, and even if it was unintentional, at least Granny did manage to get one over on Charlie at last...

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