F-F-F-FOURTEEN

When my daughter was fourteen I tried to kill her with an umbrella but my sisters-in-law stopped me. I had a good excuse - murder was definitely called for…if I’d had a blog then I wouldn’t have given her the name Amazon: I hated her for the best part of ten months!

That morning my sister-in-law called me; her daughter, Lindy, was staying over,

‘Where’s Amazon?’ she said.

‘In bed. They haven’t surfaced yet,’ I told her. It was about 9am.

‘Oh I think you should check on them.’ She said she would wait while I did. So I put the phone down and went to sneak a peak at them. EMPTY! They must’ve climbed out of the window. I rushed back into the living room and picked up the phone.

‘How did you know?’

‘Because Lindy was brought home by the police at five in the morning. She’d been caught talking to some boys in a stolen car.’

‘Where’s Amazon?’

‘No idea.’

So that’s why the umbrella. We searched all day and didn’t see her till after seven. As she walked into the flat her aunts had to create a circle around her to keep me from killing her; she hadn’t listened to me for months.

I wouldn’t have dared do anything like that when I was her age; the only thing that went out of our windows was ice skates; my brother and I dropped them out so that we could LIE to our mother, saying that we were going to a friend’s house. The final destination was ice skating on Queen’s Park pond.

Of course we got caught. An aunt, who lived miles away in Cumbernauld, had decided on that very day to visit. There she was, sitting on the bus that passed the park, staring out of the window, looking at us circling the bumpy ice in full view of anyone from the main road – which was miles from our house. What are the chances of that eh?

Grounded: not murdered, obviously.

My oldest grandson is fourteen and is still lovely but I don’t live with him so maybe he isn’t so lovely to his parents. There was some dissension a while ago; I pray that these little members of my family can communicate properly when the mad time arrives – I wouldn’t want to go through that again…even though I’m removed from responsibility by being grand.