My grandma has got a boyfriend. He's called Phillip.

My Gran doesn't reveal exactly how old she is. We'd probably need to carbon date her or count her rings to find out for sure but I'd guess that she's probably approximately two hundred years old. In any case, we'd assumed she was safely put out to pasture. But no, she's wandered into the stud farm.

All the problems started when she got her new hip. It's made up of some super-metal alloy and she's now unstoppable. She's like an eighty year old Terminator, but scarier.

Recently I've been enjoying shocking people by telling them that my grandma brought her new boyfriend to my granddad's funeral. Now whilst this statement is true, it is slightly misleading. My maternal grandmother did bring her partner to the funeral, but it was my dad's father that had passed away. Nonetheless I still enjoyed the look on people's faces when I told them.

In fact her husband died thirteen years ago. I'm sure you'll agree with me that she seems to have moved on a bit too fast. I wanted to know how she's met this elderly Casanova. Turns out that she saved a seat for him at a game of bingo at Age Concern, an organisation that I now suspect is a sort of match.com for the mature singles.



Singles Night in Leicester



Everyone I tell about this will inevitably have one of two responses: The nice people say "Oh it's sweet". Well, they haven't had to listen to my grandma's discussion about how his chin whiskers tickle her face.  The unkind people (boys) say "I bet he's shagging your Gran". This response makes me feel very wrong, a bit like Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense when he finds out he's dead.



Phillip, at the tender age of about seventy, is my Gran's junior. Yep, she's a cougar. She's always liked Elizabeth Taylor and loved Joan and Jackie Collins (no, they're not the same person). She's obviously been following Demi Moore's tweets. Maybe she watched Courtney Cox's new sitcom (she's probably the only one who did). In any case, she's a cradle snatcher. I don't understand the current trend for women to opt for younger men. My boyfriend is almost seven years older than me and he's still the least mature. As I glance over at him now he's wearing his Superman Pyjamas and playing Streets of Rage on his iPhone.



"No, you can't get ice cream until after you've had your dinner."



Now I recently visited her house for breakfast. What I'd expected was boiled eggs and soldiers, perhaps a mug of Yorkshire Tea. What I got instead was the news that they're engaged.

This is shocking news.

I panicked at the thought of several more cousins. I don't have enough money to afford a whole extra family's birthday cards and Christmas presents. My mum took the prospect of having a new step-brother and sister at the age of fifty very calmly. But I've seen all the Disney movies, and what do they teach you? That you shouldn't eat apples and that Step-Parents are always evil.

At some point I shall be a bridesmaid at their wedding, probably wearing a dress that she's knitted herself.  I suppose I will have to comfort myself with the thought that there's no stopping the Terminator anyway, and that I haven't seen her looking so happy for thirteen years.

Quarter Life Strife

I recently went to see Biffy Clyro at DeMontfort Hall in Leicester. In the middle of the mosh pit, surrounded by a sea of flailing teenagers there was one older guy with grey hair. I stared at this odd man out until I suddenly realised- that weirdo is my father.

He turned fifty-five recently and at this turning point where most men buy red sport cars my Dad started going to rock gigs. Mum permitted him to shave off his beard and grow his hair longer, she tolerated his newfound penchant for black jeans, I only hope she’ll step in before he gets ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on his knuckles.

I observed these changes in my father as you might watch a natural history programme. Sometimes in my head I imagine a voice over by David Attenborough, such as “And now, the adult male only too aware of his own mortality will act like a complete twat”. Fully confident that, being female, I was less likely to have a mid-life crisis and even if I did it was at least a couple of decades away.

How wrong I was.

A couple of months ago I turned twenty-five. Usually I wake up on my birthday very excited that for a whole day I can freely be a pain in the arse and no one is permitted to tell me off. I’m the sort of person who tells everyone it’s their birthday- the postman, the cashier in the grocers, the tramp sitting on the floor outside the grocers. But on this particular occasion I felt like I wanted to keep it a secret.

I started to think about all the things I should have done by now. I rooted out an old diary from school as I knew I’d written a list entitled ‘Things to Do Before I’m 25’. I hadn’t done too badly- I had succeeded in two points: A Get a boyfriend and B Move to London. I had failed on points C and D though. I have not travelled around the world and it’s unlikely that I’ll win the Nobel prize for Literature in the ten months left before I turn 26. I had also failed on the final point E - Get an Andrex Puppy.

I started to fixate on this- I’d always wanted a dog. Why hadn’t I got one? Because to have a dog you need to have a house with a garden. Why don’t I have a house with a garden? Because I don’t have any money. Had I made a mistake picking an industry where it’s rare you earn the mega-bucks? Should I give it all up and become a financial advisor?

This line of thought led to an entire afternoon spent on facebook obsessively looking at what all my University mates were up to. I haven’t been on facebook for such a length of time since the Great Cider Upchucking of 2006 when I spent a full day de-tagging photos of myself.

Cider Chunder 2006: Scene of the Crime

My first instinct was to go for a haircut. I got a fringe, a straight across one like I had back when I was twelve and dreaming of Andrex Puppies. My second thought was to pretend that I was still at University and hadn’t grown up. I visited a friend in Bristol and we went to a nightclub. On the way in I was delighted to be ID-ed by the bouncer. The fringe was clearly working. I showed him my driving licence with such pride you’d think I was presenting him with the Nobel Prize I haven’t won yet.

My friend went to the bar but I headed straight to the floor and started dancing around enthusiastically. Soon I was beginning to feel a bit tired, I’m usually in bed by now I thought, and the music seemed a bit loud. I paused and looked around. There I was in the middle of the dance floor surrounded by a sea of flailing teenagers. Not only was I getting older, but I was turning into my father.

I heard a voice in my head: “And now, the adult female only too aware of her own mortality will act like a complete twat”.

Talkies

I promised myself I wouldn’t waste money on popcorn when I went to the cinema last week. Most of the time it’s been sitting there all day and developed a subtle taste comparable to cardboard. And it’s so expensive- I’d spent the day scrounging an Orange Wednesday code off my mates so why should I lose the money I’ve saved on popcorn? A relic of the Great Depression it became popular in cinemas during this time as it costs mere pennies to make but people will pay much more for it. I was so sure this time I wouldn’t be taken in by this exploitative capitalism. 



Yet as soon as the smell of popcorn wafts over from the gauntlet of snack counters in the foyer I’m hooked, I’m like Pavlov’s Dogs- and I don’t just mean dribbling. Ten minutes later, there I am in the back row shovelling it into my mouth, surrounded by fellow grazers up to their elbows in popcorn tubs.


Having popcorn in the cinema is a tradition which is clearly too ingrained in my psyche to fight. But you know what’s not a tradition…? Talking during the movie. As far as I’m concerned the only noise I should hear in the cinema is the sound of the film and the soft nibbling of the aforementioned snack.


When did talking in the cinema become so common? I conducted a survey amongst my vast array of friends to see if they had been bothered by it. Both of them had. In fact they said that in recent visits to the cinema they’d always had some level of talking. It’s clearly on the verge of becoming an epidemic.


My first bad experience was having the man beside me, between sending text messages, explain the plot twists and story layers of Wanted to his girlfriend throughout the film. For those of you who’ve not seen it, it’s no Inception and about as twisty as a ruler and has about as many levels as an ice rink. I would have told him to shut up but he was huge, he looked like someone who might ask you for ID when you’re going into a club and you’d give it to him even though you’re clearly at least twenty-five. So I asked my boyfriend to tell him to shut up. On the plus side the fight that followed was actually more entertaining than the action sequence on screen at that moment.


Since then I’ve been nervy about asking people to be quiet and tend to put up with it. Once, in a particularly dodgy Cineworld, I was surrounded by a crowd of guys who proceeded to heckle throughout Ironman. I gently advised that it was unlikely Robert Downey Jr. would react to their taunts but this only made them worse and they developed into a kind of frat party in the cinema. I decided to find an usher to quieten them as during the golden age of cinema peacefulness I remember being ‘shh-ed’ by many an usher. The only one I could find was sulking in a corner and, after laughing at me, followed me into the cinema to attempt to discipline the rabble. Turns out he went to the same school as them and a few minutes later he took over as chief heckler. Iron man and I didn’t stand a chance.


So what happens now for those of us who enjoy the quiet?


We can go and see movies at 3am to try and avoid the crowds. We can commute for an hour and pay fifteen pounds for a ticket to see a film in a high-class regional cinema. We can wait for the film to come out on DVD. My best suggestion is to use that lasting tradition of cinema to combat the talkers: Throw your popcorn at them.