Things that would apall your grandmother?

[LunaMay]

Lighthearted - just missing my nanna thinking about this.

I was making a quick dinner while my mum was over and hovering about while chatting. The plan was some homemade chips and i grabbed a small knife and began peeling potatoes, next thing i get a playful slap on the shoulder and a reminder that my nan would have been appalled at me 'wasting so much potato' by not using a peeler.

Made me smile because i had that conversation with her plenty of times when she was still around. She never clicked on that i don't reuse teabags, that the clothes dryer wasn't just for emergencies, that i use fresh oil and dont have a frying pan in the cupboard with fat/oil older than me in it...

It would mostly have been around food; wasting food, snacking, eating in the street, greed, table manners.

-Eating or drinking in the street
-Smoking in the street (was perfectly acceptable everywhere else including inside her home)
-Bare shoulders in church
-Not wearing a hat or tights to any type of wedding function

• Having any alternative to a Sunday roast

-Olive oil -Joint bank accounts

'Dawdling' (walking too slowly). Anywhere we went had to be a brisk walk. Of course when I was about 5 this meant having to run to keep up all the way to the bakers and the Post Office.

I'm now a dawdler, mainly due to fibromyalgia. Sorry, Grandma

@Fluffruff

Eating in the street (my mother doesn’t like it too), I once asked her why and she said a) it’s vulgar and b) if there is someone nearby who can’t afford to buy food it’s not very fair on them - be discreet etc.

Granny would have been appalled at elbows on the table and also my kids jumping up and down from the table. I try to get them to stay seated but it is hard!

I don't really like eating in the street either and we were told not to do it when I was at school in the 80s.

Does it stem from other people being hungry and you rubbing their noses in it? Very interesting

@woodhill that was her interpretation anyway! I think from my granny’s generation there’d have been a bit of you can’t be so hungry that you need to eat on the hoof, withstand the hunger kind of thing.

Not a bad attitude tbh. I hate all the rubbish this FF culture creates.

I think a picnic is great though or a sandwich on a bench possibly

They I don’t iron. Everything was ironed. I once said you don’t need to do underwear abs she was appalled. I said it’s hardly likely anyone will see my knickers, she said ‘what if you fall over with a skirt on and people see you pants aren’t ironed?’ I rarely wear skirts and I’m sure if there was glimpse of my pants no I’ve would be thinking ‘oh my god her pants are creased!’

That I don’t go to mass. She went every day for the whole of her life, and I haven’t been in years.

That my children do not know their catechism, and that I do the big shop on a Sunday.

She would not have given two hoots about my brother’s long hair and tattoos, my own nose piercing, the fact that I work or earn more than my husband or went to uni. She was always one to back her family one hundred per cent. But she definitely would have been a bit shocked at my ungodliness.

We don't have a pot of dripping of indeterminate age in the kitchen

Being on our phones while in the same room

Not dusting & polishing every day

Not ironing

Vegans

Mine made us take cutlery to McDonald's as children (in the 90s) because it's common to eat with your fingers unless it's served on a newspaper (so fish and chips essentially).

Not accompanying any meal with a plate full of bread and butter.

Sunday lunch, liver and onions, pie and chips...always mopped up by my grandad with 5 slices of bread and butter.

Both my DGMs were ladies and very proud of their families. I also think eating in the street is common!

I think both would find my life very different to theirs and I've raised my DS flexibly because there was only two of us.

The fact that ridiculously we went up throwing food out every week from the fridge that's gone out of date. Grandma used everything nothing went to waste

My Nan was 57 when she died of lung cancer in the early part of this century. Her oldest grandchild was 20. She was a pop music loving, chain smoking, lager drinking member of the darts team who had two ex husbands, a string of infidelities behind her and a boyfriend 15 years her junior. There's very little I do she wouldn't have approved of. Maybe not keeping my living room like a show home

Going out without wearing a vest.

A vest and a slip

Nothing. My grandmother was very open-minded, she may not have liked or understood the ‘modern world’ but she knew the world moved on and accepted it. She’d shrug her shoulders and say ‘well, that’s how things are today’ After coming through 2 world wars, nothing much fazed her!

I only knew one grandmother and she died when I was 10 but I think she’d be quite pleased that I got a degree, and a higher degree, ran my own business and both my DDs also went to Uni.
She was divorced ( or so we thought, turned out she never was and her DH had bigamously remarried) brought her son up without any input from his father. She must have struggled financially and emotionally. My mother never liked her, bad mouthed her to all and sundry, which makes me sad. I think she had a tough life and she’d be happy to know women have more choices now.

My nana was an alcoholic smoker who got up the duff at 16. So she'd not be fussed about a lot of the 'shocking' things upthread.

She was a geordie and loved getting dolled up so might be shocked by how casual Londoners are for a night out.

I live in sin - have done for 8 years - one grandma would hate that 😂

Im vegetarian - same gran would find that stupid.

My partner does all the laundry - they'd both be baffled with that.

Not ironing the bath or hand towels

That I don’t starch and iron my dp and dd’s clothes each week. That I don’t have dinner ready and on the table for dp every single night when he finishes work. That I sometimes leave the house without make up on. That I don’t style my hair every day. That I let my dd eat in front of the TV and that sometimes as a family we don’t eat at the table. That I’m about to have my second baby out of wedlock! I don’t think she would be appalled by some of these necessarily but more shocked at how expectations for women have changed.

This thread has also strangely reminded me of going on holiday to the outer Hebrides in Scotland when I was only about 10. We stayed at a bed and breakfast run by a very old school lady in her 70’s. She was baffled by my dad asking for an iron and then stunned that my dad could actually use an iron. She had never seen a man iron in her entire life before. She literally stood and watched him iron in a mixture of suspicion and amazement

My nana is shocked i dont have set meal times

The cost of literally everything! I think her idea of what things cost stalled some time in the 70s and so any time anyone mentioned a cost it got a 'HOW MUCH??!' or a 'SCANDALOUS!'. We all basically lied about what we earned, or how much our homes cost, or what a new item of clothing cost as she might have combust.
She was utterly brilliant, one of the most inherently amusing people I've ever met, and I miss her loads.