Roots!

Well I have been very anti-social haven't I?! It seems like such a long time since I last posted anything here, with so many odd things happening, that I can't decide what I should post...too much to say, so I say nothing at all.
So rather than talk about all these mad, chaotic things in the here and now, I think I will indulge myself with reminiscing...and so I think I'll trace my anti-social roots.
My Grandmother, Gran as we called her, was a strange woman, a small prickly-hedgehog, as I recently heard her described.
She had been a beautiful young woman, a real stunner, very much in keeping with the looks of the icons of her era: with black hair and very blue eyes and features that lent themselves to sepia, a straight nose, high cheekbones, well shaped eyebrows and full lips. She was 5 foot tall with straight shoulders and elegant, lithe limbs and a slim, sweeping neck. In her youth she had a bust, a waist and hips, just as Moviestar looking women in the 1940s were expected to, a real hour glass figure. Even at 70 she measured 37, 27, 37 - I know this piece of trivia as we had a dress made for her Birthday party because she just couldn't find a single, modern dress that she was prepared to wear, or that seemed to fit her properly.
I loved her immensely and she was a small, fragile rock who held my world solid with her strange unconditional love.
But she was bloody awkward and rather eccentric, a punk before her time. She refused to get up until lunchtime and stayed up until the early hours reading horror and thrillers. She was both desensitized and unshockable and we would sit up and watch certificate 18 films with her when they came on the television without her ever thinking we may actually be terrified. She considered sending a child to bed to be an act of cruelty. In fact telling a child to do anything constituted neglect and cruelty in her odd view and so when with her, my sister and I did whatever we liked...literally. We were feral.
She lived off tea and chocolate and flicked cigarette ash everywhere. I had a childhood of scorch marks where she'd turned round and the end of a dimp caught hold of us...singed our clothes and brandished pink spots on the arms; the fierce bashing she did to extinguish the spread of seeping brown across the polyester fibres of the seventies was often more painful than the burn itself! If she came back from the spirit world, it'd be signalled by a billowing smog of smoke and a smell of Regal fags...they'd be calling it Armageddon...but the woman could barely be bothered visiting you at Christmas, the trek from another world would definitely be beyond her.
She refused to eat vegetables, or rice or potato skins and would eat her cake before her dinner...then leave her dinner and have another cake. She wasn't suffering from dementia, she was always like that. Our Grandad idolised her, but she never held with that old-fashioned view of cooking him dinner...he knew where the kitchen was...she stood for no nonsense off him. Although he died before I was born, he was apparently a wonderful man, kind, gentle and softly spoken with the patience of a saint...and Gran was his deity.
We lived with Gran as children, it was her, Mum, my sister, me and the dog and Gran's indolent, two-fingered approach to life shaped my world view. 
So I apologise for my rudeness and lack of interest in whether you read, or I write for that matter, because, when I was just a lump of clay, before the fingers gnarled up with arthritis, a strange, beautiful lady shaped me to never give a damn, but rather to stay up too late reading and to tut and give my husband a haughty look and then wait in disdain, while he brings me chocolate and apologises for some unforgivable misdemeanor or oversight that has never occurred.