Bernadette Strachan

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MAVIS  I gave my hirsute ward a delicious chewy treat and a bouncy new ball at the same time. Big mistake. She sat, motionless, between them,  whimpering with indecision. In the end I had to take them away and let her lie down to compose herself. I would be just the same if confronted with an 'Either Or' situation involving a naked Don Draper and a whole Vienetta.

GORDON RAMSAY  I'm taking a leaf out of his book. Evidently skilled in family diplomacy, he printed a critical open letter to his mother in law in a newspaper.  I have already taken out a full page advert in The Times bullet-pointing my real feelings about the foot spa my brother in law gave me last Christmas, and I'm drafting one for The Sun to my six year old daughter, making it clear that it's not cute to shout 'My Mummy has boobs' at visitors. But I'll sign it, a la Gordon, “lots of love”. Which makes everything OK.

THINGS I INTEND TO DO WHEN MY HUSBAND DIES  Buy a chihuahua.

IRISHISMS
"I'm not as green as I'm cabbage looking".

Handy for when you suspect you're being hoodwinked. If your boyfriend comes home covered in love-bites he swears are self inflicted; if a shop assistant says “they suit you” when you emerge red faced from a changing room in a pair of leggings that give you the arse of Bernard Manning; if your Mother says the reason you are the spitting image of the milkman is her craving for yoghurt all through her pregnancy, you can say, wryly, “I'm not as green as I'm cabbage looking” or, in other words, “I may have a naïve face but I am actually rather clever and I don't believe you”.

WEDDINGS  God, aren't they complicated these days? Along with the invitation to a 'do' we received this week, there was a booklet. With an index. It included FAQ's. One of the questions was 'What can we expect?' (How I wish the answer had been an honest 'Damp vol au vents and too many speeches' but no.) My friend Tamsin's big day a few years ago was quite a different kettle of wedding fish. It wasn't done on a budget: as she gravely told me “there is no budget”. She bought her wedding dress in a Warehouse sale and sent the 'bridesmaid' (i.e. least scruffy attending friend) out on the morning of the wedding to buy a cake for the reception in her tiny flat. The bridesmaid came back with Flintstones fairy cakes. When the screaming had subsided, the bridesmaid defended her decision. “They're discounted. Because they're damaged.”

And when Tamsin sent photos of the happy occasion to her new family in Australia, her Mother in Law wrote back “We can see your knickers through that dress”.

Now, that's a wedding.

I LIKE HIM  If we didn't have Sir David Attenborough, somebody would have to make him up. Simultaneously old fashioned and modern, he has a passion for  the natural world that keeps him young. When we were about ten, my best friend and I wrote to him. I drew him a picture of a cat. A not very good picture of a cat. And he wrote back! In his own handwriting, a personalised letter each. His letter to me ended “I must go now, as I can hear my wife calling me for dinner”. When I heard, in 2007, that his wife had died  after forty seven years of marriage, that curly writing came back to me and I felt a pang at his loss.