I've told Ben that this grandmother story may beat his 'are you sure you don't want some of these cheese balls?' grandmother story, if that's possible. (Now I feel compelled to share Ben's grandmother story with everyone so people can vote on which is funnier. But I don't think that's particularly fair, because a) no one knows Ben apart from me, and even I've never *seen* him; b) Ben's story is sacrosanct to Ben himself; c) maybe neither of these stories are that funny if you write them down; and d) I just gave away his punch line (sorry, Ben).) But I have to share my grandmother story! So pretend it's funny, all of you. Write me emails waxing eloquent about its funniness, or something. Lie if you have to. (For some reason, this story has never been told to me until a few nights ago. I don't know how my mother kept it to herself this long.)

My grandmother Bonnie died over twenty years ago, when I was five. She was a very small, beautifully dressed, vivacious, brave, naive sort of person. Not exactly prim, but almost innocent, and very very funny. In the early seventies, when she was 50ish, she went off by herself on a coach holiday through Europe. Somewhere in Scandinavia, possibly Oslo, the coach passengers were told to go and buy themselves some lunch. Their tour guide recommended they buy bread and fillings in separate shops. So Bonnie went trundling off, got herself a bread roll, and went in search of some meat for her sandwich. Believing she had found a deli, she entered a shop and began pointing at various things, asking the shop assistants to help her. They seemed bemused. Not daunted, Bonnie opened her bread roll to signal her need for sandwich filling. You can guess what kind of shop she *actually* was in, right? Well, she didn't. Finally the owner had to take her outside and point at the flashing red and blue neon sign she had (bizarrely) missed on the way in. 'Sex Shop'.

:D I can only *guess* what she was pointing at to ask for sandwich meat... Apparently my grandmother's friend Tom laughed so hard when she returned to New Zealand and told this story that he literally fell off a chair.