Olive

For years I thought her birthday was the 8th August and sent cards, presents and flowers and phoned her on the 8th every year and I never forgot because it was the same day as a good friend's birthday and my cats were born on that day and I remembered phoning her to tell her on the day.

Then, when she was 90 she told me that actually her birthday was the 10th and this year she was having her ears pierced as a present to herself because she'd always fancied it and why not?

The past being a different country, Olive has been and is still my translator. From a time when most people knew their lot in life and made the best of it and were happy with an absence of trouble, rather than aching after lives led by other people. Working 'in service', then a hat shop, visiting disfigured soldiers in hospital during the war, raising a family, holidaying at the coast, a trip abroad to Austria in the 1980s. Everything else is details. Olive feels incredibly lucky to have had such an untroubled life and to still be enjoying every day. Of course it hasn't been untroubled, but she always had a loving husband, a home and enough money to pay bills and feed her family, who stayed close to home and had families of their own.

What more could a young working class girl ask for?

Over the past 15 years, since Arthur died, she's taken up painting and won a Commended in a regional competition; worked, until the last year or two, in the local Help The Aged shop; regularly attend concerts in Manchester city centre; won a Best Garden competition (with a little help from her weekly gardener); fostered pets; knitted jumpers for Kiwi oil-slicked penguins, and been an all-round wonderful Grandmother to me.

Next week I'm going to visit for a couple of days. Yeh! Just the two of us for two whole days and nights. I'm going to ask her everything in case it's the last time I ever see her. Although it'll be just as nice to just be together, she's that sort of person.

PS: The first time I ever Googled for people, my grandmother was the only member of my family with a virtual presence, she was listed as an official knitter for Trafford Borough Council.