What to say when those phone calls come...

You know the ones. Where they ask if you are Mrs Bad-ger when you said, 'This is Glenys' or when there is silence and funny background noise before they answer.
There is an alarming increase in these calls. Some are raising money, some offering an investment opportunity and some are downright scams which unfortunately people fall for and loose heaps of money.
Our answering machine mostly sorts them out as no-one seems to want to leave a message with our sweet grandson whose voice is on the recorded message. I get more calls to my  mobile than to the fixed phone although even the  mobile is susceptible. But sometimes I am expecting a call from someone and pickup.
My first response is to assure them that I am Glenys as I've said and that Mrs Badger is my mother in law, dear and cherished but long dead.
When they plough on there are questions to ask them: Who are you? Where are you ringing from? What is the weather like where you are?
Some ask politely how I am and I am tempted to tell them the whole story of the aches and pains and the  frustration with the insurance company and about the lack of rain. I did try this recently and they hung up in my ear. How rude!
A while back, in a coffee group an elderly lady, ie older than me, told me with a twinkle in her eye some of her suggested responses.
1. Can you hurry up because I am in the middle of something important. [Actually she was more specific than that but I'll leave it to your imagination.]
2. Can you be quick because i am robbing this house.
3. Are you the person who ordered 250 tubas? If you give me your address I'll send them to you?
Others simply let the caller rabbit on until they realise no one is listening and so it goes.

We also got to discussing who would make these calls. Who was so rotten as to try and trick people or maybe so desperate to earn a few bob that they would take on the job on behalf of the big bosses calling the shots and making the money.
So the other night when I picked up the phone and encountered a female voice which i really had trouble hearing, I let her talk for a minute and then asked her name. When she told me I said to her that I thought it was sad that she had such a nasty job and that I wished her well - and I did.
I don't know what she was wanting to sell or push, but I decided to leave her with a blessing rather than a flea in her ear.

On the buses -

- or in this case, on the tram. Or a babe in the woods. Or a country bumpkin is bewildered.

So we were in the city and had been dropped off by car, confident that we could make our way back to the suburbs by public transport. We'd done it before (once or twice). Armed with our Seniors Card we'd been on the bus and knew the drill.
Although we knew it was free on off peak time, we were prepared to pay the extra to stay in town to visit the art gallery. We'd done it before. Headed to the front door of the bus, waved our Seniors/Metro card and been told how much cash to pay for a paper ticket which we then inserted into the cute machine for the beep of approval.
Mind you, one time when it was just after the appointed off peak time, the driver just waved us on telling us to take a seat. I  guess sorting a ticket was too much trouble for him.
So there we were in King William Street and realised we could catch the tram. What could go wrong? So there we were clutching our Seniors cards and I had my purse with small change and....
The tram went whooshing  along the platform and stopped so we had to enter the very last door. It was before 4 pm but the thing was crowded. We peered at the instructions and saw that it was free to ride to Victoria Square. There was a ticket validating machine but we only saw a couple of people use it. When we got to Victoria Square the announcement said that from there on we needed a validated ticket. Where to get one? We were standing swaying and holding onto a pole with not a chance of getting to the driver who I thought would sell us a ticket. Nope - the drive is blocked off in their own little world unlike on the buses. We spotted something about a ticket machine and maybe the picture was about getting a paper ticket . The arrow pointed forward and there was still  not a hope of moving forward to where it might be.
Eventually we got off at our stop in a moral quandary. We really would have been happy to pay but how to do that escaped us. We use public transport so rarely that I haven't wanted to load money onto my card but we didn't have the process for getting the paper version. My conscience is not happy. When I saw a tram the next day I just wanted to throw money at it.
On a sweeter note, I stood balancing precariously next to a pole which I clutched desperately ,but after some people got off there was a seat next to a young woman, so I sat down. She looked at me, stood up and said it was so 'my friend' could sit next to me. There is a sign saying seats need to be relinquished for old geezers like us but no one had moved until she did. How lovely!

Lying about

Whenever I hear someone say they are laying somewhere I wonder whether it is eggs they are laying. The verb 'to lay'  needs an object ie you need to lay something. An egg or your burden. ('Gonna lay down my burden, down by the riverside...')
English is messy. While I  may lie in my bed today I will tell you that yesterday I lay in my bed. That's the past tense, folks, and I admit I do quite a bit of lying in my bed.
The usage of 'lay' as present tense with no object eg 'I enjoyed laying by the pool.' or 'I love laying in my bed reading a book' is so ubiquitous that I realise I am probably fighting a losing battle, but old pedants don't give up without a fight. I have wondered whether people feel a bit shy of saying they are lying ie telling fibbers. They don't want people to think they were telling tall stories by the pool or in bed when in fact they were just lazing about.
What to do?
I might just go and do some more lying in bed, reading a book, not telling fibs at all.

Stories

Stories don't exist until they are told....
Over the last few months I have had the fun of editing transcripts of interviews for the Barmera Library Oral History Project. This mean reading the stories of real people in our community, some of whom are still alive and others who have died. The interviews were originally oral and I sometimes refer to the recordings to clarify parts of the transcript which are unreal. And so I hear the voice of women and men describing their experiences, their stories.
The wonders of Google have  enabled me to put together some of the pieces that are missing or unclear eg the varieties of grapes that used to be grown in earlier days, the names of the first principal of the local high school, famous for being a league football player.
Each story details the background story of the person - their parents, where they were born, what brought them to the area, what role they payed in work life, home life and during events such as the Depression, the wars and, the 1956 flood, what school was like, what the town was like and so on.
The stories have many similarities  - hard work, hard times good times. But each is unique. I listen to the voices and fall in love with each of them, marvel at their resilience, love the turn of phrase that marks their conversation.
Just recently we celebrated Easter and I marvelled yet again at the stories of those who encountered the risen Christ. The reaction of each of them - Mary Magdalene in the garden, the couple on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and many others - was to tell their story. They ran back to the others to say,'We have seen him.' What if they hadn't?
What if the stories of the Barmera people were not recorded, what if families don't tell the stories of life and love and faith.
A story only exists when it is told....