Most of the time.

Sometimes, out of the blue, he tells stories that do go somewhere.

He was visiting today, looking proudly over his great-grandson, wondering out loud whether he’d have any nicknames when he got older.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You can’t really shorten ‘Tom’.”

“Well, didn’t you have a nickname?”

“No, not really.”

“I did. I was called Anna.”

I laughed. “Anna?”

He smiled. “It goes back to when I was small, something that shocked me to my core.”

I glanced at him. He gave me a sheepish look. He knew this was quite an opener to a story that I’d not heard before.

He continued “When I was seven, my Dad had to move to Fring because of the General Strike, there wasn’t any work elsewhere, see. There wasn’t a school in Fring, so I went to school in Shernbourne.

“One really cold day, I was walking along and came around the corner and there was this little girl. She was all wrapped up for the cold, long straight hair, with a hat on. And we got talking and one thing and another…”

(It’s not a story by my Granddad if it doesn’t include the phrase “and one thing and another”.)

“She said her name was Diana she lived just across the road, with her aunty. And then she said, her mummy had died.

“I felt the colour drain from my face. I’d never heard of anyone who didn’t have a mummy. I didn’t even know mummies could die. I was totally shocked.

“And do you know, we became inseparable. We’d always be seen together. And one of my friends said ‘There’s Gerald behind Diana. I know, let’s call him Anna!’and it stuck. Everyone called me Anna. Your great Uncle Peter, his wife called me Anna until she died. That was only when I moved to Thornham that people called me Gerry, but all my old school friends still called me Anna.

“But we stayed friends right through school, Diana and I. She taught me to dance, as much as she could! Then her mum said ‘you don’t want to be going around with that Gerry, he’ll never amount to nothing! She married some guy who became a shepherd. And I became an explorer!”

He grinned. My granddad married, and got out of the tied cottage owned by the farmer, became a lorry driver and then worked on big building projects around the UK and in Nigeria. An ‘explorer’, when his life should have been spent on the same farms his father and grandfather had worked.

After he left, I sat down to write this blog post, and burst into tears. Suddenly, I was seeing my granddad as that young boy who’d taken pity on that little girl with no mummy, and became friends, and grew up, and danced, and got married, and travelled. A whole life entwined with a little story about being called “Anna”. One of thousands of stories that go to make up the old man who’s a bit foolish, and sometimes annoying, and who I love to bits.