(…actually, it’s more like five foot seven.)

I was speaking quite eloquently to my mother just over a month ago.

“We went out and saw the first four series of Six Feet Under on sale. M had a spasm and bought them on a whim. We just started watching the other night, and now we’re addicted and can’t stop! This hasn’t happened since the Twin Peaks video marathon of 1997. We’ve never owned a series on DVD before. In fact we only own two proper DVDs that aren’t to do with bushfire. We’ve got Dangerous Liasons and Reservoir Dogs. We watch them on my laptop - and did I say we bought Six Feet Under? It’s excellent. We own it you know.”

What my mother heard;
“Something about some kind of DVD sort of thing. I like Six Feet Under. It’s really great.”

In the meantime she went to Vietnam, bought a bucketload of highly suspect latest release movies on DVD and then came to visit on the day the Wiggle was de-skivvied, last week. I began again (so limited are my topics of conversation):

“So we’re now into series three of Six Feet Under and it is SO GOOD. We watch a few episodes each night, and I’ve just realised that there five series, so we’re actually missing the last one and I’ve just been looking at it on Ebay and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah,” I said, as my mother looked ever increasingly pained. In the end, after about 45 minutes, she snapped.

“OK! OK!! So I might as well just tell you that we got you the box set. The BOX SET of Six Feet Under. Right? And you’re telling me you’ve already got it. Are you?”

I squeaked. “No - I’m telling you I’ve got all of them but the last series. Which I’m assuming will be in the BOX SET. BOX SET,” I said again, just to say it.

“Well you can stop watching any further episodes as of right now,” she snarled.

I shook my head in mute refusal, Six Feet Under being my current opiate of choice.

“I mean it,” she insisted, “I don’t want either of you watching one more minute. Or your present will be completely ruined. Where are they? I’m going to take them home so and you can have them back after Christmas.”

“I don’t THINK so. Just because your cheap-and-excellent-and-looks-expensive Christmas present is dead in the water. If you’d listened to me in the first place when I kept parroting on about it you would have known. It’s not showing on TV - I obviously had it on DVD. Gah.”

I think she wanted me to believe that the humidity had gotten to her over in Vietnam, and so when she thought of me while standing in the DVD shop, all she saw were my lips saying Six Feet Under, Six Feet Under, with no other associated information. Personally? I think all her brain cells are getting exhausted from too much pilates.

I really have to stop posting about conversations with my mother. I can already feel Small Brother shaking his head over me in London.