More Christmas Tat
Scaryduck has reminded me of my favourite Christmas Tat story: my rich great-aunt. She really was very rich (as in, when she died Christies held a special auction for her collection of original Picassos, Chagalls etc) but she was also a miser, and eccentric with it. (She ended up leaving all her money to Frankie Vaughn, but that's another story).

At Christmas she'd come round to our house, and her presents were legendary. My mother received a half-used box of makeup that was so old it had started to rot, and my brother got a 'raincoat' that was a bin liner with holes cut in it. One year she gave us both wallets and they had some money in them (pound notes, ar, them were the days). I counted mine and found that I had eleven pounds. When I said this, she grabbed it off me and took one out - 'I only meant to give you ten'. Class.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 12:01, 4 replies)

Frankie Vaughn you say ?
... it may well be another story but I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to hear it!
( Ramsay Tupper, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 12:04, closed)

.
Jumps up and down waiting for it...
(misanthrope is so adjective he's verbing nouns!, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 12:18, closed)

Ah... the eccentric rich great-aunt
Every year she'd give me a whole one pound, paid directly into my Abbey National saver account.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 12:24, closed)

Oh, all right then
Well, as she approached her latter years she started getting a bit.. odd. Obsessed with computer crime, that hackers would steal all her money, that kind of thing. Then out of the blue, her white knight, comes a crooner. He woos her with soft words, love notes and so on. And he persuades her that she should leave her money to a good cause, not her scrounging family. And what better cause than the Boy's Club that he happens to run? So when she finally pops her clogs, with the National Gallery and Tate and all the rest of them hanging around her like vultures hoping for a Modigliani or two, the whole lot went to Frankie.

No idea what happened after that, but there you go. In fairness, my brother and I got a fair bit of money off her in trust funds before she went weird and I managed to live off it for six months to write a book, so I feel pretty kindly towards her :) But I think my dad was gutted...

[Edit: Now I think about it, I like the image of vultures hanging round in the hope of an example of early 20th Century avant garde art]
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Fri 4 Jan 2008, 12:31, closed)