My slightly crazy Polish granddad...
...did a number of crazy things during his life, many in his last 10 or so years, until he died this past Christmas at the age of 85. A few of these I only heard recently from my parents:

1. When he first moved into this country during WWII, he married my grandma, bought a plot of land in Essex, and built his own bungalow, garage and various farmhouses. When they got electricity, he developed a strange fascination with it, insisting on replacing all the plugs and sockets of his tools as he didn't like the ones they came with. This resulted in many broken drills, saws and things that my dad would usually end up having to mend for him...

...it turned out ALL the wall sockets in his garage had the wires the wrong way around, requiring him to rewire all the plugs on his new tools. This explained why most of his electricals didn't even have a fuse in them - he had removed them all to make them work.

2. He bought an electric chainsaw to cut down the bushes and through small bits of firewood. He loved it, but one day it 'broke' and so he gave it to my dad to fix it...

...my dad took one look and decided to never give it back. Grandad had removed nearly every single safety feature from the saw because his old hands (one of which was missing a finger he knocked off) and fading mind couldn't operate it. On trying to remove the final safety feature- the on/off switch (he decided the only on/off switch it should need was at the wall socket) - he had broken it.

3. A few years ago my mum was on her way to visit him and my grandma. As she drove up the driveway, she saw him about 10ft up a ladder, cutting a stray branch off a tree over the road. She stopped, and leapt out of the car over to him, begging him to come down...

...he had been cutting off the branch his ladder was resting on.

R.I.P. Grandad.
( johnsto, Fri 6 Jul 2007, 16:40, Reply)