Ma has come out with some treats...
...in her frail old dotage. Bless her, she suffered from manic depression for 16 years (which has incidentally gone since she lost a leg. That's another story), and as a result also suffered from paranoia every now and again. Now, husbandless and sadly lacking someone to give a shit about the trivial pap that Mothers tend to care about, I was constantly on the receiving end of phone calls whilst I was out on the shant/ getting extremely stoned round a mate's. Being the inebriated young upstarts that we were, pretty much anything would make us laugh; so chances were when I received one of the numerous phone calls about the cat having one eye lower than the other or somesuch, my mates would be (in an unrelated manner) laughing in the background.

Now at the time, I owned a Trium mobile phone - the sort of £30 sub-par tossycock that you make do with but has the uncanny knack of sounding like someone sexually molesting a Nintendo Gameboy when it rings - lending it the name of the 'underwater telephone' (told you we laughed at anything). Said phone call is taken, accompanied by group of mates pissing themselves silly at my fruitily aquatic sounding mobile. Sounding extremely fraught and pretty sketchy, the old dear demands to know why my friends are laughing at her. Hushing said friends out of their slightly unjustified apoplexy, I maintain to Ma that they are in fact laughing at my underwater telephone. As the silence was rolling across the room, all you could was her yelling "you don't fool me. I know that's a slang name for genitalia". I'm not sure what was funnier - the fact that she could get it so wrong, or what she thought I was getting up to in my friends' flat that would involve everyone laughing at my cock.
(Nimrod's Son Boredom provokes some interesting habits..., Mon 15 Feb 2010, 18:48, Reply)