Story 5 View From The Toilet Seat

Story 5 View From The Toilet Seat

“What are you doing?” I asked as I watched my granddaughter, hands flapping, beaming a gappy toothy smile into the mirror beside the toilet. She gave me a sympathetic look. “I’m making a selfie, granny,” she replied in a tone that said she didn’t expect me to understand.
“You take a selfie – a picture of yourself with a camera,” I pointed out.
She pouted and folded her arms. “I know. But mum wouldn’t let me. I’m ‘pracising for when I get a phone of my own.” Her face brightened as I lay my phone on top of the toilet seat. “Can I…”
“No! Definitely not – out you go. I have writing to do.”
“Why do you have to write in the toilet,” she huffed as I closed the door behind her. “Any more questions – ask your granda,” I shouted back.
“Can i just ask you one more thing,” she breathed through the jamb of the door.
“Ask your granda”
“You’re not my best granny anymore,” she wailed. With a sigh of relief I readied myself for a few minutes solitude before I started to write.
A six year old wanting to take a selfie. Where will all this technology end, I mused. My mind slipped back to the programme I’d seen on TV the night before about the web cam babes making good money from their own bedrooms.
Fools and their money are easily parted; I thought as I watched a young girl blow up balloons and get paid good money via her webcam as she wriggled about on them for a ‘customer.’ Another girl squeezed a banana between her painted toes and offered them up to the webcam viewer. She was young. It was a giggle. But it made me think what kind of things my own grandchildren got up to with the skype and their phone cameras.
“Times are changing. The world is not like it was. Accept it? Isn’t that what everybody says,” I muttered settling down to write. And the barefaced selfies the celebs and the women on Facebook did raised a good bit of money for the cancer charities, I reminded myself.
“Maybe I will let her take a photo; a selfie of a granny and her favourite granddaughter. What harm could there be in that? I searched around for my phone. “Probably fell into the linen basket again,” I murmured. But at least it’s fully charged today and receiving a signal, I thought as I rooted through the ever present pile of jeans and hoodies for washing.
My hand came up empty. Then it dawned on me. The little monkey had slipped the phone into her pocket when I wasn’t looking. I gulped back the swear words that rose to my lips and went for the toilet door. “Thank god for the new handle,” I breathes. Flinging the scribbled notes from me I jerked open the door
“Where is she,” I asked her granda reading the paper at the kitchen table.
“She’s upstairs in the bedroom. She borrowed your laptop. Is that all right?”
“What else did she take up with her,” I asked feeling faint.
“Nothing – except a banana and the packet of balloons you bought her last time we were in Tesco.”