Lost in translation

It's nearly the weekend and Tall Girl has 'volunteered', or perhaps been press-ganged, into making chocolate and ginger mouse for the Dinner Party on Saturday evening. "Have we got all the ingredients?" I ask. She checks. "We just need Ginger Nuts" she replies.
"OK" I say "I'll just catch Big Al before he goes into town and I'll put them on his list".

Big Al is fiddling about with the recycling outside, he struggles with recycling. His inherent nature is to send it all to landfall, but we are addressing that instinct gradually. I catch him before he heads out and scribble on his shopping list.

Meanwhile my Mother is 'having coffee' on my sofa, she is regaling her taxing day and is currently in overdrive relating the story about being trapped in her trousers in the bathroom at home, when she needed a wee! There was a happy ending but a warning for the future issues which may occur in public toilets with an eye on buying elasticated versions in the future.

While all this going on my phone rings, it's Big Al "About the Ginger nuts?" he asks, I immediately put the phone back down, thinking he is being lewd, knowing my mother is in the room. I tut inwardly.

Sometime later he returns home.

"How did it go?" I asked
"Terrible!" He replied "I got to the supermarket" he regaled "and thought - peanuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, and then I looked for 'ginger' nuts but couldn't find them anywhere, so I found an assistant and asked her if she knew if they had any ginger nuts - she was Polish so we both had English as a second language" - Big Al is Scottish and tends to shout when he can't be understood, in a very British way - "so the conversation didn't really flow and there didn't seem to be any nuts anywhere that were ginger so we had to involve a third party" he continued seriously "who seemed to know what I was talking about and ... lead me to the biscuit aisle" by this time I was laughing so much I was crying and mum almost wet herself (again!) "You never told me they were biscuits!" he complained.