It’s the Easter holidays and I’ve been watching grandparents interacting with their grandchildren during our various coffee shop and café visits while I practice my drawing. It has been an interesting study. Some are clearly at ease with the relationship, others not so. The most fascinating examples have been in M&S. Perhaps this is evidence of a particular place or site reflecting the demographic who choose it. It was an altogether stiffer affair, like the man sitting in the little alcove with his grandson. ‘You talk funny,’ said the little boy. The grandfather had been eating a dry pretzel and complaining about it’s saltiness then it’s blandness. I don’t like the white bits, he said. They’re salt, said the boy. They were a discordant pair. The man was so offhand, and mostly distracted by his iPad which he had propped up on the table in front of him. There was another grandfather at a more central table that I also began to draw (I’d moved tables by then for a better view). He too was distracted by technology, though he did try to engage his grandson in it. He spoke in Welsh. The boy was fidgety and squirmed about on his seat, eating a scone and sucking a drink through a straw. He leaned into his grandfather, clearly fond. And even when he pressed the box containing the drink so that the liquid shot up in a fountain and sprayed all over his grandfather’s food, tray and phone, the old man kept calm and remonstrated with him in a measured, placatory way. The generational gap in both cases was a chasm.
