Teach your grandma to suck eggs.

When I was young, if I got too big for my boots and began to advise my mother on what she should do and should not do, she would tell me:

''Don't try to teach your grandma to suck eggs!''

 60 years ago it was and perhaps still is in some traditional societies relevant advice. Although I am not preaching disrespect for anybody, let alone my contemporaries and those, who may be thirty years older than me,there are however some things that our grandchildren can teach us and we should accept their help graciously and gratefully.

There are still elderly people, who do not know how to use a mobile phone. In the last few days I have witnessed how having or not having a mobile phone could respectively save/waste time and worry for both elderly people and their relatives.

Every third week I ring round to nine people in their seventies, eighties and nineties. They have one thing in common; they live alone, look after themselves but feel the need to say good-morning to somebody every morning. If they answer the phone and tell me that everything is fine, then I wish them well and that is that until the following morning. If on the other hand, there is no reply, it is then my duty to ring their contact person – usually a family member, who will accept responsibility for checking up on them.

Three times this week there have been problems with the land-lines. The first time it was not really a problem for me, because the client had a mobile phone, which was on and fully functional. The second and third times though, neither of the clients had mobiles phones. so I had to get in touch with and worry their family members, who incidentally themselves are not very young anymore. One of them told me that she had offered her mother a mobile phone, but she had refused it, saying she was much too old to learn to use a thingamajig like that.

Perhaps she did not want to teach her grandma to suck eggs, but she should have insisted – kindly and politely- that she should learn how to use this particular thingamajig, because it could be a life-line.

For an elderly person, with elderly eyes and fingers a smart phone is not the solution. However there are many mobile phones on the market that would be suitable: here is a selection.

So please, at least sometimes, teach your grandma to suck eggs; it could save her life.

P.S. For those of you who read my two last blogs, my dear old computer has recovered. I could make do with my Ipad, but really a computer is better when it comes to writing longer articles. 

I have included links to idioms, because perhaps some of my readers are not native English speakers.