Mother in law

She adores my children, they adore her, their Grandma. She is unstinting of her time; babysitting, child minding, housework, gardening, never forgets a birthday or Christmas. Our debt of gratitude is huge.

She is also the most bigotted racist person I have ever had to give house room to.

They came over today to help in the garden, despite all my efforts to put them off. Thick skinned doesn't begin the cover the way she can ignore my efforts to turn down her generous offers of assistance.

She brought us a home baked cake apologising that it had sunk a little.  I suggested that the flour might be to blame - I sometimes have trouble with bread flour not rising and had read that low gluten content in winter wheat could cause bread to flop. She wondered where the flour came from - bound to be 'foreign' flour that was rubbish. I suggested that most flour was imported - England is not exactly awash in wheat fields after all. She actually looked appalled and then relieved when I said I thought most of our flour came from Canada. "Oh, Canada? That's alright. It couldn't be China or India could it?. I couldn't eat it if it came from there".

Speechless.

She has in the past actually said that she couldn't eat indian or chinese food because 'those people' will have have touched it.

Invited themselves to lunch and Grandad (sweetie) was browsing through a library book on 20th century Britain. He read out a snippet about concentration camps set up in Africa by the British during the Boer war - thousands of women and children died of malnutrition and disease. Without the slightest hint of irony she said "and now we're overrun with immigrants coming over here". And a nice little comment about Muslims / terrorists - interchangeable terms in her view.

Speechless again.

She isn't even ashamed or embarrassed about saying these things. It hasn't even crossed her mind that I disagree with her views let alone find them extremely offensive.

I've told her many times that my family are Irish immigrants - I was born in Dublin but she doesn't even see the connection - I'm white after all so that's different.

I've pointed out that the British occupied India for 300 years before we (we? nothing to do with me, I'm Irish and have plenty to be guilty about without this) graciously allowed them to have their own country back. That's different and no excuse for 'them' coming over here and taking all our jobs. Like. What jobs exactly? All our ambitions to become taxi drivers, work 18 hour days in corner shops or textile sweat shops or open restaurants where we can be abused and insulted by drunken (english) louts til 4am in the morning thwarted by this tide of immigrants 'overrunning' the country?? Give me strength!

Her own niece is married to an African Caribbean man - how can she say these things and get away with it? Why don't I have the guts to tell her that I do not share her views and find them offensive? That would be because of my complete inability to deal with confrontation (of which more another time) and her utter bone deep stupidity and inability to begin to understand what I'm talking about. She simply cannot see it.

She has no books in her house. They gather dust and make a mess. Her husband, a quiet, intelligent, gentle soul, cannot have books except for one or two at a time from the library. Her highest accolade about a hotel / house / country is that it is very clean -"Oooh you'ld like Italy J___, it's ever so clean, I wasn't expecting it (unspoken - a country full of not very white foreigners) to be so clean".

After they had left I had some cake. Her dark brown chocolate cake. I'm a bad person. Bad.