TASCHENGELD ANGELA

CUDDLY ANGELA MERKEL does her best on her understandably rare TV appearances to look like that sort of youngish grandmother figure that we are happy to see when Christmas comes around and we don’t mind sending a postcard to when we are on holiday, with messages like “I’m in Slovetiaskinstiopia with some friends from college, Gran. I loved the socks you knitted me.”

THE DEEP MESSAGE of being nice to our Grandma is usually, as all of us will admit when pushed to be honest, the hope that at some stage “Gran” will come up with the goods and stick her liver-spotted hand under the mattress and give us the cash that she has been holding back and hiding from the “real" world.

THUS IT MAY HAVE BEEN for the citizens of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and possibly soon Spain and France, all behaving like nice little children and taking their little presents of little Euros in their little hands and doing what grandmas always tell their little grandchildren to do as they come up with their tiresome warnings of “When that’s gone there’s no more”, or “Don’t spend it all in one go.”

SOMETIMES GRANDMAS foolishly ask their adolescent grandchildren things like “And what are you going to spend it on?” perhaps knowing that the youngsters will lie to them. But I suppose that is all part of the limited fun of being a geriatric; pretending that you have some say in the way the world is run when you have obviously lost the plot.

THIS PANTOMIME IS NOT FOR GROWN UP David “Davy Boy” Cameron, who went yesterday to visit Grandma Merkel rather more like the sulky teenager who isn’t prepared to put up with listening to stories about the “old days”, “during the war”, “when I was your age” and as someone who is definitely not going to wear those ridiculous sweaters that Merkel knits and expects all of us in Europe to wear.

CAMERON APPEARED TO TELL MERKEL to sharpen up her act, that the other grandchildren are a useless band of lying malcontents who are frittering away her money on bubblegum, sherbet fountains and dandelion and burdock-flavoured boiled sweets and that none of them is ever going to amount to much unless she either cuts off the pocket money or spends it seriously in order to send them to a proper school to learn how to get a proper job.

MERKEL, LIKE GRANDMOTHERS everywhere, bless them, pretended she was deaf, and then went off into the kitchen mumbling something to herself about “I’ve got something somewhere for you, David, but I’m not sure where I’ve put it, or what it is ” and rummaging about in cupboards. Cameron, of course, is a nice boy, and he will keep on visiting his grandmother, but it looks like he’ll stop sending those postcards for a while.