My father often used to say to us when we were children “you are brought up too soft”. You might imagine that on this basis he himself was brought up in conditions of penury and hardship and went barefoot to school but in fact, he grew up in a large house at the bottom of the road where my parents’ house is now. As far as I know, he had access to shoes at all times. So, given my father’s relative affluence, I felt his tendency to assert that we were too soft was inappropriate.
The other day, herself wanted to squeeze some lemon juice. The electric juicer was in the dishwasher so I hauled out the manual juicer from the back of the press. She looked at it a bit dubiously. I went back to reading the paper. After a while she said plaintively, “How does this work?” I looked and she was holding the lemon daintily on top of the squeezer waiting for the squeezer to work its magic. “You have to twist it down.” “What?!” Brought up too soft.
