Comic Janey Godley drinks at the cow after going to a bank with her father

Janey Godley checks for text news of her dad

Yesterday, I had tea and muffins at the giant upside-down purple cow – the Edinburgh Fringe‘s  Udderbelly venue – with comedian Janey Godley, who had just arrived from Glasgow.

“What was your morning like?” I asked her. Will I never learn?

This is what she told me…

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Last night, my dad called me and, cos he’s 80, he’s got a wee notebook with loads and loads of people’s phone numbers and the PIN numbers to his bank accounts.

He told me he’d lost the book. He had not lost his bank card, just the book.

But, seriously, if you found the notebook, you’d need to have been Alan Turing, the man who broke the Enigma code, to be able to find a PIN number in this tiny wee notebook that’s got like 6,000 phone numbers and notes. And, anyway, he hadn’t lost his two bank cards. He still had them.

At midnight, my dad phones his two banks and cancels everything. It’s like we’re all on Tangerine Alert… Jim’s lost his fucking notebook!

This morning, he phones me at eight in the morning

“You need tae come with me while I go to the bank tae make sure they’ve did everything!”

“Oh fuck!” I think.

So me and my husband had to go and pick ma dad up. We went into the first bank and ma dad threw the card at the woman as if it was her fault and I told him: “I’m gonna speak.”

I told the woman, “OK, ma dad’s lost his PIN number and he’s cancelled his cards. Can you check that everything’s been cancelled and his account’s fine?”

She checks.

“Yes,” she says. “Everything’s fine.”

“Take me to the next bank!” ma dad says to me. He’s got two bank accounts.

En route to the next bank, I say to him: “Dad, it’s the summer. The kids are all away.”

“Aye,” he says. “You don’t see many kids.”

When I was wee, all the kids used to go to residential school in the summer, which was like a Council-run holiday. I said to ma dad:

“You never ever let me go to residential school. Why did you never let me go? I’ve held that against you for forty years.”

He started laughing and said: “I didn’t want you to go to residential school.”

“Well that’s shite,” I said. “I wanted to go to residential school.”

So we get to the second bank and I say to the woman:

“This is my dad. That’s his card. He cancelled his card last night because he lost his PIN number and we’re all on Tangerine Alert, so…”

“Have you got another bank account?” she says.

“Yes,” my dad says, “I’ve got a bank account with the Royal Bank of Scotland.”

So she says: “Do you want to move your bank account from them to us?”

“Excuse me,” I say. “He’s 80. He’s already confused. He’s been phoning banks in the middle of the night. Can you just reassure this old man that his bank account card has been cancelled, his account is secure and he need not worry about anything else. Can you do that with your mouth moving? Can you just tell him that?”

So she says: “If you’ve got another account with another bank, we can move it.”

I say: “You clearly aren’t listening to anything I say,” and my dad butted in:

“She’s just angry cos she never got to go to residential school in 1966.”

The woman just stared at us.

I said: “Dad, we’re not doing a Thing. Not now. It’s not a show.” I turned to the woman and said: “Gonna just explain to this old man who saw Clydebank burning in the 1930s… Gonna just explain to him that his bank account is OK? That’s the reason I got oot o’ ma bed. Can you not talk to him about moving accounts?”

So she went: “OK. Your card has been cancelled, a new card has been ordered… But, if you want to mo…”

I said: “You need tae shut yer mooth. We’re done here.”

My dad marched out of the bank with me and said: “Thank fuck you’re a comedian, because she’d have just stood there and kept saying that to me.”

I said: “Do you want us to drive you to Govan?”

He goes to a wee social meeting there.

“No!” he says, “I shall get on the tube. It makes me exercise.”

So I walk him down to the tube, my husband drives me to Queen Street station and I get the train to Edinburgh. On the train, I look at Twitter and the whole subway in Glasgow has been closed. So I immediately panic.

I phone my dad and he says to me: “Did you find out something went bad on Twatter?” cos he has to call it Twatter.

“Yes,” I said.

“A man committed suicide in front of me,” he says. “I had to get a fucking taxi!”

There was a jumper and, instead of my dad accepting somebody might have killed themselves, he was more angry he had to get a taxi.

“You were away!” he said. “Where did you go in the motor?”

“Queen Street,” I said. “We told you this.”

“Right!” he said, “Well some cunt killed themselves and I had to get a taxi.”

So that was my morning so far.