Gantry

Boiler-room

‘Grandfather’ Write about one of your grandparents. Opening: Basics – name, age, job (s), home, appearance. Development: Personality – three adjectives and examples. Conclusion: Your opinion on your grandfather/mother; your opinion on getting older.

Grandfather Opening: Basics – name, age, job (s), home, appearance.

Grandfather My grandfather’s name is Paddy. He is 90 years old. All my other grandparents are dead. Paddy is the last man standing. He is retired now but when he was a young man he had a lot of jobs. Most of them were odd jobs. He worked in a shop in Offaly, a bar in London, before eventually moving to Dublin. He comes from Longford, in the middle of Ireland. He moved to Dublin in the late 1940s, just after the Second World War. This is where he met my granny. At the time Paddy was delivering clothes for a laundrette and he met my granny, Phyllis, while working. Later, though, my grandad worked for the harbour police at Dublin port. He worked for them until he retired.

Development My grandfather has a lot of good characteristics. He is honest, funny and he rarely says a bad word about anyone, except for politicians. It’s easy to say my grandfather is honest, because you can ask him anything, and he will try to give you an honest answer. He tells me all the family secrets (no, I’m not telling you any). My grandfather is funny without trying to be. He reads the paper with a magnifying glass. Of course, this looks really silly, but that’s the good thing about being 90: you don’t care about being silly.

Conclusion I respect my grandfather more than most people. Nobody is perfect and in the past he made some bad decisions. However, there is no badness or meanness in him – if he made a mistake, he did it with good intentions. There are lessons to be learnt from his life. It’s a cliché but it’s true: nobody has a bad word to say about him. I think this is because he doesn’t have a bad word to say about people, and how they choose to live their lives.