Jenny Eclair reveals 'strict' rule she refuses to break with grandson Arlo
Award-winning comedian and novelist Jenny Eclair is 'besotted' by her two-year-old grandson. But nevertheless, she says, there' one strict rule she won't break
Comedian Jenny Eclair says she’s “besotted” with her grandson Arlo, but stresses that she has “one strict rule” when it comes to looking after him. “I didn’t think I’d like him as much as I do,” she confessed on Kaye Adams’s How To Be 60 podcast. “It takes you aback, a bit.”
Jenny says she finds being a grandma much easier than motherhood. “Children can be quite boring,” she says, but at 64 is taking pleasure in the little things more than she might have done in her heyday as an award-winning comedian and novels: “Maybe it’s because I’ve slowed down,” she reflects.
But while she “likes a baby in the bed in the morning,” Jenny says she draws the line at looking after “the light of her life”
“I don’t want too look after a baby full-time, and I don’t do night times,” she stressed. “I haven’t done a sleepover, I don’t want a child interfering with my nice glass of vodka and my telly in the evening so I’m quite strict about that.”
At the moment, Jenny looks after Arlo every Tuesday: :We have him on Tuesdays … I think one day a week is enough, quite honestly. I take him to a singing class, and he moves away from me when I start singing because he knows I can’t.”
While she happily admits to being a “slave” to two-year-old Arlo’s whims, Jenny’s husband Geof is “just as bad,” she says. “Geof really likes the telly. He like swatching very young children’s cartoons – it’s slightly worrying. I have to make sure that Arlo’s actually in the house and Geof isn’t just watching them for his own sake.”
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Jenny says that sometimes she looks at Arlo and his resemblance to his mum – Jenny and Geof’s daughter Phoebe, “hits her in the chest.”
Phoebe, now a successful playwright, says that watching her mum perform helped her realise that that “there’s a world where adults also play and don’t have to grow up.”
It’s that ability to take childlike pleasure in things that helps Jenny’s bond with Arlo – and with her daughter too: “I sometimes look at him and it’s like 30 years has gone away… it could be the 1990s and it could be Phoebe again .”
