When Patsy Nixon's granny, Kathleen Howell, died on Boxing Day in 1989, it sparked a panicked search for an important item without which granny couldn't be laid to rest...

Still feeling rather shocked at their granny's death on Boxing Day, Patsy's family gathered together in Ireland for the funeral. There was a curious fluster amongst the cousins and the priests, and just after the ceremony they found out why. "They couldn't find granny's buried leg," explains Patsy, enjoying the more or less divine comedy of the situation, "A few years before, she'd had her leg amputated and it had been buried in consecrated ground. The idea there was that when granny died, she would be re-united with her leg and go to heaven. The leg was buried in the same churchyard that she intended to go eventually, as plotted out by the undertaker. I don't know whether he'd had a few drinks when he wrote up his map - anyway there'd been some frantic digging, overnight!"

Kathleen was not one to have been worried by such an event. Even when her leg was amputated - she was an inveterate smoker which had caused circulation problems - granny was "a bit of a shocker" according to Patsy, "When in hospital in Dublin, a lot of the people who visited her were priests, because my uncle was a priest - he had lots of friends - and she used to like to startle them by pulling up the rug and showing the bare stump. I think priest-frightening was her hobby!

Kathleen coped well with her false leg - she simply didn't wear it. She did, however, use it to good comic effect, "Granny used to leave it in the room with a matching stocking and shoe for whatever she happened to be wearing that day," explains Patsy, " It was propped in the corner, and brought out whenever anyone was expected ... "

When, evenutally, Kathleen moved to a nursing home, she resisted all notions of the archetypal sweet old lady, "We had a phone call not long after she gone into the home," recalls Patsy, "Granny had gone missing and the police were out looking for her. She turned up about 70 miles away in a place called Salthill, a seaside part of Galway city, playing the slot machines in an amusement arcade."

Patsy enjoys recounting her grandmother's exploits, "She taught me to have a sense of humour and railroad through trouble when it happens. She was a star. We were very proud of her... and if she anyone could get into heaven without a full complement of legs, it would be her - she would have talked her way past the security guards - for sure.