As practise for school. Try the whole "watching people to find characters" thing. i got all of this from watching my grandma speak in a restaurant and its better than anything i could have made up.

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She wasn't quiet. Loud in a sort of helpless, effortless way. Like you knew if you asked her why she was talking so loud she'd look at you as though you were crazy. She often did that anyway, she'd give some strange comment or unfinished sentence or obnoxious notion and you'd ask why, or how, or what was her reasoning? and she'd give you this look that not only conveyed she thought you were stupid, but that she hated stupid people who asked stupid questions and would very dearly like to wipe you off the bottom of her shoe, and she'd stare and the moment would stretch longer and longer and you'd start to think it was never going to snap, then she'd snap a correction and it was over. The whole incident was forgotten in the blink of an eye.

She'd continue her anecdote, or story, or observation with conviction, having reassured herself that she was in this case right. She was always right.

Her head swung as she talked.

The way puppets do when you twist the back bar, side to side, switching between people and eye contact so fast you felt she was a television screen showing clips of something so quickly edited you were always one step behind, always wondering what you had just seen. Her eye contact was staccato. It hurt to try and look at her the normal way you would look at someone when they were speaking to you.

She crouched in to the table as she spoke, leaning low over the wood like a general discussing tactics, engrossed in everything she said as though it was the funniest or the cleverest thing anyone had heard to date.You could mock her, for her wildness, her eccentricity that was so hilarious because she was so blithely unaware of it ( she really did believe that is was the world around that was outrageous).Yes you could mock those parts of her, but she was passionate. Crazy maybe, and passionate about the wrong things, but her raucous laughter and burning fury (both of which could be heard within minutes of each other, she swung like a pendulum through a dazzling spectrum of emotions at lightning speed) showed she cared. She cared deeply, sincerely about these silly things she talked of, that no one else could understand or relate to. Her passion, her focus, the way she seemed to get lost in the very things she was saying, gave the impression she had once been a glittering, all singing, all dancing charmer, whose wildness in her youth had made her enchanting.

Now her intensity had lost its lustre and developed, or deteriorated, with her age and her audience were now her grandchildren, feigning awed interest in the words of a fool, who had retained her spark but poured it into the most misguided of opinions.

She gestured hurriedly, purposefully as she spoke, illustrating her words invisibly in the air in some language only she herself knew, but in the time that had passed her audience had dispersed, gone to buy a programme of the show, or to find their jackets or the child that had disappeared into the bathroom ten minutes ago, and she had been left, the only one now hanging on her every word.