My cousin died.

Things have been a bit fucked up over the past week or two, my cousin died a couple of days ago after a heart attack brought on by a life of good booze and presumably better drugs. One of the paramedics at the scene wanted to pronounce him dead there and then but the other fought against it. After a few days in a medically induced coma they took him off the ventilator and he had what I’ve been told was a peaceful death.

I didn’t really know him at all, being a fair bit older than me and normally not present at any family get togethers. It was strange, being at a rosary for someone who was largely a stranger yet most of the people there were family. Between my uncle dying a few months ago (suicide, which I don’t think I mentioned, mostly due to lacking either the time or the inclination) and now this it’s been a rough patch for everyone. Mostly it’s made me aware that time is slipping by, that the people I grew up with as a child and whom I considered more or less immortal because they could never be anything but were slowly but surely getting older. Eventually it’s not going to be the fringes of my large extended family that will bite the dust, eventually it’s going to be someone who’s house I slept over at as a child, who told me stories and whose kids I played with at parties and the like. One day I’m going to have to carry the coffin of someone I well and truly care about, and they’re not all going to be afforded the choice of suicide or relative quickness of a heart attack, there’ll be illness and wastage instead. Far too soon my family is going to shrink, and we’ll ask less how people are and talk more about how they were.

My cousin leaves behind more than a half dozen kids, with five mothers to look after them. He’s lying in a coffin right now with a Celtic strip emblazoned with the names of all his children. He’s wearing jeans, Timberland boots, and a pair of Family Guy boxers with “womaniser” ön the waistband. He was in his thirties. I should have known him better.

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100th post: Police stops, half cut clubbing, and looking like a bouncer.

Another gap in posts, tried to sit down and write about a half dozen times but never got the peace to do so. But today is my day off and everyone is either out or in bed after a night shift so I figured I’d grab what little chance I have for some proper quiet to get all this typed up.

Had one of my rare nights out to a club the weekend before last, as is normal my memories are rather hazy, what I do remember after the bottle of Jack Daniels before we all left to go out was the police stopping us on the way to the train station, asking me what it was I had in my still mostly full plastic pint glass, to which I replied: “Whiskey, sambuca, tequila, vodka, some poofy fruit juice and a wee bit of cola on top to darken it.” Either they didn’t believe me or I had the good fortune to bump into the soundest polis in Scotland because I walked away with it still in hand.

The club itself was the usual medley of rock tunes that I’d either never heard of before or was too drunk to recognise, a man emploring me to “just kiss his fuckin’ burd man” and minor flashbacks of a ginger chick with big tits and a chest piece.

Through beer-goggles she might just have looked like this. But probably not, let’s face it.

Next thing I remember is standing outside, lost from everyone I went with who all appeared to have had a rammy with the bouncers and got chucked out, missing my last bus and weighing up the pros and cons of getting either a taxi or walking home 30-odd miles like you only can while completely smashed. Eventually a little kernel of common sense made itself known and I opted for a taxi instead. Walking to the rank I heard some skinny dude who looked like he would’ve lived in a Berghaus jackets were this 2007 asking if one of the drivers would take them to the town right next to mine. Operating on “close enough” logic I told the guy I was going to share the taxi with him. Yes, told. Woops.

He shouted on his two mates who were busy trying to proposition another driver and we all piled into the back of a Hackney cab and were merrily on our way. The taxi dropped me off first, and the three guys decided they’d pay my fair as they thought I was a bouncer! For £50 in my pocket I wasn’t going to correct them.

And… that’s about it. Other than that I’ve been working away and reading The Walking Dead comics. Three cheers are in order however as this is offically the 100th post I’ve made on this little blog. Not too bad I’d say!

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