Pretty Paper, Pretty Ribbons Of Blue, Wrap Your Presents To Your Darling From You

As featured in Third Sunday Blog Carnival

After that scatty little detour – haha! – I’m back functioning to the best of my abilities again and putting all the words in their proper order. Praise be! 

Christmas didn’t turn out too bad after all despite Mother inviting Uncle Dudley, who, at this time of year, gets pissed every day from the night of Children In Need onward till he’s stone broke a few days after New Year’s and he can drink no more. I would suppose that he is drunk more so between this period as it is fair to say he is drunk generally most the year round. 

In this very drunk state he tends to antagonise people, crossly accusing them of engineering plots to bring about his downfall. Trying to get them to own up to these conspiracy’s – or he'll at least, finally, pleadingly, request some abstract clue as to how to avoid ruin.

As well in attendance were that fucking holyjoe moonbeam Nirab, who before Christmas Dinner tried to fucking rap grace, then gimmie a wink after like I’d think he were fuckin boss of the bus or something. Earlier to that, to freak Nirab out, Uncle Dudley held one of Mother’s many crosses over the flame from the cooker in the kitchen then stuck it into his forehead upside down branding himself with it, like Glen Benton outta Deicide. All through dinner Uncle Dudley sat staring out Nirab trying to freak him out with his mad upside down cross, but that dirty snake Nirab, cold and barren as a nun’s cervix, didn’t take him on at all – making me think it mattered to him neither way the wanton sacrilege of the Gentle Jesus’ Club pin badge.

After dinner Micheesha, Stupid Peter and their kids came in. Micheesha’d told Mother on Christmas Eve Eve that she was on some special diet and that she couldn’t have the usual X-mas fare. But that was all lies, cos she told me, in secret, that Mother’s turkey when she did it it was like plasterboard garnished with sawdust and wrapped in sandpaper going down, which is exactly how I’d described it last year, and was exactly how it were this year. That selfish cunt Nirab went through a jug and a half of water on his.

Over brandy and Christmas pud’ Nirab turned his attentions to Uncle Dudley and beat him in the staring out game. Uncle Dudley began to cry like he does when drunk/emotional and got the better of. Then Nirab nearly choked on the penny in the pudding and everybody laughed, apart from Mother, who beat Nirab’s back rapidly, squealing and trying to get it up…

We retired into Mother’s lounge to get pissed and I asked Micheesha what she’d had for dinner instead.

 - We stapped at thuh fuckin Muck’Danalds over utt Connswater!

 - Lucky packa cunt’s, - I went. – You have any burgers left in the motor?

 - Do I fuck! – Went Micheesha. - Fuckin kids gobbled em up like Hungry Hungry Hippos. Me and Stupid Peter only hod a carton of chips between us! I'm'Ah be starvin, Danny! And so'll Stupid Peter. And he cant hold his liquor at thuh besta times, nevur mine when he's boozin! 

I went outside and got into Stupid Peter’s car and sniffed some empty McDonald’s bags to get my taste buds working again after getting them terraformed by Mother’s dry bird. After that I found one of the children’s Heat Magazines and pulled one out over Tina from Corrie going to some X-mas do all dressed to the 9’s. When I were done I stared into the sky and resolved to get some authentic muff in 2012. Then I went back inside.

In the short time I’d been out Nirab had recruited Stupid Peter into his God cult. I tried to renounce Nirab and his fairy tales and tell Stupid Peter that Christ the Messiah was most likely a prototype EBE*, a forerunner of common man – now broke from the shackles of apeman impulses by being imbued with Space Genes, transforming us into the fast thinking, imaginative and above all compassionate specimens we are today…

 

But Stupid Peter was well gone, all the way along Nirab’s Yellow Brick Road. I give up on him then ruminated on Nirab’s powers of persuasion, his stealth and speed and cunning in getting the simple minded to get on his side. And I also begun to wonder had I found our front man in me and Party Time’s Credit Card Fraud scheme…if so, the first stop was getting to see if he were in any financial dif’s one way or another…Maybe a drab, hopeless Christmas and a ominous New Year were beginning to look up, the fortunes flipping, an inversion of fate, as in like Uncle Dudley’s upside down God’s cross stuck into his noggin.

*EBE: Extraterrestrial Biological Entity

Doesn't Have A Point Of View, Knows Not Where He's Going To, Isn't He A Bit Like You & Me

"He always went with a jubilant spring in his step - but in his heart there swole a mushroom cloud on every horizon...and the possibility of one round every corner.
He had a car that never started anytime it rained, and he? he lived between worlds. It is lucky in a way, because the rain would depress him and make him drink. And so Mother Nature became his designated driver – raining on the car so it didn't start and preventing him from driving anywhere pissed."

There are people who ascribe some magic superstitions to cars. Like my Uncle Dudley; who in telling me this story this afternoon about the death his pal Billy Wheelbarrow in the summer of 1986 theorized that it were his car's bad luck (Billy Wheelbarrow's car's) that caused it to stall and crash on the M4 killing him instantly. 

Just like everyone knew would happen the car stopped working just as a heavy summer rain began and it crashed into a bus. 

Uncle Dudley said the downpour this afternoon, in an afternoon in 2011, reminded him, in its ferocity, of the rain that fell 25 years ago, in 1986, and that killed his pal Billy Wheelbarrow by stopping his car in its tracks on the motorway.

My Uncle Dudley is a great one for reminising. We get into arguments often when he reminisces as he does. Arguments over such things like: Where was The Woodstock Festival held? Uncle Dudley insists it were held on the Isle Of White...I go mental telling him it were upstate New York....sometimes my sis Micheesha tells me to let him be and let him think what he likes.

He is also a great one for the impromptu one liners. 

For e.g: We pulled up in Connswater's car park the other day. Uncle Dudley spied this cocky MILF exiting her car in the parking bay beside us. She'd a wide arse and a skinny waist... 

 ...Uncle Dudley yelled, - You love! You've an arse like a bag of spanners!

Uncle Dudley has bad nights and wakes from his sleep often. He screams out, “Leave Me Alone!” or “Fuck Off!”

Me and my sis Micheesha think he's done time and this is what he is shouting about. We think maybe he got a hard time in the clink and these are the terrible episodes he revisits every night in his nightmares.

But he takes me on runs up into the country. He races cross country over into Donegal. We appreciated the mountain ranges out there and take pictures, fucking with the perspective --- like I squat in the foreground, with some mountain in the background, lining it up so's it looks like I'm sitting with the pointy bit at the top of the mountain sticking up my hole.

Uncle Dudley loves this type of humour and loves it when the conversation turns blue.

Every time on the way home we end up buying cheap feags* and always, somewhere on the road, he gives me this micro-lecture about marriage, or rather about why you should never get married:

 - Why make one woman miserable when you can bring pleasure to so many?

 - Yeh, Uncle Dudley...Yeh!

Then he puts some Beatles in his cassette deck. And usually he plays this un, cos its his favourite:

*feags - cigarettes