You can choose your friends, but...

The world is a different place when the sun is shining. Mr Kemp delivers the papers with a cheery ‘morning!’ rather than a malicious ‘don’t forget to pay me tomorrow, fatty’; the birds in the garden look joyous and proud, rather than windswept and grumpy; and even my mother seems less sweaty, overweight and toxic.
Well, alright, that last one was an exaggeration, but two out of three ain’t bad.
We had a near cataclysmic meltdown last night. At approximately 10.15pm, dearest mother ran out of Jim Beam and staggered over to the shoe-rack for the cheapo emergency half-bottle of Jacobite she keeps hidden in a welly. Trouble is, my Welsh cousin Gethin had accidentally found it at 9.45pm and had decided to help himself. Mum’s reaction was like a white dwarf erupting into supernova (see Hubble website for further details and examples)
I did what any child borne of an alcoholic parent has learned to do with bitter experience – I hid. Gethin, sitting half-comatosed on the sofa bed with a large cheese sandwich and a HobNob, stepped into the fatal trap that so many Welsh pseudo-criminals have fallen into before… he confessed.
He is now sporting a black eye, a bloody nose and wrist burns, and is on his way back to Wales as we speak.
In a strange way, I shall miss him; but in another, bigger way, I’m so glad he’s gone I could dance naked on a plinth in Sainsburys, and I hope I never see the fat, unpleasant bastard again.
Families, eh?

RC 29-5-08
1455 BST