2 April - 3 Funerals & A Wedding

Well, I only went to one of the funerals in question…Three fathers of friends of mine died on the same night recently. Am not making this up. Got texts from all of them in the space of a few hours. Long hospitalizations for all of them. Their daughters and son are all my very, very intimate friends but the fathers, all hovering around the 80 years old mark, never met, though could they have met? Say, could they 60 years ago have all been in some London dancing venue, drinking at the same bar? A London QC, a coastal town foster parent majorly into the Christian religion (you know, his car had Jesus Loves You stickers on it) and an Irish guest house owner in a pretty remote part of Ireland. I wonder what they’d have to say if we brought them together for lunch or if their souls collided at the door of whatever is up there. All 3 were practicing catholics so all headed in same direction. Probably all wold have worried we’re not married and have no savings in banks. Never mind what we consider achievements. Actually I lie, one of us ‘kids’ did have a wedding recently. More about it later.

I attended the funeral of one of them. Which was notable for two things, apart from learning some staggeringly moving details of how he’d met his now widow at a naval dance 60 odd years ago and how many longstanding friends he still had and for falling in love with the most beautiful mourning dress, Maxmara black taffeta with a wide skirt, very Audrey H. as worn by my half orphan friend. First, earlier in church my mind flashed for some reason to some pretty out there sex I had one night with Dear John. Amazing what you can do on a reclining chair. In some arty posh flat. Thank god it was faux leather and didn’t mark/soil. Maybe it was the hard church bench that in some sequence of thought led me back to the designer electric blue chair where bending in a myriad of positions came easily. I batted the images away but they came back a few times before my mind was able to change the subject and focus back on the service. I think it’s deliberate. Still trying to not be a good catholic or precisely because I am.
Secondly at the wake back at the house, Aiden, an old friend also attending, decides to tell me a propos of nothing about his travels in China for work. I do ask the necessary question (no I don’t care about their food and working habits) and he confesses he did try a Chinese girl despite being married to one of my best friends. Says he decided for the prostitute option to get his curiosity satisfied once and for all). Surprisingly he says ‘It was like fucking a frog’. ‘In what way?’ I enquire. ‘She was….viscuous.’ ‘Why did you do it?’ ‘As a technical thing. I just wanted to find out as all my colleagues had fucked Chinese girls. I wanted to see if she was shaved, not shaved etc. But they generally don’t do it for me’. ‘Just as well' - I say- 'as you’re there often. Am I supposed to let your wife know that they ‘generally’ just don’t do it and after your experiment they really don’t do it, so whilst on business trips in Asia you’ll stick to fucking Caucasian colleagues? Also she was a prostitute don't forget, so perhaps it would have been different with a civilian?’
No he doesn’t think so. He adds that she asked to stop whilst they were doing it and went and looked at the dictionary and pointed to the word for ‘stomach’. ‘So you were hurting her?' I say 'Thanks for letting me know you’re so big! Am sure sad I didn’t fancy you in high school. But it’s no big deal with an oriental girl, maybe they’re built differently and they’re small/tight. Maybe they do the ping pong ball trick to distract you or maybe most of those sad guys who fancy they’re having a relationship with Thai girls instead of just providing the washing machine, are the ones that on top of having no social skills or looks to attract a woman back home, are also small dicks? Questions questions I’ll never get the answer for.

We quit this conversation and I turn to this guy David who looks very Jewish but tells me he works for a small Christian charity. How can that be so? I ask. He converted he explains. Anyway, Christian is always a giveaway byword for some sort of weirdness: ‘normal’ Christians say they’re Catholics or not as the case may be. So he couldn’t just be a regular churchgoer, oh no, he did the Alpha course. I won’t go into how much I despise Alpha courses as I have to be tolerant of whatever works for people in managing to stay afloat of life in big cities and so on (am categorically sure that no sheep farmer in Wales actually feels the need for Alpha courses, in my experience it’s usually heavy coke users in London). Once I got dragged into some drama by an ex lover who did such a course and wanted me to apologise retroactively to his wife to whom he’d finally confessed a sham of a married life for previous 15 years. The poor woman was very upset with me as I was the only identifiable baddie in his story. All the others being dozens of prossies he'd frequented and an old flame now dying of cancer and so she had to be exhonerated from the 'come to the meeting/hug/say sorry etc. Sorry?? Er, you're the married guy not me! If I have time one day I’ll tell you the story of He who 'lives in the very big house in the country' as immortalised by those 'boys who likes girls who like boys 'and so on. Blur ok?

I was enjoying the crazy conversation at the wake but my best orphelin friend, who always suspects my motives, didn’t believe I wasn’t flirting, just having fun with this guy (plus if I talk to anyone I do give them full attention and in these cold parts if passes for flirting. I do maintain people need to go and live in Spain and Italy and France for a few weeks once in while) and she passingly lets me know that if it were Summer, I’d have seen that David, who habitually wears Jesus sandals, has very long toenails that curve inwards. I tell her that’s my favourite kink. It’s not, but you know, your best friends don’t always know all about you. And is this a common male thing? Years ago I knew someone else who had the precise same detail about his feet, don’t know if it can be called affectation? And I also knew a Dominik with one v. v. long eyebrow hair which he just kept there no doubt to track your eye movements. The guy was in his late thirties so we’re not talking Dennis Healey here but he had the long eybrow and the long fingernail to clean his ear out. Don’t know about his toenails.

I’ll leave the wedding for another entry.