Cake, Death or a Holiday on Brighton Beach?

Because I got bored telling my own stories, I will now tell the stories of others.

I used to say to Mark that there were two types of people in the world (actually I tell everyone that there are always two types from a subset of a subset of a certain type of person in the world). In this particular black and white view of life the universe and everything, there are people that are helpful to have as friends, and people that are content. That is, they don't have their shit together, but you still hang out with them because they're interesting, and one day, you just might write that best selling novel about your stupid life and all the stupid people in it. But of course it isn't really like that.

If you know Mark at all, you'll understand what it means to feel a certain type of English. I.e. Life is shit, the weather sucks, The food tastes of arse, everyone thinks you're a cunt, but somehow, we muddle through.

Do you know Richard Billingham ? He has a collection of photographs, Ray's a Laugh, that exactly encapsulates this certain type of Englishness I'm talking about. You can see his alcoholic father throwing the family cat here.

A month or so back Phillip and I were at the wine connection, and we tried to get Mark to join us, but he told us he had just arrived in Essex on family matters after having disembarked from an SQ flight completely drunk off a bottle of vodka (all of it) and having just lugged 20 or so kilos of photographic equipment from the railway station (he believed in doing everything the hard way).

The message was kind of unclear, and I think I sent something like, "Are you finally listening to your parents wishes and opening a photo-shop in Brentwood... finally?" Which was not a very nice thing to say really, and I probably did not say such a thing, but something like it. When he replied, it was pretty... unpleasant. Something about a close family member being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

That wasn't very nice, I felt quite sorry. I even remember having met her in Essex the first year we were dating. It was a real treat you know, being in Essex. Really. Most fascinating. It helped me put all the British comedy I love to watch in context.

Philip sent him a message saying he was sorry; I mean what else can you say. Mark replied, "Life goes on. I'll be back, and she'll be dead."

We laughed. It kind of funny.

Mark did give me a few things to take away from that relationship, the most valuable one was his sense of (romantic?) irony. I don't think I could have quite gotten it from anywhere else. Also how when you think things are shit, they can get worse still. But it doesn't matter, you'll live.

It reminded me of the period when my grandmother was dying (the one I liked, not the one I don't know). My parents and little sister were going back to Kuching every month to visit her,  and reporting back on her unstable condition which was always "getting better" but actually, not really. In January, they returned and I asked them how she was, and my sister said, "Oh my god, Uncle Dave died." Now that was bizarre. So here they were, visiting Grandma, waiting for her to get better or die, and then while they were there Dave died quite suddenly (he was not an old chap) and they had his funeral instead.

You know in Fooled by Randomness, N.N. Taleb has a term for how things tend to happen in clumps? ...Now what is that term...?

Oh on on the subject of Englishness and Essex: Check out the New Yorker article on Phyllis Diller. Hilliarious! Women should aspire to this.