just spent a great weekend back in southport. My brother, Matt's, best mate had a 40th so, Matt came over from Canada with his wife Jackie, my other brother, Paul, came over from Germany, and my Dad came up from Devon. Jez, the guy having the 40th, put us all up at his house. the Party was to be a fancy dress do. Vivianne, my wife and I decided to go as Nip and Tuck, well Dr Nip and Dr tuck to be specific. Vivianne is a research nurse so managed to get hold of a set of surgical blues, and i made up two fake arm stumps. i'll try and post a picture of the stump at some point. it's an old gag where it looks like you are holding a cut off arm but in effect it is you own hand and the glove holding the arm is a fake. this is usually done with a black glove but i needed it to be a surgical glove so had to make it from scratch. at points in the construction i thought it wasn't going to work but the whole thing came together well and it freaked out most people who saw it. the party went well and almost everyone came in costume, some real crackers, the blues brothers seemed rather popular, as did superman/woman. the best costume was easily the one jez made. there used to be a comedian who rode around on a fake ostrich, with fake legs sat on top of the bird and his own legs providing the legs of the bird. jez had constructed a replica of this and it was a scream. There was as you can imagine much alcohol consumed, but it was all done in good spirits the occasion when us brothers get together are few and far between and they serve to move us forward in a kind of time lapse process. We grew up in fragmented circumstances with my Dad out of the picture for most of it, we have 3 other brothers by his second marriage. From early on the family i remember consisted of Mum and us 3 boys. there were satellite relatives and my mum's mum, Nan, who we lived with sporadically, usually till we did her head in, often due to excessive noise. Just as we were reaching the point where relationships between siblings begin to change we went our separate ways, Paul to the Army, then settling in Germany. I went off to sea on a ship called the logos, met Viv and settled in scotland and mat then went of to the army and then settled in canada. the consequence of this has been in times past that we haven't had chance to update the internal perspectives we have of each other. For instance, on previous get togethers Paul used to have a tendency to hold this notional idea of being the big brother, but both Matt and i have mates older than Paul so it just seemed strange. this was the first time we've got together and not continually rehashed events that happened years ago. most of the conversations were about current issues and where we all are. it was quite amusing to discover that i share some interesting similarities with Mat that i wasn't aware of. He married a woman that hates art galleries and museums and he does exactly what i do, though to look at our wives are completely different they have loads in common, Viv has spikey red hair and a fine frame and Jackie is native canadian indian, but they are both strong characters. I'll need to sign off now kids to take to swimming
