Oh …

[blamebrampton]

My mother rang me early this morning.

This is a thing she does occasionally, usually when I am working regular hours, or when she has turned up unexpectedly in the same city as me and thinks we should eat together. But sometimes, as today, because someone has died. This time it was her brother, my uncle. A difficult man, who neither of us was close to and who we both ended up on speaking terms with only after a lot of patience on our parts and effort on his.

So it is that strange sort of thing where you are sad that someone has died, and that they did not seem to be able to make happy choices much of the time, but know that you can't in fairness take a week out to be miserable about the whole thing, because you don't have a week's worth of decent memories to sustain it.

But I do recall a thing he said the last time we saw each other: that he wouldn't want to see Donald Trump as president of the USA. I feel that – not for the first time, though almost certainly for the last – he's taken a perfectly understandable position to an illogical extreme.

Comments

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Cheers, ears. He was not well for the last few years of his life, but it was a shock to have him go suddenly. I do know that he had a fear of a lingering end, so I suppose that's something … Such an odd phrase. 'That's something' always makes me feel as though I have just said something along the lines of 'Well, at least he wasn't eaten slowly by lions …'