We have a friend, whom I shall call X. He is a really nice bloke, would never do you wrong, caring father and step-father with high expectations, lacks malice, has a very sharp brain eg when I come up with clever comments he immediately has a well-matched riposte. Sober, he has clear and sensible ideas about people should behave in a public place.
Sober. Drunk, he's a different character. An interesting history of which I know only the half of it. Well brought up boy, son of wealthy plumber/boiler fitter from a nice suburb of Dublin, he developed a heroin addiction. He's been clean for years, and I will state my admiration of anyone who has managed to kick that dreadful habit and make a go of life.
But he does like the drink. He was totally off it for months but has got into a habit of going to Wetherspoons when it opens at ten, and sometimes ending up via various other places at the Torygraph until two in the morning.
A couple of weeks when it was hot and sunny, he was asleep on the lawn in the garden of Crappy Pub. Having had a fair amount to drink, he needed a pee, so he just whipped out his thing and peed there. Someone reported him to the licensee; he wasn't barred...
Over the weekend, he and his partner and daughter went to partner's mother's place near Bournemouth. Partner's mother is comfortably off, very proper, very very middle class, house-proud to a tee. Thinks her daughter could do a lot better than X. The complex where the mother-in-law lives has a pool, so X bought himself some swimming trunks. Not sensible shorts, oh no, but some designed to make the man look, er, well packaged. SO he gets into the pool, splashes around for a bit, and comes out, minus these trunks... He claims the water was cold.
Bank Holiday weekend, so what do any loving couple do? Now, you may want o know how I know this - he told everybody in the pub. And 'Everybody' gleefully reported it to me. Somehow, he missed, and it went all over the nice clean sheets at his mother-in-law's. Which kind of puts into perspective his spilling paint over the new Axminster carpet on his previous visit.
When Jimmy went to the pub for an hour yesterday early afternoon, X was already three sheets (or more) to the wind. Some five hours later, Jimmy popped out to the shop to get me some cigarettes, and bumped into X, who was staggering all over the pavement. He was on his way home to change his trousers. this time he hadn't even bothered to wop his thing out...
But believe me, he's one of the nicest guys you could meet...
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