Family Values - the history.

You can choose your [boy] friends, but you cant choose your [boy] friends family!

My family have only ever impinged on the scene [of David and I] twice in nearly fifteen years.

David has a representative of his living "on-site" [Fat Bird].

Dave has a real family and a half family, his mother having died when he was eight and his father marrying again.

Of course the step-mother is always a wicked old hag, and Isabel was.

Isabel was nicknamed "Miss Piggy" by Davids older brother, Eamon, and the name sort of stuck.

She also had her own kids. All of them older than David but younger than Eamon. Lawless, godless baby farm, the fukin lot of them.

Dessie [Desmond], the eldest, was shot dead by the INLA [having just been released from The Maze after completing a sentence for terrorist offences].

Martin, the respectable one [ie never convicted and sentenced for IRA membership]

Paddy [Poidraig], who has also "done time" and is a complete nutter.

Beth, who has more kids than Dr Barnado's, each one with a different father.

Then there is Eamon, David's real brother who has two kids of his own Roseanne [Fat Bird] and Ethan who is bad news and who, in my prediction, I see wearing an orange boiler suit being lead, with his head shaved, to a large wooden & metal chair.

Dessie, I never met. Martin is a bit of a twat and doesn't like me because I'm a Brit. Paddy is great and we get on like a house on fire, even though I am a Brit [probably because we're both piss-heads]. Beth, I don't know that well - but well enough that I won't baby-sit any of her litter.

Eamon [and his wife Pauline, the doom & gloom merchant] sort of brought David up because Miss Piggy didn't / wouldn't.

Hence the close ties with Fat Bird.

She first came to live with us when she came over to London to go to university. For the first year she lived in the halls of residence but since then has lived with us, on and off, for about seven years.

At two and a half years, this is her longest continual stint yet with her head in our fridge.

There's no signs of her getting a man so it looks like we've got her for a while yet.