It’s not a short story…

OK first up: I’m late.  As in, sorry for the delay in the letter. Not as in “I’m probably pregnant and you’re the dad oh god how could we have been so careless even though that night on the houseboat on the Murray was so magical I wouldn’t trade it for the world but my GOD we’re just friends are we really gonna HAVE A KID!!??”. Now that I write that, I am a bit sad it’s not that option as a mad cap adventure of raising our little bastard (unless you legally wed me) would give us killer content for these letters. Luckily, there is far to much business for us to attend to to need a Content Baby. Phew.

There’s so much to unpack from your last letter. Firstly, the nose. It’s a long story! Haha, I gather by now you’ve returned to the room having fallen over after that gag, picked yourself up, gone to the bathroom to splash some water on your face, held your own gaze in the mirror a beat too long and whispered “how does he do it?” I must confess I have used that great joke many, many times. In fact, after I realised how inconvenient the Witch Nose was (and it really was) I delayed getting the surgery to reduce it back to normal size for some 11 months because I enjoyed having people ask me about it and with a cocked eyebrow responding, “it’s a long story!” The problem was (well, there were many, but the MAIN problem was) I’d made the nose TOO long by having it come down and rest on my chest. It just wasn’t a practical witches nose. Classic me. Always trying to buy top of the line when I should have worked my way up to a 50cm nose. The engineering in there to support the actual structure of the nose was insane too (it was a world first, which is something I guess) and it used a lot of bone grafted from my hands to support the whole schnoz, which weighed nearly a kilo. And of course, at high school, it’s advantageous to have hands, so therefore to not fall behind in writing and make sure my hands could function they took a lot of bone from my feet to put in my hands, but then of course, same story with needing foot bones for all the walking I needed to do to get to school, so then they replaced my foot bones by taking my kneecaps out but, of course, the knee cap is a large disc and the foot bones are very little so, of course, they smashed them up a bit, but then, of course, I can’t bend my knees no more and I need to to walk to school so, of course, they start eying off my pelvis to cut some knee cap shapes out of it etc. So it really became a rolling case of robbing Peter to pay Paul all around my body until on the 18th surgery when they had taken my skull out to cut into slices to replace some ribs I needed and they sheepishly proposed taking “all those old hand bones” out of my nose to fuse into “something fairly skull-ish” I said “ENOUGH. It was a fun idea but I think we should try and reverse all this mess.” So they did. So that’s where I was for that time I disappeared for a year. Like I said, inconvenient.

The second thing I need to get to is the song you mentioned. Oh. My. God. I had totally forgotten I had that moment when I was a moody 19 year old where I attempted a ballad career like [look up good ballad singer and insert before sending do NOT forget].

You mentioned the song was called something like “My Cinnamon Sunsets” which was close, I guess you only heard it live and I can see how you’d think that was the name!!

The song was called “Mice In A Mans Sons Bed” and whilst I couldn’t find the lyrics, I did go back and find an old set list where I played that and Hotel California while busking, just alternating between the two.  Wish I could remember the song but from memory the lyrics were about how a son and his father had become estranged and when the father finally comes to see the son after all these years the sons house is abandoned and the only sign of life was the mice nibbling biscuit crumbs in the sheets of the dirty flat, and the audience was forced to wonder if that was a metaphor for parent child relationships and also (hopefully) forced to wonder if I was single. Pretty powerful shit actually you can do something with it if you want, like turn it into a film or whatever.  All yours man.

OK, sorry this has been a wild trip down memory lane. YOU’RE the one who was in TWO hostage situations before he was 20! We should be going down YOUR memory lane!! Seriously, I was pretty deep into music at the time and I probably didn’t pay as much attention to those newsworthy events as I should, particularly the second one, I’d love you to take me back.  Also, I heard something happened with your plans for the pool? And who’s Errol and why does he keep answering your phone?

Anyway, all my red hot undying love, I remain faithfully your friend always,

Hame.