My best friend and one of my great friends from Belfast have, quite independently (they've never even met), come to the same conclusion about me.
Dave regularly says that "He can't be killed by normal means" whereas Marty phrases it that "Come the nuclear holocaust it'll just be wee Paolo and the cock-a-roaches"
These testimonies have always amused me because they always remind me in a curious way of Terry Pratchett's definition of flying as the simple matter of 'throwing yourself at the ground and missing'. In evading death thus far this is entirely how I feel I've done it.
I've come close to proving them wrong a few times but so far their proclamations seem to have held true.
Mostly it has been medically where I've come closest, with several doses of pneumonia and other respiratory afflictions getting me perilously close but that isn't what I really want to talk about.
A couple of weeks back now a young woman got separated from her friends in Glasgow while under the influence of a good bevvy. She was last seen walking along the Clyde side and, eventually her body was recovered from the river. This has really got to me, even though I recognise it was probably an unfortunate accident.
About a dozen or so years ago I was on a stag do for a pair of brothers who were getting married within weeks of each other. A good squad of us went to Amsterdam and everything was going pretty well. A bit too well in fact as I seriously over indulged.
In one place we were in I went to the bathroom and decided to jump out and get more money from an ATM. I told nobody where I was going. This is a perfect definition of bad decision making when drunk. Details from this point on are pretty vague but the upshot is that I was mugged. I got hit on the back of the head and down I went. My wallet (empty as I was actually on my way to get money) and phone were taken. I tried to stand up but was clearly concussed and lurched sideways, over a barrier, and into a canal.
Thankfully someone who saw this unfold jumped in after me and got me safe. I was later told in the hospital that the unknown heroic person had told the ambulance crew who arrived that my foot had got caught in a bicycle frame at the bottom of the canal and they had to get me free of it.
I amazingly got away with just a small cut to the head that got glued back together, but if it hadn't been in such a busy area I could easily have died.
My friends all assumed, quite fairly really, that I had just gone home to the hotel to sleep it off. It was only when I arrived back at eight the following morning (dressed only in a paper boiler suit) and had to wake Dave up to pay the taxi driver that any of them found out what happened. Men are really bad for this. Every one of my friends has just disappeared on nights out and we all just assume that they've just had a moment of clarity and called it a night. It's an atrocious assumption.
I have problems equating that to the story of the young woman though. She was deaf and was separated from her friends not by her own volition, but by a couple of bouncers. I wonder if they mistook her attempts to communicate as her being too drunk to get back in to their club. Who knows really? I am just so sad that she had the apparent misfortune to end up in a dangerous stretch of water where nobody was likely to see her and save her.
Mostly it has been medically where I've come closest, with several doses of pneumonia and other respiratory afflictions getting me perilously close but that isn't what I really want to talk about.
A couple of weeks back now a young woman got separated from her friends in Glasgow while under the influence of a good bevvy. She was last seen walking along the Clyde side and, eventually her body was recovered from the river. This has really got to me, even though I recognise it was probably an unfortunate accident.
About a dozen or so years ago I was on a stag do for a pair of brothers who were getting married within weeks of each other. A good squad of us went to Amsterdam and everything was going pretty well. A bit too well in fact as I seriously over indulged.
In one place we were in I went to the bathroom and decided to jump out and get more money from an ATM. I told nobody where I was going. This is a perfect definition of bad decision making when drunk. Details from this point on are pretty vague but the upshot is that I was mugged. I got hit on the back of the head and down I went. My wallet (empty as I was actually on my way to get money) and phone were taken. I tried to stand up but was clearly concussed and lurched sideways, over a barrier, and into a canal.
Thankfully someone who saw this unfold jumped in after me and got me safe. I was later told in the hospital that the unknown heroic person had told the ambulance crew who arrived that my foot had got caught in a bicycle frame at the bottom of the canal and they had to get me free of it.
I amazingly got away with just a small cut to the head that got glued back together, but if it hadn't been in such a busy area I could easily have died.
My friends all assumed, quite fairly really, that I had just gone home to the hotel to sleep it off. It was only when I arrived back at eight the following morning (dressed only in a paper boiler suit) and had to wake Dave up to pay the taxi driver that any of them found out what happened. Men are really bad for this. Every one of my friends has just disappeared on nights out and we all just assume that they've just had a moment of clarity and called it a night. It's an atrocious assumption.
I have problems equating that to the story of the young woman though. She was deaf and was separated from her friends not by her own volition, but by a couple of bouncers. I wonder if they mistook her attempts to communicate as her being too drunk to get back in to their club. Who knows really? I am just so sad that she had the apparent misfortune to end up in a dangerous stretch of water where nobody was likely to see her and save her.
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