Christmas.
So Merry Christmas.My wife and I got a Christmas card from my brother Edward this morning.
To say that I don't get on with my brother would be a world-staggering understatement. He made my childhood a complete misery. He is a nasty, spiteful, vindictive, manipulative little bastard with no conscience, who derives a great deal of joy from other people's misery, especially mine. And that doesn't even begin to do justice to him. I never wish to see him again. I don't know exactly when was the last time I saw him (had I known at the time, I'd have marked the occasion), but I think it was Christmas '95, against my wishes. I haven't wanted to spend a single second of time in his company since around '82, since I could guarantee that he would do his utmost to make that second miserable for me, and that he'd succeed. My family all know this, or would if they had ever listened to a single word I've said in the last twenty years or so. The fact that my father, the member of my immediate family with whom I get on the best and who knows me the best, after my having repeatedly asked for, at that stage, about ten years never to spend Christmas with Edward ever again, arranged matters so that I would be forced to spend Christmas with him, tells you a lot about my relationship with my blood relatives. I last spoke to Edward very briefly on the phone a year or two later: I rung my mother, he answered, I asked him to get her, he did. Even that level of contact was, as far as I was concerned, unwelcome. But, since I cut off all contact with my mother (which is another, but (ha!) related, story), that doesn't happen any more.
Anyway, I just moved house a couple of weeks ago. Needless to say, I didn't send a change-of-address card to my brother. Yet here is this card from him, delivered to my new address. The list of people who could have given it to him is short: my father, my sister, or my grandmother. Whichever one it was, it simply demonstrates, yet again, how little they have ever listened to me and/or how little they think of my feelings. That I can't guess which of them it was says a lot. I don't want him to know where I live. I've gone to great lengths to avoid him: I've left the country, for fuck's sake; how heavy a hint do they need?
This card is, to all extents and purposes, a big special Christmas "Fuck You" from my family to me. And they wonder why I don't visit.
So Merry Fucking Christmas.
Ach, well.
On the up side, I got let out of work a few hours early. So now I'm going to go home to the rather excellent new family I've made for myself and try and forget about the old one. And I'm going to boil a ham in Diet Coke, which should be fun.
Back soon. Have fun.
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