My brother is going through chemotherapy; he is facing up to the illness with amazing bravery. He still makes me laugh as he is as mad as a fucking squirrel on smack.
Mij has had drug problems for most of his life and lives on Methadone which is supposed to help wean him off heroin, who the fuck can wean him off methadone? No-one, is the answer.
My daughter Ashley and I went on the train today to go visit him.
He insisted I shave his entire head, giving him a number 1, by God he has a full thick head of grey-ish hair and it was heavy going. He knows all his hair is going to fall out and wants a head start on it! I felt like I was shaving a Shetland pony!

“Do you have a hoover to get all this hair?” I asked as the buzzing shaver ran through his scalp and thatches of hair dropped to the floor.
“No, see that big crack in the floorboards, just brush it all into that, that is where I brush all the dirt into” he answered me.
“What if rats come and use that hair to build a big nest with?” I suggested.
“Fucking hell, I never thought about that, lets brush it up and throw it outside in the bins” he quickly added.
His flat is less than hygienic to be honest, but he had made a huge effort to clean it for me coming along. His mad jumpy crazy dog Cooper, was trying to shag my leg as I shaved him….I was trying to kick it off and make sure I never cut my brothers head!
So then my brother told me that he had to shake the dog off yesterday as it bit his chemotherapy tubes that hang from a Hickman line in his chest!

“The dog thinks they are clothes pegs and because he goes out the back and jumps up and bites the clothes pegs off the line, he thinks my chemo tubes are for biting every time I bend over and they dangle” he told me.
“Fucking hell, keep them covered, you can’t have your crazy dog biting those tubes out of your flesh” I screamed.

“Yes, I know so that’s why I have clothes pegs in my pocket, it gives him something to chew…. look” he said.
In his hands were a selection of coloured clothes pins and the dog snapped them off him immediately!

He then went onto tell me he was in the street last week and half naked man in bare feet carrying a cup of tea escaped from the local mental hospital approached him and asked my brother if he was in ward 5.
“I told the mad bastard to fuck off; I mean he was the one in bare feet carrying a plastic mug of hot tea in the street, why would he think I was in a mental ward?” My brother gasped.
“I don’t know why he thought that, what were you wearing?” I asked him as I shaved his wee grey head into what can only be described as a ‘rapist’ hairstyle.
“I had on my pyjamas but I had a coat on top and my slippers, but I was only going to the chemist to get my methadone, so I never dress up for that, the pharmacist always laughs at me and we joke about my dress sense” he looked indignant at me.

“Well two men meeting in the cold wearing pyjamas seems sensible to me, God knows why anyone thought either of you belonged in a mental ward beats me” I added sarcastically.

It makes me sad; he lives alone and yet has all these posters and news cuttings of me on his walls. It is so touching, my daughter gulped when she saw them.
Ashley can play guitar and my brother has his guitar in the flat, so she sat with him and played songs and they had a sing-a-long to all his favourite tunes. It was lovely; he cheered her on and was so proud of her guitar playing.

My brother is clearly a funny mad character, he never stops making me laugh, he is very ill and I worry for him. He is lonely and too bloody faraway from me to keep a good eye on, so I can only get through once a week.
I hope he comes through his chemotherapy with the same sense of humour he has now.

Have a wonderful Christmas and very prosperous 2007,

 

From Janey Godley & Daughter Ashley

 

Have a wonderful Christmas and very prosperous 2007,

 

From Janey Godley & Daughter Ashley

 

 

I conned husband into dragging the tree up from the downstairs cupboard. I just pushed it onto him, we were passing the cupboard and I said “Can you go in there and pull out my tree and decorations and help me carry them up, I am so small, I can’t lift it” I looked all forlorn and whimsically girlish- well in reality I probably looked like a sad hobbit-like dwarf.
“Ok hold the door and I will get it all out” he answered.
So he carried the two giant boxes up the stairs and let me get on with it.
I managed to rope him in to the tree trimming by saying “Please help me, these branches that need assembled and constructed have tiny wee colour strips to help you sort them out in size and I am colour blind as you know, please help me I love you….” I whined.

My tree is a bunch of green branches that are poked into a solid green stalk that comes in tubes that you slot together, it is difficult to build.

He sat down beside me and my gigantic mound of green plastic branches; he sorted them all out in size, colour code and in order of assembly. He then started putting it all together with me and before you knew it we were trimming a tree! The very tree that he hated and tried to make me give away rather than build for the holiday season.

I finally got it all up and tied on all my lovely sentimental decorations. Husband was fussing and fixing little red velvet bows (this was extremely unusual as husband has a primeval fear of velvet and normally goes foetal rather than touch it) he made such a nice job of the decorations.
I am happy- the tree looks amazing and the room is so seasonal….so nice.

Now all I have to do get husband to share my love of make up, cleansing balms and Donny Osmond.

I then finally sorted out the wee nativity scene, made me think about poor Mary…imagine being pregnant with the Son of God, then being married to a man who never organised the delivery in advance? I mean they had NINE months to get ready for what was going to be the most talked about birth in the history of the WORLD! Yet they left it all to the last minute, then he pulled her onto a fucking asthmatic donkey and dragged her to a town where the whole place was mobbed because of a census….the poor woman must have been dying in pain, knocking on doors begging for a bed in LABOUR!
How she kept her patience and accepted their “Sorry no room luv” I would have clutched my heaving belly and screamed

“For Fucksake, I am squeezing out God’s son here; you must have a fucking floor near a fire and couple of blankets? Help me or I swear I will get the father of this baby to smite you with locusts….don’t make me do this…you wont like me when I am angry”
Poor woman had to finally give birth in a barn, surrounded by animals, then what happens? Men arrive with gifts. No women came …just men.
Did they bring hot tea and pain killers? Maybe a warm blanket or some soup? No they brought Frankincense and other strange shit, just what she needed as she chewed her own umbilical cord….one man brought a lamb….there already had wee sheep and donkeys but hey one more lamb is good yes?
Poor Mary, I personally would have punched Joseph in the balls, killed a lamb and left the baby on the door step of the inn keeper who ignored her pleas, then fucked off to Syria, took in a beach holiday and divorced Joseph. God could fight over the custody battle; it was his son after all.

You see that’s why I would never have been picked to give birth to God’s son and become a religious icon….I hate nuns!

“Deck the halls with bows of holly…lalalalalalalalal”

I have spent the last few days tracing my roots. It has been hugely interesting and to be honest very revealing!
For instance my new baby niece Julia is a long line of Julia’s that stretch back to the early 1800s. My dad’s gran was a Julia, her mum was a Julia and her mum was also called Julia with the surname Derham. Very unusual name I think, but there we have it. I also discovered that both my great grandparents Annie and James died on the same day in December 1952. That must have shaken the family losing both parents.
The funny thing I came across was that the name Gunn was in my family, well we always knew I had guns in the family for a long time!

So I have been immersed in the last century for days now and find it really amazing how these people lived and little did they know that one day I would be writing about them.
All those poor wee Dutch and French immigrants who made there merry way to Scotland, marrying, breeding and finally settling in Glasgow, never telling much to each generation, only leaving behind Parish records and Marriage certificates, scrawling names that they probably never thought anyone would want to read again and never knowing that I, their great-great-great grand daughter would finally get to run my finger over that weak blue ink.
They buried children stricken by the measles and whooping cough, they sent sons of to war, they became weavers and bar tenders, they married and died and I wonder what part of that DNA was left in me. Probably none I suppose, but I do wonder what the women of my past were like.
I would love to know how they lived and how they died.
My mother died at 47 years and her mother died at 38 years old, but the women before that survived into their 60’s.
I traced Ashley dad’s side of the family and they ended up Irish and French on his side, and extremely Scottish on his mother’s, mother’s side. They were highlanders’ through and through but am sure history tells us that no-one is truly British we are all descendants through Scandinavians and Normans. Though Ashley tells me it’s a fact that one in four of the world’s population are descended from China.
So if anyone out there knows the name Derham, then we may well be related!