Gratitude V: A Eulogy

Larger Than Life: A Eulogy

You know those people that you think will never die?

People whose unforgettable lust for life,

Whose spirit and smell and smile

Will live on for a very long time –

People that are, in the well-worn cliché of our times,

“Larger than life”?

Well, one of them died last night.

So, whoever decides these things, or whatever:

Fuck you for taking our favourite horn player,

And for spoiling all our plans for the summer.

And fuck you for making me remember

Our protracted arguments about Jeremy Clarkson;

(Admired by one of us, despised by the other.)

And, equally,

Thanks for letting us see

Him blow his horn, in the Front Room,

Thanks for one of my favourite lines,

Which was off the cuff, the first time:

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome,

Doing what he does best – blowing his own horn:

Mr. Robbie Fraser.”

Thanks, I think, for letting me hear his

Story of anal drug smuggling,

From his big fat round head,

With its big fat beautiful grin.

Thank you for this

Farting, burping, ass-scratching, ball-grabbing,

Inappropriate joke-making great big belly laugh of a man

A day-sleeping, attention-seeking,

Top Gear-watching pain in the ass.

Someone else said it before, and said it better,

That’s why I always quote.

So, Hunter S. Thompson wrote:

“There he goes:

One of God’s own prototypes,

Too weird to live, too rare to die.”

A viking sent from another time, to remind us

Not to take life so seriously.

So, Thanks for taking the piss out of me,

For laughing relentlessly at my pretensions

Thanks for never ever worrying about offending someone,

I learned so much from that.

Thanks for every beer and every dab I blagged,

And Thanks for never complaining about that.

Thanks for laughing at what you found annoying,

I learned a lot from that too.

So, I’ve been walking around in my pants

And I’ve taken to scratching my balls

In a public, a bit more

As if to try to replace the irreplaceable.

Because, people, we’re gonna have to

Pick up the slack, and be larger than we were before

We’re ALL gonna have to blow our own horns,

To drown out the sorrowful silence of enforced absence.

So, yes, the dead haven’t left, so they can’t come back,

But we’ll have to pick up the slack.

I’ll start now….

“Two nuns in a bath…..*

Thanks.

*[And one says to the other:

“Did you hear about Robbie Fraser?”

And the other says “No, what about him?”

And the first nun says “Well, you know how we don’t really exist,

Except in the mind of a self-regarding poet, for jocular purposes,

But Robbie lived – I mean, he didn’t just exist, he really lived.”

And the other nun says,

“This is just the kind of long-winded, pretentious shit

That Robbie probably would have hated….but, yes, go on.”

And the first one says, “He’s dead.”

And the other one, the second nun, says

“Bollocks, you're having a laugh – or maybe he’s faked it.”

And then the two nuns stare at each other for a long time, until eventually,

The first one sighs, and says

“What the fuck are we doing in the bath?”

And the other one says:

                                                                                                         “Robbie probably would have laughed at that.”]