My nephew, Taylor, made a wish when putting a two pence piece into one of those charity spinners in Banardos. He’s seven so his reasoning is he gets a wish if he’s giving away some money, like you would do in a fountain or whatever.

In Coventry, he wished for a new mario game for his Wii, previous wishes have been quite sweet. Once he wished for his mummy to be happy. The kid is pretty amazing.

His wish this week was the world.

Less sweet, and confirming what I always suspected. My nephew, in conjunction with a couple of my cousins will take over the world.

I have a lot of cousins, most in Coventry, some in south Wales, a few are older, most are younger than me. Most are bonkers in their own special way that I still love.

The cousins that I’m pretty sure are going to take over the world are Bradley and Scott.

And Bradley’s going to be in charge.

He’s nine, and a bit weird. I’m pretty sure that some of the kids at his school do not appreciate his weirdness, but kids don’t. I do however. I love it, and I don’t know why I think he’s going to take over the world, but whenever I talk to him I get this strange feeling that in the future he’s going to be on television a lot ordering us around with Scott and Taylor on either side of him. I should be more scared than I am, but I’m his cousin, I won’t suffer like the rest of you. Sorry.

Scott is pretty smart, and cool, and a scout. And a pyromaniac. He knows how to do a lot of dangerous stuff already at eleven and by time he’s old enough to take over the world and not have his mum take away his X-Box as punishment, he’ll know a great deal more. While Bradley will be a benevolent leader, Scott will be the evil side of this trifecta. Again, I’m not worried, Scott loves me. You guys are all screwed though. Punishment for not bowing down the new regime will involve burning down of your house I suspect.

Sorry.

Taylor is a bit of a wild card in all this, he’s the youngest and thinks Scott and Bradley are brilliant, and cool, and so far he’s pretty easily talked into most things, unless it’s by his mum. He’s really nice, but can be a bit evil too. He likes to play the bad guys in Lego Star Wars, he has a red light saber. But then, in Lego Harry Potter he wants to be Harry, and in Griffyndor and only makes potions to poison the boy who’s been bullying him. And it’s Taylor I have to watch out for, because as much as he loves me, he’ll still beat me up. We can’t play Lego Star Wars together because he plays as the emperor and constantly electrocutes me. We can’t play Super Mario Bros. Wii because he picks me up all the time and throws me off edges. There is a streak of naughty in that kid. He’ll be helping Scott burn down the houses, but will make sure the owners and their pets aren’t inside when it goes up in flames.

All while Bradley is watching on and planning his next move as our leader.

I’m pretty sure my aunts are going to hate this post. And my sister. But hey, what the hell, it’s not like they’re going to suffer when their children are in charge. Though, they may react a bit like Vala in Stargate SG-1 when her child was hell bent on talking over the galaxy in the name of evil ascended beings. But then, that kid did a whole lot of killing, and these three boys, not so much. Unless it’s on the Wii or the X-Box.

This is my nan. And me. I’m the baby obviously. My nan actually didn’t really change in appearance, between this picture and when she died a week on Friday. I’m assuming at some point in her life, her hair was no the shocking white that I always knew. The stupid thing is, I don’t know what her hair colour is, and now she’s not around to ask.

Not around to ask a lot of things.

And thus, this is what you’re left with when someone dies. Questions. Young or old, natural or not, you’ve always got these questions. I suppose my dad can answer a few, he told me recently he’d traced my nan’s family back to the eighteenth century, which is quite cool, and some things have been straightened out, like the fact that I always thought my nan was the eldest sister of the three, but was actually the middle sister. And she was eighty-six, though, I knew she was in her eighties somewhere.

I know a few stories. Good and bad. Both exist, in my family, even my grandparents are fucked up. Actually, more so than my generation of nut balls. Or we’re just fucked up in a different way. I’m not entirely sure yet.

My nan learned to drive during the second world war. She was taught by the army in a jeep, and to this day, I don’t think she even had a real licence or passed a proper test.  The Army needed her to drive, they gave her a licence and she drove on that for another fifty years. Roughly. She wrote off two cars that I can remember (my dad wrote off a few too), and couldn’t park. I know people have trouble parallel parking, I would too, but she couldn’t park at all. Anywhere. Pulling into parking spaces, with empty spaces either side, was too much for her. We used to pile out of the car in the middle of the road, or wherever, when we came to our destination, and my dad would park the car for my nan.

She collected little miniatures. Tiny little bottles of alcohol, that often didn’t have any alcohol in them, or did when she got them and have evaporated over the years, sitting on the shelves. Addictive personalities run back a few generations in this family. She must have three hundred or so. I looked at some of them recently, they’re covered in dust, it’s been a long time since we got them down and cleaned them all, and some of them still have alcohol in them. Not that it would be fit for drinking. I opened up a tiny bottle of peach snapps and, well, it did not smell like peaches, snapps, or anything consumable by humans. Though, I suspect, my grandad would still put the rum that’s up there in his coffee.  My dad said he’s probably just going to leave them there, continuing with the house’s antiques shop theme. Complete with dust. I don’t think he owns a feather duster.

He needs a feather duster.

Her will says she wants her ashes to be spread over her younger sister’s grave. My great aunt Val died eleven years ago, and I think that hit my nan a lot. They were very close and my great aunt wasn’t even seventy when she died of cancer.

One thing I do remember about my nan was that she would watch Stargate with me, I think she liked Richard Dean Anderson. I know she liked to watch MacGyver back in the day. Mostly though, she watched cricket, and as she got older, the televisions got bigger. She got sky and only ever watched the cricket and countdown. And the soaps. So, at the time, basically everything on terrestrial channels. I had to write down the instructions for the sky box in big letters on A4 paper, so she could get the first four channels on. My granddad liked lawn green bowls. Which bored my nan. Which confused me, cause cricket was just as boring to me at the time, and about six hundred odd channels were just going unwatched, while in Wales I was stuck with the welsh channel S4C instead of normal channel 4 and a dodgy picture for channel 5.

The sad thing is, there isn’t a lot to know about my nan. That I know of. She lived in a pub when she was a kid, before the war, and her dad was a racing car driver for Singer, but my nan, well my nan worked for the telephone exchange, had a couple of kids, and retired. And drank. And watched cricket.

Now the question is? Is this all there was to her, or is this all I can remember?