Goodbye PantyHead

I am very saddened to announce that PantyHead passed from this Earthly dimension into the next at the end of last year. As I had been gallivanting in deepest darkest Africa I only learnt this news a few days ago via an email from her daughter, which I discovered amidst a sea of spam.

Apparently after I left her last August the old battle-axe’s ticker grew dickier and dickier until it finally stopped the week before Christmas. Her daughter assured me that PantyHead had given her subsequent carers a run for their money and was prickly to the end when finally despite her obsessive compulsive neuroses, extreme calorie counting and bizarre hypochondria she passed peacefully away.

I was strangely saddened to hear of PantyHead’s demise. Despite being madder than a March hare and so causing me to curse inwardly (and audibly - she was pretty deaf) she also awarded me with moments of blog worthy comic gold. I’ll never forget her bizarre approach to self-medication: preventing blindness (brought on by excessive salt intake?) with a sugar rich midnight feast consisting of half a bottle of wine, 8 prunes, 4 laxative pills and a fair gulp of liquid laxative. This was followed by a full day propped up on her commode shitting indelicately through the eye of a needle but feeling all the better for it because she had after all saved her sight.

I was surprised to hear of PantyHead’s death as I half expected that with her indomitable spirit and Rod Stewart wiggery she really would live forever. But she is testament to that Universal truth that we are none of us infallible. I saw a glimpse of the fragile woman behind her prickly armour of neuroses that day when whilst combing-over her remaining wispy locks she so soulfully questioned where her youth had gone. I could never imagine her young and beautiful, dancing in exquisite clothes at lavish balls. Just as I suspect my (for now imaginary) grandchildren will never fathom that I was once young and ginger (as a result of excessive hair dying I now pass for a natural Red).

I am profoundly affected by PantyHead’s passing, I think of her with a tenderness of heart that at the time I never suspected I would be capable of. She has reminded me that no matter how tough you think you are it is a slippery slope towards insanity and incontinence from here on in. What I found most tragic was the eulogy attached to the notification of death email. It was a eulogy written by children who felt no connection to their difficult mother, but in that great British tradition of the Stiff Upper Lip were being very polite about it.

Excuse me for going all preachy with a borrowed line from Moulin Rough,

'The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.'

An aging, neurotic, hypercondriac once showed me a life lived without Love ends in a polite eulogy. And a polite eulogy is to my mind like a tepid cup of tea – frankly bloody intolerable.