The problem with having a very large extended family
Is that they don't all know each other, especially when they're from different parts of the country....

My older brother and my Dad share the same birthday, and when I was 15, my Bro was 25, and my dad 50, so a large shindig was planned. We'd hired out the top room of a local pub, all the family were there, Aunts and Uncles and Cousins from Exeter, where we lived (most of whom I didn't even know), and Aunt, Uncle and cousins from Kent came down as well. Chris, my cousin from Kent, who's a couple of years older than me, went into the toilets and opened the door onto the head of one of my Exeter cousins - he apologised, and that was that. We thought.

The end of the evening came, and I started walking home with my brother and some of his mates who'd come down for the party. There were a couple of coppers the other side of the road, who asked us not to sing quite so loudly at 1 in the morning, when we heard screaming back towards the pub. Turning around, we saw a massive brawl kicking off between two halves of the family - our group and the coppers all legged it back to the pub and started pulling people off others, until Exeter's full complement of Saturday night town patrols was dealing with my family......

Next morning, a copper comes to my Mum's house to take statements. I haven't mentioned yet how many people were staying at our house. It was so full there was a guy asleep on the stairs.... Just as the guy came down the path, 8 people were on their way out climbing on Dartmoor for the day (they'd missed all the action teh night before), but there were still about 25 people to take statements from. He called for another 2 officers, and it still took them about 4 hours to get all the statements.

In the end, 2 of my Exeter cousins were found guilty of assault, and my Nan blamed it squarely on my Kent cousins, even though they were the ones beaten up. My Nan's funeral was the first time we'd seen any of them since then (was something like 10 years later). It was a bit tense, and all the blokes in my immediate family were expecting trouble, but thankfully in the end nothing happened. We still don't speak to them though.

My mother-in-law though, seems to have an ongoing feud with *all* of her family, which no-one seems to know the reason for, probably not even her. At least we do things properly in my family.....

Are we still doing length jokes at the end? The statements must have come to about 50 sheets of A4...
(vinny, Thu 12 Nov 2009, 14:01, Reply)