Not mates...
...family. Cousins, to be precise. Gradually, over the course of years and years, wound me up with their continuous drama, drugged up, drunk, irresponsible nonsense. Yes, living in your mum's house but calling her a cnut every time you're not giving her the silent treatment, getting wasted every single weekend and most weekdays, getting into fights, growing ten grand's worth of pot in your attic, etc. is very funny (to an outside observer) when you're seventeen. When you're thirty, not so much. The family soap opera was starting to get seriously boring.

I'd still mostly do pretty much anything for them, though, until the last time I arranged to go down and see them all. By this point, one had managed to secure a girlfriend to live with, and one of the others also lived away from their mum. So, having spoken on the phone with four of them (three of the cousins and the aunt) that day and arranged where I'd be and when, I knocked off work early and spent three hours driving to their home town, looking forward to a weekend socialising with family and hoping they weren't too annoying.

I arrived at the house bang on the time I'd said I'd be there, and knocked. Nothing. No answer. They knew I was coming. If they'd been coming to visit me I'd have been waiting by the door with a cold one. What was up? I rang the mobile - answerphone, with, natch, stupid answerphone message. I knocked again. After about ten minutes, I gave up and went to the aunt's house. All dark. Nobody home. Rang various mobiles. From four cousins and an aunt, not one of these people who knew I was coming to see them had their phone switched on. Nobody was in anywhere.

Eventually, I realised that the twat in this story was me, and drove for another three hours to get home. I've never seen any of them since. (Later, I was told that at the first house there had been someone in - he'd had a little lie down and gone to sleep, and hadn't heard me knocking. I arrived at about 19:00...)

I kept in touch with them on Facebook for a couple of months, until the aunt started a website to promote her new business and asked me to proofread it. I did so, and pointed out a spelling mistake on the front page, where she'd got a typo in the name of the service she was offering. Not a big thing, but makes a poor first impression but very, very easy and quick to correct.

She ignored me, and then proceeded to spam my timeline four times a day every day with links to her lovely new website (this on top of her near-hourly Farmville updates). Eventually I pointed out that people were unlikely to pay for a service from someone unable to spell the service they were offering. That was, apparently, "rude", and brought threats of violence from her offspring, so now I'm not in touch with them in any way at all.

And do you know what? I don't miss them.
(SonofRojBlake, Thu 19 Sep 2013, 15:06, 3 replies)

are you sure you're not a jehovah's witness
and they weren't just hiding behind the couch?
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 19 Sep 2013, 15:27, closed)

Oh dear.
Line five, "one had managed to secure a girlfriend..." I thought for a moment you'd gone all royal on us.
( edjogs Collared doves are shit., Thu 19 Sep 2013, 16:23, closed)

Have you always been a slow learner?

(the other guy not the one that gave you coochie warts, Thu 19 Sep 2013, 16:44, closed)