Evening all,
Today has been a great day on the sponsorship front...Thank you to everyone's favourite temping receptionist, Ingrid, for sponsoring me on the justgiving site. And thank you to Shazza from the Watton office for her fiver on the form at work. Great stuff.
I also got a fiver from someone called Isla on the justgiving site...and I'm not sure who this is. If it's the Isla I went to Cornard Upper School with, then thank you very much, and I am indeed well and happy. I hope you are too....it must have been nearly 20 years since we last had contact and I'm really not sure how you've found me now. That is spooky.
However, if it's the 'Isla' I met in a Corfu bar back in 1998, you really have to let this go. Whilst I agree that you can barely see the scar downstairs, your Adam's apple is still clearly visible and I just can't see past this (literally). It's over, move on.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, spooky occurrences. Well, if you want spooky with a capital S, then I'll tell you about the time my mum died at Mildenhall Airshow.Don't worry it has a happy ending...
I went to Mildenhall Airshow about 6 years ago with a group of mates...I hate airshows but they served beer and someone had lied about there being loads of women there. The day had gone well (despite the lack of ladies) and I was enjoying a cold beer when my name was called out over the tannoy...of all the names in a 100,000+ plus crowd...it had to be me. I was told to report to the police headquarters on site.
When I got there (via the gents toilet and having bought a packet of mints...I was walking, not driving, but you can't be too careful with the police) I was taken into a little room and told to sit down. They confirmed that I was David Cobb (not just some random bloke who wanted to be a David Cobb) and the policeman put a hand on my shoulder. He then gave me the number of Norwich Hospital and told me to give it a ring about my mother.
The nurse who answered asked me if I was David Cobb (it was a popular question that day) and then asked if my mum was Maureen Cobb. I confirmed this to be the case and she apologised that there was nothing they could do but she had died about two hours earlier.
Naturally, I was in bits, the policeman offered me some tissues and I just sobbed and sobbed. I managed to clear my throat and asked how she had died. The nurse on the phone seemed surprised and then said "Well your mother was 92 and she had been suffering a long time"...........Unless the airshow had been even more boring than i thought, and I had actually been enduring it for 30 years, my mum was way off 92 years of age.
I told the nurse my mum was in her sixties. This started a whole load more questions (not "Is your name David Cobb?") about my mum and five unbelievable minutes later we established that another Maureen Cobb with a son called David Cobb had died of a stroke earlier that day. It took another five minutes for this to sink in, and a phonecall to the Maureen Cobb that created me, before i accepted everything was ok.
The police apologised profusely and after a cup of tea I was on my way. There was a queue at reception when I left and I wondered how many of them were David Cobb's and who the poor one was that was about to get some bad news. I like to gamble, but the odds of that happening to me must have been over a million to one.
I told you it had a happy ending.
David
