Irish Joe

I had a phone call from my friend Stewart in Hove to say that Joe had died on Saturday. This was awful news as Joe was a dear friend to me and I`d known him and Stewart from 1986 when I moved into my ground floor flat in Lansdowne Street in Hove. I remember the lady I bought the flat off of saying to me to avoid the mad irish man upstairs! I did indeed avoid him for a few weeks as I could hear him wobbling in through the front door and falling against my front room wall. I did eventually ask him in for a drink and a friendship was sealed for life.

He was a one-off, kind, wise and although "steamboats" most of the time, as he put it, he could not be outwitted even when he was at his most inibriated. I locked myself out more than once and Joe came to the rescue wielding a huge breadknife that hacked-off part of the door jam to get to the latch. He would phone a taxi firm, get the driver to go to the off-licence at the bottom of the road, buy him booze and deliver it to Joe so he didn`t have to leave the flat! He once nearly killed the chap in the garden flat below me who was having a barbecue. From upstairs, Joe got a packet of frozen prawns out of his freezer and threw them down to Frank. I think he actually hit him with them but Frank was so nutty he wouldn`t have felt it.
I remember one new years eve when I was upstairs with him and some old ladies from down the street. As the bells rang out, he appeared with a shotgun and started waving it about and was going to fire out the window as they do in Armagh. We all made a quick exit. He was very careful with his money but would always help a friend out. He made his own slippers out of a blanket and some cardboard once, they looked quite good too. He would knock on my door, stagger in dressed in his best three piece suit and out of his jacket pocket would produce a crystal glass and a bottle of Scotch! Then he would proceed to talk without pausing for a couple of hours until I managed to get him upstairs. His glasses would be halfway down his nose and his gait would be unsteady but that was Joe. At night when he was pickled, he`d ring the White House, the Kremlin or the Pope and torture the poor person on the switchboard for hours! I`ll never forget the sight of him sucking the bones out of two boiled pigs trotters in his front room - ugh!