Onimousity and dead famous people

I woke up today with that horribly ominous feeling one gets when one remember can’t remember the last part of the night.  It’s horrible, that feeling. I think it’s worse than the headache, the nausea and the eye-ache that often accompany it.   Eskimos have invented loads of words for snow because it snows so much where they live, so I’ve invented a new word for hangover symptoms: ominuosity.

One of the most alarming things about my current onimousity is that I found out that Whitney Houston was dead last night, apparently, but I can’t remember, so when I logged onto the ‘net this morning I was as freshly shocked as I was when I was a kid and got up one Sunday morning and my dad told me Princess Diana was dead. Weird. I feel kind of sad, but at the same time I don’t really care. The sadness is probably exasperated by the hangover. It is sad when people who were big in the nineties die though.  It makes me feel really old. I wasn’t a fan of her music… in fact, my foremost Whitney memory is when I went shopping with my friend in Chester and I realized the full extent of her shit music taste because she bought the cassette single of that duet Houston did was Bobby Brown.  Anyway, in honour of Whitney, here are my top five ‘Finding out Famous People are Dead’ situations:

1. Micheal Jackson.  In this case, I was tipsy when my friend texted me to tell me the fruit-loop was dead, but the next morning I questioned whether I was in fact so drunk I had hallucinated the text as it seemed so unlikely but I turned on the radio and they were playing ‘Man In The Mirror’. We were moving out of our shitty ex-local authority house that day.
2. Diana… yeah, I’m a republican so I hate myself for remembering this. I was sixteen. I remember going into Asda in Runcorn and there was a book you could sign which they were going to send to  her kids.  Great.
3. Hunter S Thompson. This is the saddest one on the list. I was gutted when I found out Hunter S had topped himself. I went out to the The Grapes pub in Sheffield and had a conversation about it on the stairs with a friend.
4. Winehouse. It was a shock yet not surprising. I was at a writing retreat in the
   

   Princess Di: ominously dead

   Andalusian mountains and it seemed like it the world was falling apart as I spent the days languishing in the Spanish sun, working away at my novel, then the evenings getting drunk on home-brewed sherry. I’ll always associate Amy Winehouse dying with that lethal home-brewed sherry.

5. Kurt Cobain. It’s embarrassing he’s fifth on the list, but I hardly remember Kurt dying at all. I was 13 and I found out about it when I was in an RE class.  My parents used to get that awful Today tabloid and there was a tiny, one paragraph story about it. It just shows how much celebrity culture has changed. Nowadays they’d spew out pages and pages of tabloid coverage, The Guardian would change the picture box on its homepage to black and everyone from Kim Karshashian to Barack Obama would tweet about it. But yeah, back then, it was just the last item on the news and  only championed by the cool pages on Teletext.