Free Flying Free by Nigel Farage

don’t put champagne in hip-flasks and all those burly men in dark blue cashmere were just dying to give her a drink .
    They winked at one another in the porch, murmured things like ‘If it had been a Testarossa, OK…’ and ‘Dark suit, dark coat, bit pissed. Shouldn’t think the poor bugger behind the wheel saw a thing’, ‘Who’s the foxy bint with, then?’, ‘Heigh-ho. ’Nother one bites the dust… Way it goes…’
    They then took up the approved position in the pews – hands clasped before their groins, faces downturned – and heard a eulogy by a vicar who had mugged up on his subject the previous night .
    ‘Nigel was so full of promise and energy. At twenty-one, he was about to take up a new job which paid more than the entire tower restoration  fund, which is ridic … splendid. Just think of that. Who knows what heights he might have attained had he lived? Millions surely awaited him, fast cars, big houses, marriage, maybe children…
    ‘But it was not to be. A very seriously slow car was to snuff out the bright, feverishly flickering light which was Nigel Farage. I am sure that he would have been glad to think that he was heading home when the accident happened, back to the family house which he so seldom found time to visit save for three or four hours’ kip, but near which he will now sleep in unwonted peace and in perpetuity .
    ‘What can we say about this remarkable young man? Everyone liked him. At the pub, the golf-club and at least one church fête which he attended, he talked to everyone with such ease and understanding of their interests. Miss Maitland recalls his enthusiasm for, and understanding of, her bantams. Colonel Brereton tells me that he never knew a man so young yet so knowledgeable about fishing. The professional at the golf-club assures me that Nigel might have been truly exceptional had he devoted himself to the game…’
    And so they laid this paragon in the graveyard and returned to the City to get very drunk (and, in at least one instance, also laid) in my memory, and the stone subsequently raised above my head read ‘NIGEL FARAGE, 1964–1985’ .
    And then, since the stonemason was absently taking dictation, ‘ER…’
    OK. I do not ask you to believe that I awoke, Scrooge-like, from a reverie of my own death and was instantly transformed.  
    I wasn’t dead (there is another sentence which I seldom have cause to write), in part thanks to Adolf Hitler’s pet designers and their invention of the motorised computer mouse avant la lettre . A vertical radiator grille would surely have killed me.
    I wasn’t even strictly unconscious for long. My notes, of which I caught a glimpse in hospital, declare me to have been ‘lucid but aggressive’ as the ambulance decanted me from a very wet impromptu nativity scene on the pavement into A&E at Bromley General. My doctor on the night tells me that, when first he approached me to perform an examination, I toldhim, ‘Oh. Right. Yes. Listen, mate. Get me a cab, will you? I’ve had quite enough of this, thanks,’ before passing out again.
    They could not operate on me until my blood alcohol levels had declined, so they sedated me, for which, I think, I have cause to be grateful because I was a right mess. Then, I assume, came the general anaesthetic and the hours under the knife.
    I was very surprised when at last I awoke. I did not really do hangovers at that age, but if this was what they were like, temperance suddenly seemed alluring.
    First there was that sensation of something bound very tight about my temples. Then there were the discords inside my skull. For some reason, you never get a tuned-up orchestra playing a lush, harmonious, Brahms symphony-type chord. You always get the oboes and clarinets with frayed reeds tuning up whilst an obsessive timpanist pounds away. I was getting the Portsmouth Symphony orchestra let loose in the Radiophonics Workshop.
    The certainty that you are dying because of acute but obscure