In Homage to Andrea 'JR' Kiss.

Andrea Kiss is a fellow blogger from Tennessee. Regular readers might have noticed that she regularly comments on my posts, or at least she used to. She’s been conspicuous by her absence from the blogosphere this summer, and this morning I discovered why. She got shot.

Seriously! (By which I mean ‘I’m not joking’ and also ‘it weren’t no mere flesh wound.’ So maybe I should start the paragraph again.)

She got seriously shot, seriously! And with her own gern, to boot. (You might remember that JR got shot with his own gern, and Brits who read the Observer at the time might also remember that Clive James, the TV critic, worked tirelessly to emulate the Texan accent.)

Well, Andrea has become something of a pal down the years. She’s almost family, and it was a bit of a shock to my system to discover that a pal-who-is-almost-family had been shot. It was.

So how did this unfortunate calamity come to pass? It was a complete accident. Andrea’s fiancée, a splendid chap called Alex, was about to empty the chamber in order to clean it, when the damn thing went off of its own accord. Andrea, brave girl that she is, leapt forward to save the living room wall from being holed and needing a redecoration job. (I made that up; she just happened to be in the flight path of the errant bullet.) And I expect poor Alex, splendid chap that he is, probably suffered more than dear Andrea did. You can read the whole story here if you want to. It will explain what the non-gun toting Andrea was doing having a gern of her very own, and there’s even a bit of a whooo factor to the story, since there was a tarot deck involved.

Now, every cloud has a silvery lining, and so it is with Andrea. She lost weight. They had to take some bits of her insides away, you see, since bullets have an unfortunate habit of scrambling a person’s insides. Better still, she has a rare story to tell. Not many of us can go through life with the opening line ‘I remember the day I got shot,’ can we? No.

Make a full recovery, Andrea. Not only are you one of the good guys, you’re obviously one of the tough guys, too.