Friday, March 23, 2007
THAT OLD MAN RIVER
While scraping around for new ideas (they're getting as rare as hen's teeth these days) I was commenting on a post at Billy's where he was discussing auditory hallucination. He asked readers whose voice they would like to accompany an hallucination.
This triggered off an unpleasant memory of mine, which is the *inspiration* for this awful post.
When I was about five years old, I was sat with my parents watching The Val Doonican Show on television.
Velvet Voiced Val was like a cosy security blanket wrapped around my childhood. I'm sure his shows were on television every Saturday night until I was about seven and the reality of how cruel, indifferent and cold this dog eat dog world is finally kicked in.
To anyone under the age of, I dunno, forty, it's difficult to describe the way that Val Doonican strode the earth like a colossus. Well, probably difficult to convince anyone of my age actually. He just played an important part in my life, okay?
Anyway, one night I felt a bit poorly (as five year olds tend to do for around seventy per cent of the time). This, however was ... different.
I had some sort of high fever and was put to bed ONLY ABOUT TEN MINUTES INTO THE VAL DOONICAN SHOW. Clearly, I was at death's door.
It wasn't long before I was hallucinating that Val was singing to me in his rocking chair, with a voice that was far deeper than normal. He sounded more like Paul Robeson. The rocking chair rocked harder and more insistently, and Val glared at me, his eyes ablaze and his voice booming, like a rocking chair-bound lay priest.
Into this melee stepped Pinky And Perky.
The menacing puppet pigs are trauma inducing enough in themselves. My cruel parents had decorated my bedroom with Pinky And Perky wallpaper. This featured a design of one of them playing drums, and one of them playing a stand up bass. Some sort of bebop duo set up.
In my feverish state, Pinky And Perky came out of the wallpaper and started to play the most ungodly rhythmic modern jazz racket
All this lasted about half an hour. An atonal, hundred and fifty decibel cacophony involving pigs and a crooning Irishman.
It was even more frightening than my previous hallucination, in which my parents' insurance man, Mr Baker, was scrambling over the roof of the outhouse that I could see from my bedroom window
There will be more on Val Doonican in the next post. You all deserve to suffer as much as I did.
Labels: Junior Disprin, Paul Robeson, Pinky And Perky, Tom 909, Val Doonican
