En Passant: The case of the whistling clown

DORIS, my Doris, doesn’t like clowns (although she quite likes me, ha, ha). She can’t tell me why she doesn’t like clowns, it’s not as if she has a memory of being a child in the front row at the circus, when a big scary clown loomed over her laughing like a hyena and farting like a racehorse. She has no recollection of a vertically challenged clown thrusting a balloon down his trousers and then pretending that its popping was a humongous poop. She just doesn’t like clowns, she finds them a bit sinister.

I understand this although I don’t find them necessarily sinister. But they are grotesque with their accentuated mouths, corps-like pallor, garish eyes, riotous hair, misfitting and outlandish clothing, and sometimes enormous feet. They’re monstrous, in fact, nightmarish even, parodies of what’s normal, or what we are used to as “normal”.

They’ve invented a word for a fear of clowns, it’s coulrophobia, and as I understand it, and I don’t, “significant aberrations in a clown’s face may alter a person’s appearance so much that it enters the so-called uncanny valley”.

So what’s the uncanny valley, I hear you ask?

Well, as I understand it, and in this case I might, it’s a circumstance “in which a figure is lifelike enough to be disturbing, but not realistic enough to be pleasant”, and I think that is what Doris is experiencing, but then, I’m no Sigmund Freud.

In any case, if that is the case, I cannot understand why Doris has chosen to knit, assemble and stuff three clown dolls, each around 60cm tall, each wearing garish clothing to include pompons on the shoes, on the hat and down the front of the shirt.

Then there’s the scraggy wool hair, orange or yellow, on either side of the clowns’ heads, and on the face of each a falsely humorous mouth, and plastic eyes that cannot blink, and that follow you around the room as if you’re food and the clown hasn’t eaten for a month.

Doris has completed all three of them and for a while they sat on the sofa in the lounge, staring at anything that moved and even appearing to be interested in what was happening in Isi-bleeding-Dingo, which given the current story-lines is remarkable. I mean, is Rajesh going to put happiness by the body with Zak his secretary? Who knows, who cares?

Doris, despite her phobia seemed to be unaffected by these staring clowns, I presume on the understanding that she’d brought them into the world and could just as easily take them out of it, but anyone else in the lounge could not help but get the feeling that they were being watched.

Thus it was that I had an idea.

Teaspoon, our parrot (who has the vocabulary of a hadeda, but louder), has developed the annoying habit of emitting a monotonous whistle if he hears someone in the kitchen and he’s alone in the lounge. I think he believes (and he’s not often wrong) that if he hears kitchen-type noises it means he is about to get some edible treat if not curry and rice, and he annoyingly whistles until it arrives just so he won’t be forgotten.It gets right up my nose.

The thing is, see, if there’s someone in the lounge with him, then he doesn’t whistle no matter how many pots are being banged about in the kitchen by someone else, so I figured that if I could convince him that the clowns were not inanimate dolls, he would keep quiet even if I was in the kitchen cooking up a culinary storm. Listen, I haven’t told Doris about this, so please don’t.

So I got a chair, an ordinary old upright dining room chair, and put it by Teaspoon’s cage, and then grabbed Tweedledum (I don’t know what its real name is – probably Chocky – one of the clowns, anyway) and propped him up in the chair staring at Teaspoon. Then I went into the kitchen next door and started scraping plates, banging pots and opening and closing the fridge.

Well, it’s true that there was silence in the lounge. Teaspoon had watched me with curiosity as I put the chair there and then the clown, and I thought that to start with it was just this curiosity that was keeping him quiet. Then I heard him “tweet”.

It was a tentative “tweet” as if he was new to his beak and was testing it. Then he got bolder, and tweeted longer and louder. Then it was a two tone cadenza, almost as if he was doing his annoying whistle while at the same time harmonising with himself.

Harmonising by himself? Are you crazy? I put my head round the door to see what was going on…

THE CLOWN WAS WHISTLING IN HARMONY TO TEASPOON’S WHISTLE!

And then I woke up…