The most terrifying noise in the world

I’m reasonably tough. Not wrestle-a-bear-to-save-the-damsel tough, but a bit better than burst-into-tears-at-the-sight-of-a-spider wussy. Just about, anyway.

I’d fight you to prove it, but to be honest, that sounds a bit scary, and I’d probably lose. Last Saturday I came into contact with the most terrifying noise in the world ever. More alarming than, well, an alarm – even an alarmed alarm. More horrifying than someone saying “Your round? Great, I’ll have a triple whatever that really expensive whiskey is”. Louder than 50 Barry Scott’s trying to push their Cillit Bang on you. More piercing than Concorde flying in one ear and out of the other.

I went to my nearly-nine (she is now) year old niecelet Rebecca’s birthday party. There were 20+ under 10s, largely of the female variety. If that sounds pretty scary straight off, someone had done the unthinkable, and added water. Much like those film critter Gremlins, mixing children with water, in this case a swimming pool, causes them to become whirling, screeching banshees, unable to control the ear-damaging decibel levels that emanate from themselves, nor the particularly high-pitched nature of the noise.

Bats 50 miles away probably woke up startled, thinking it was Batmageddon. Dogs for miles around will have had their owners thinking the house was haunted, as their tormented ears tried to deal with the invasion of squeals, and they barked fearfully into thin air. They were the lucky ones. This swimming pool was that nostalgic, old-school sort. No fancy viewing area, shielded by glass windows and with comfy chairs and a machine vending something that might be coffee, or possibly tea (it’s hard to tell). Oh no. This one had cold, hard, benches. You had to put bags that you’d normally see being used to collect dog poo over your shoes. Then you got to sit, with the delightful smell of chlorinated water, right at the edge of the pool, with only a plastic chain between two poles for protection.

There’s a special place in Hell for whoever designs these places. Every surface is shiny and reflective, perfectly suited to reflect and multiply the sound. And oh... the sound. It’s like some kind of hive consciousness occurs between the little ‘uns, rendering normal speech unnecessary, and resulting in them making only glass-shattering ululations, as one, until you become convinced something inside your head just exploded.

Still, nature has given the youthful some kind of mechanism that allows them to make that noise without killing themselves on the spot, so clearly this is a normal evolutionary development.

On the distinct plus side, afterwards there was party food, including that most inexplicable but excellent device of fun and jeopardy, cocktail sticks with cheese & pineapple on. There was music too (although I was restrained from dancing Gangnam Style), and goodie bags. Plus Moshi Monsters chocolate cake, which makes up entirely for the inner-ear bleeding, permanent hearing loss, and sudden onset aquaphobia.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday 22md March 2013. You can view the edited version used by the paper on their website here Because you're so goddamn lovely, you've got the full, original, version here with 65 extra words! Barry Scott went missing (no bad thing) and the brief second-to-last evolution paragraph vanished too, but they're back!

If I've made it sound like I didn't enjoy myself, that couldn't be further from the truth - it was seriously good fun. Except for the screaming.

What's next week's column about? Well, someone remixed the BBC News24 theme music without asking me first... (Subject to me being able to sustain a rant about this fact for 500 words and nothing else seeming like a better idea in the meantime.)

(Proper old-skool 90s glowy-sticks, waving your hand in front of your face, Global Hypercolour T-shirt, dancey nonsense this morning emanates forth from Grumpy Towers - It's Sash!'s Greatest Hits!)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog