My mind reeling on the ‘freeway’ to Cork with Baby Shark on a loop

IWAS born with a dent in my chest. “Pigeon chest” was, I think, the phrase I grew up hearing. There were other names, some of which made me feel like a freak growing up. Philip Roth wrote in Everyman that: “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”

My childhood was a minimassacre. I remember when I was seven, someone told my mother I was deformed. I never saw my mother round on someone as she did that day. Savage stuff. It was like a lioness protecting her cub, watching her eat the head off someone who dared pass such rude comment on me.

When I asked my mother later what deformed was, she told me not to be ridiculous and that whatever deformed was, I definitely was not it.

Be that as it may, I did have an enormous insecurity all through my early youth about my chest, because it was not like other boys’ chests. It seemed to have a hole in it.

A Grand Canyon, as someone in the school yard joked. How I laughed. But I was dying with self-loathing inside. School yards are always the cruellest of places. Going swimming, or changing for sports in school, was a particular nightmare. I was terrified what other boys would say.

Now, at 51 years of age, I am mostly over it. And my dent has its uses. My oneyear-old son rests his head in it and the sound of my heartbeat puts him to sleep. So, all’s good. Until it starts again. By this, I mean that I still get the fear sometimes.

Last week, we all went swimming locally. I was back to 11 years of age in swim class for a split second. The dread passed just as quickly as it emerged when my four-year-old daughter grabbed me by the hand and pulled me towards the water’s edge. The dread was completely vanquished, however, when my daughter then insisted she sing Pinkfong’s existential piece de resistance Baby Shark to me as we swam together in the baby part of the pool; with me pretending to be the daddy shark and she the aforementioned baby shark.

Like a take on Gene Kelly singing in the rain, there is nothing, it transpires, more delightful — healing even — than singing in the pool.

My daughter: “Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo...”

Me: “Daddy shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo...”

Even if you don’t have a little daughter to order you to sing it in your local pool, I heartily suggest you try it immediately. It’s good for the soul, and even in my case, the hole. Not that being in the pool matters to my daughter where Baby Shark is concerned.

This morning, we are driving to Cork for a short family break. And I guarantee you that she will want to hear it — with occasional plays of Yum Yum Breakfast Burrito by Parry Gripp — all the way there.

I will run the risk of being pulled over and arrested by gardai for being mentally impaired by driving under the influence of hearing Baby Shark on a mindwarping loop. You try telling that to a four-year-old. Her brother will clap along in the back, too, as will their mother, my wife.

At least I have the excuse of not clapping along because both my hands have to remain on the steering wheel of the car for the purposes of driving us to Cork for a few days.

Even at her age, my daughter has taste in music, as I discovered last week. Last Wednesday morning, I was driving her to school when Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by The Beatles came on the radio. For those few minutes, she forgot Baby Shark and sang and danced (the Floss Dance basically) along in her seat to the Fab Four’s trippy classic from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I knew she truly liked it because last Thursday and Friday morning on the same journey she kept shouting at me to play “Lucy!” on the radio. She didn’t quite understand that the radio doesn’t play Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds every morning at 8am.

One day I tested her with some CDs. She hated everything by Arcade Fire, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. I played her Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison. She loved it — and wanted to know what colour her own eyes were.

She also loved Don’t Stop Me Now (it has become her personal anthem) and Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen, Valerie by Amy Winehouse, Train In Vain by The Clash, Young Americans by David Bowie and Paul Weller’s You Do Something To Me — but didn’t like Weller’s earlier act The Jam (“I want music!” was her reaction to the class war of Eton Rifles). Though she was impressed most of all by Elvis’s Polk Salad Annie, the up-tempo Bob Dylan’s Must Be Santa and Chuck Berry’s bop-along beauty that is Run Rudolph Run.

She sings along to the lines: “Run, run Rudolph, Santa’s got to make it to town/Santa make him hurry, tell him he can take the freeway down/Run, run Rudolph ‘cause I’m reelin’ like a merry-go-round.”

As you read this, the Egan family will be flying down the freeway to Cork, with yours truly reeling from too much of a certain song about a fish with very sharp teeth.