Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
As if Chris’s neighbours didn’t already think him half mad, now they know he’s completely mad!
Due to the wonders of modern technology, I’m nowadays able to read entire books on my mobile phone. And when I can’t be bothered to read them, my phone can read them to me, something I find absolutely amazing and my daughter Maya finds absolutely infuriating. Apart from hearing a voice constantly talking to me in various rooms, she’s also accidentally, bit by bit, put together the entire plot of a horror called TheTerror, and has been left slightly traumatised by it.
So all wonderful then, except for the atrocious parenting, but, due to the failings of modern technology, I often have difficulties reading my phone prior to around nine in the morning. This is because, prior to 9am, my phone doesn’t know who I am. It uses very clever face recognition to unlock its own screen when I look at it, but apparently, when I first get up in the morning, my face is so unrecognisable it simply states “No Match Found”. Some mornings, it even says “No Face Detected”, which begs the question, just what does my face look like in the morning? Definitely not a face.
Back on the subject of
Maya being annoyed at unavoidably hearing voices around the house, she was more than a little stunned the other day to hear my own voice shouting and complaining outside her bedroom window at 7am. I’d gone outside to wander aimlessly around the garden, as you do when everyone else is asleep and your phone claims not to know you, when an elderly neighbour spotted me across the fences from two doors down.
“Morning, how are you?” he called.
“Good thanks. You?” I called back, but I immediately noted a frown spreading across his face. He then pointed at his ears and said
“You’re going to have to speak up, I’m partially deaf.”
I tried again.
“Louder!” he called, quite quietly. “No, louder!” came his reply to my next attempt.
Thus, my daughter awoke to the sound of me bellowing, “I’m fine thanks!” at the top of my voice outside her window, apparently to myself. And then a few seconds later, in response to my neighbour’s very softly spoken comments about local over-pricing, came my 90 decibel shout of, “It’s a flipping liberty! It makes me really mad!”
Maya was by now convinced I was indeed mad, totally mad, and in the time honoured tradition of how to deal with somebody outside manically shouting in the early hours of the day, opened her window and threw a teddy bear at me.
My neighbour looked quite surprised to see a fluffy toy land on my head from nowhere, but raised his hand in a friendly wave and started back into his house. His surprise couldn’t have been as great as that of Dave though, the neighbour between our two houses, who stepped out of his own house at that very moment, to find me peering over his fence, holding a teddy bear and loudly shouting, “Goodbye!!” at a now completely empty garden.
Dave ducked straight back indoors. No idea why.
My neighbour was surprised to see a fluffy toy on my head