Chapter 2 - Too much colour

   

It was the most parroty parrot you have ever seen. The kind of blue that can sometimes hurt your eyes. Too much blue info shooting down your optic nerve into your brain. Greens too, reds and yellow.Too much colour sat on a fence by our kitchen window..

I was about 10 when I saw my first colour TV programme. My dad worked for Rediffusion and none of my mates had one. We were the first. I remember it was Top Of the Pops and I remember I didn’t like all the colour. It was too much, it made me feel uncomfortable, anxious even. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t how things were supposed to be. You could rely on the grey world. There was a sort of understanding; a trust between me and the telly that however potentially unsettling the images were, they were at least censored by the absence of hardcore colour. 

The parrot and I watched each other for a few seconds. He (I decided it was a bloke because of his 'you looking at me?' manner) then, started shitting huge amounts of white, god knows what, down my ebony stained trellis work. A strange shrugging of its shoulders, followed by a twisting of its neck, seemed to indicate that he had done it deliberately and was trying very hard to muster up some more. 

Parrots remind me of clowns. They don’t fool me, either of them. I can see the hatred in their painted faces, even hear it in their voices. “Who’s a pretty boy then?” They’re biding their time, waiting for the opportunity to punish us for generations of pointing and laughing and ridicule.

I’ll be honest, when I first saw the parrot I didn’t think  - bloody hell maybe this means I’ve got something really wrong with me. Something like a brain tumour and not just a bad case of earwax. It had been two weeks since I’d seen the doc and if anything I’d thought more about whether the old bum investigation ought to be investigated by the authorities than the Kung Fu lesson on probability. An exotic outcome was unlikely.

I knew though that the parrot bothered me and I knew that there was no control button that would desaturate the colour. No control that would make the parrot become a sparrow and make things normal again.