Into The Valley Of Death
Following the drainage work done on our house to prevent it from subsiding into the mud, and the subsequent mayhem of having to cram four rooms worth of our accumulated belongings into a room-and-a-half while the plasterers and painters erased all memories of the cracks in the walls upstairs, we decided to take advantage of our insurance-financed first-floor “year zero” by awarding ourselves all some new bedroom furniture. So it is that my wife and I have been enjoying to the full all the associated pleasures of flat-pack assembly; the dowels, the barrel nuts, the instructions simplified to the point of incomprehensibility, and of course the inevitable accompanying medical complaint of “Allen key thumb”.
Through this chaos we managed to stumble upon my son’s old Fimbo toy, a first birthday present from my brother, if memory serves. Delighted, my son took it away to play with, but soon returned ashen faced, stating that Fimbo was “too scary.” Understandable, I thought; I always felt there was something not quite right about old Fimbo, which is why it was the perfect choice as the picture on my old Blogger profile, and is still the image for my About page, Gravatar, and so on. More specifically, however, I reckoned my son had simply forgotten that this Fimbo was the talking version – if you press its tummy it emits one of its famous phrases from The Fimbles television programme – so when it started to speak my son got a bit of a harmless shock, as anyone would.
But having now heard Fimbo for myself, I wonder if my son may indeed be onto something. Over the past few years has the absence of human contact driven poor Fimbo completely mad, or into the arms of someone or something much darker? See for yourself, if you can stand it. Too scary? I certainly think so.
The Obscurer 