On 'Strange Dave's' Singing

I work with a bloke called Strange Dave. He's called Strange Dave for many, many reasons but one of them is that he sings to himself while he's at work.


He's a jazz fan so I've no idea what it is he's trying to sing but I was asked to describe it today, Strange Dave being on holiday and so not in the office and singing.

Not wanting to actually try and make the noise; I came up with this description which I would like to share with you.

Imagine that you are a man who is hastily dressing in a dark wardrobe. Outside said wardrobe is a very large, very suspicious man who is on the look-out for things like semi-naked men in hiding.

In the large man captures you he will get very violent and cripple or kill you in a terrible, possibly sexual, way. You wish to avoid this.

However, while slipping your jeans on you close the zip rather carelessly and track quite a large amount of your genitals in the large-toothed, metal zip. The jeans are also quite tight on you, causing the zip to bite down all the harder on to your parts.

You want to, HAVE TO, cry out from this, to give some sort of release to the pain that is washing up and down your very blood and bone. To scream would free the pain for a short time.

You know, though, that this would result in the large man being alerted to your presence and pulling you from the wardrobe and doing terrible, terrible things to you until you either died or were, at least, painfully debilitated by them.

So you mark a stifled, high-pitched whining cry. You feel a little better or at least a little distracted, when ever you make this sound but you can’t fall to the ground and wail for fear of detection.
You try and punctuate it with each in take of breath or footfall that the big bloke makes so as to try and cover it by the noises he is making himself. There’s a rhythm to this keening, a terrible, sobbing wail, punctuated by silence and in-takes of breath.

And that’s what Strange Dave sound like when he’s singing.

For some reason I decided the only book that could follow The Amber Spyglass is The Kraken Wakes. I think it's because the first person I knew who read His Dark Materials also once said she wanted to move to Edgbaston because it was John Wyndham's home land.


I have some great friends.

It's turning out to be highly quote-able, the first page of Phase One has someone called Phyliss, who's listening to a singer on a cruise ship, asking:

"Why, do you suppose, do people keep on mass-producing these decadent moanings?"

This could sum up most of my record collection and now, looking at it in this context, most of what makes up s lot of blogging.

Later on Phyliss's husband, Fireball Watson, starts receiving news clippings on strange phenomena after filing a report of strange fireballs seen at see. This causes him to reflect that:

“There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled, and who, moreover, feel a kind of immediate kin to anyone else who admits bafflement along roughly similar lines.”

Which pretty much sums up the condition of being a fortean or being into forteana extremely well. It doesn’t touch of the fun we have chucking these ideas around and seeing what shape they fall into after each throw but the camaraderie of being into the unknown, off-beat and unusual is captured there. It's probably not what John Wyndham meant.