Voices

• I have a habit - common among old scrotes living alone - of talking to myself, and even to my dog, not that she is alive any more.

More than that, I talk to myself in assorted voices - posh, demotic, idiotic, dramatic, most of them derived from the characters in the Goon Show, the wonderful corrupting influence of my adoloscence.
It also influenced all my mates of those wonderful years, and we all lapsed into Bluebottle or Eccles or Major Bloodnok or Moriarty or Min and Henry on the least excuse.
No harm in that. But I am still doing it fifty years on.

And a few moments ago, the thought struck me that I am probably the only one of the gang left. The names mean nothing to you, but everything to me, and I know that all of the following have gone: Chic Goode, Colin Goode, Dickie Bone, "Peche" Fisher, well, I won't go on.
I haven't heard of some of the others, so maybe they are still banging the rocks: "Ace" Attrill, "Hump" Trumper, "Flog" Ferrington. I hope so.
Or, if they are in Heaven, I just hope they are haranguing the angels in Goon Show voices.

But I tell you this:- Shirley Valentine talking to the Wall is normality incarnate compared to explaining to a deceased labrador that you know what time it is because you've "got it written down on a piece of paper."