Humor: Why I'm all shook up after the show

Why I'm all shook up after the show

When I was eight I thought that the ferris wheel was the biggest, scariest, most daredevil ride in sideshow alley history.

Now I am 46, I realise I was wrong.

History has moved on. My wife Katherine and I took our eight-year-old son Jack to the Royal Canberra Show on Saturday and let me tell you they have invented all manner of rides that make the ferris wheel seem positively tranquil.

Provided you are of a certain height, you can now twist, shake, bobble, rotate, plunge and generally be frightened out of your wits.

And whereas when you threw up on the ferris wheel the worst that could happen was you threw up over a stranger in the same basket, when you throw up on the twisty, shaky, rotating, plungy, bobbly things your peas, carrots, bits of dagwood dog and wisps of pink fairy floss are quite likely to end up raining on a part of town far, far away.

"I don't know why people would want to pay good money to put themselves through this kind of terror," I told Katherine as we made our way down sideshow alley amid the screams. "Do they test for intelligence as well as height?"

We have avoided the show in recent years because we both realise two things:

To a small boy sideshow alley is the focal point of excitement at a show; and
When a small boy has you in tow in sideshow alley you better have an awfully big wallet with you because you can spend a lot of money in a very short space of time there.

But we relented this year after getting special permission from our bank manager.

I come from Launceston, where the show falls around my birthday, and as a boy I had many, many happy returns to the showground.

I only went on the ferris wheel once, and experienced 15 minutes of pure terror. I still remember the ferris wheel stopping to let people on and off at the bottom while my basket dangled helplessly at the top. That's when I swore ' never again.' Or possibly I just swore for the first time.

Mostly thereafter I stuck to the clowns and those little boats that rotate around water tanks. Sometimes I got adventurous and drove the dodgem cars or rode the Ghost Train.

The Ghost Train was at the Canberra Show, as a matter of fact, and, well, some things never really change.

The ride was quite impressive from the outside, with all kinds of animated, tortured monster sculptures, fake cobwebs and piped screams.
But we paid for Jack to go on and he returned about two minutes later reporting the scariest thing that happened inside was that a mechanical arm touched the top of his head. I think he felt cheated. And I felt touched, too, for $6.

"Let's go and get a showbag," we suggested to Jack, trying to get him away from sideshow alley lest he think it might be fun to go on one of the twisty, shaky, rotating, plungy, bobbly things and he grew a centimetre while we were standing there.

When I was eight showbags fell into two categories: comics and confectionary.
Every now and then you'd stumble upon something exotic, which had in it a Groucho Marx mask or a shiny plastic Sherriff's badge but mostly you either got things to read or things to eat.

But there were dozens and dozens of showbags for sale at the Canberra Show - filled with fake weapons, lollies, chips and toys of just about every description.

Jack settled for one with the biggest assemble-it-yourself skateboard he could find.

Until last week I thought he was too young for a skateboard.

But I am older now and it doesn't seem nearly as daredevilish as it used to.

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it