BarryHutchison

Technically it should be “The Count up to 250″ but that just looked stupid as a post title, and I look stupid enough in my day to day life without doing it here, too.

By my reckoning (or, more accurately, by my website stats) this is the 244th post on BarryHutchison.com. Since I did nothing whatsoever to mark the 200th post, I’ve decided to do something special for the 250th post. I have no idea what it’ll be yet, but it’ll be at least reasonably good. I think. Just promise me you won’t set your expectations too high or anything, eh?

Anyway, I thought I’d start building the excitement now by having a countdown (or up, if accuracy is your thing) to post 250. Each day, for the next five days, I’ll be pointing you in the direction of one of my favourite older posts on the site.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’ll also be giving you a glimpse into my psychological make-up by revealing every day something that either scared me as a child, or scares me now. Or both, in most cases.

Today we kick off by looking back at the 100th Post Spectacular – the first (and currently only) blog milestone celebration I wrote - and by recalling the fits of sweaty panic brought on whenever I saw this man on TV in the 1980s:

Andre the Giant was a professional wrestler from Grenoble in the French Alps. He weighed 380 pounds – or 27 stone – and from what I can tell from looking online, his height ranged from 6 ft 10 in to 7 ft 5 in, suggesting he could alter it at will.

Nothing in the paragraph above was the root of my fear, though. I didn’t care how tall he was, how frickin’ enormous his arms were, or how many times he sat down heavily on Hulk Hogan’s unsuspecting face. Even as a child I was tall myself, so I knew I had nothing to fear from people who just happened to be big.

No, what scared me – what made me run upstairs crying whenever he appeared on screen – was his voice.

His voice, for those of you who have never heard it, was like the rumbling of two tectonic plates deep beneath the Earth’s crust, or the yawning of some long-dormant sea monster. It was the deepest, most resonating sound I had ever heard, and it scared the bejeesus out of me.

You know in the film Titanic, when the boat’s big foghorn thing gives that long, ominous blast after they hit the iceberg, and you know virtually everyone is going to die a horrible death? Andre the Giant could make that exact same sound just by breathing in.

What’s worse, he made those noises with a heavy French accent. To a boy from the Highlands, who had never met anyone from another town, never mind another country, this only added to the sheer, unwavering terror his voice caused inside me.

A few years later, I saw him as the lumbering, deep-voiced giant, Fezzik, in the movie The Princess Bride, and all was forgiven. Although his voice was still unrelentingly chilling, I realised he probably wasn’t going to use it to murder me with, and that – despite his repeated stamping on the face of Randy “Macho Man” Savage – it was clear he was just an unfortunately huge French bloke with a heart of gold.

Which may have played some part in him dying of a heart attack aged 46. Or it might not.