CLOWNS? I hate 'em.
Long before the recent creepy clown scare had people jumping out of their skins, you couldn't have paid me to go to the circus.
No, I do not have coulrophobia – a morbidd fear of clowns – but I get it, honestly I do.
Circuses – I hate them also as much as I hate clowns. This may have to do with the rundown big tops of decades ago with the scraggy pony and, if you were lucky, the flea-bitten chimp.
Where was the pretty girl in the sparkly leotard poised on the rump of a white horse – not in our neck of the woods.
You'd run away from the circuses I knew. I could never understand storybook heroines who ran off to join them.
The disappointment may be to do with the fact that the one time my mother relented and let us go to the circus, she had no change and gave us a £1 note – back in the days when it meant a lot – and she told us to remember to get the change.
We were not tall enough to reach the sill in the ticket booth. We were old enough to know we should get 11 shillings change back.
I remember my brother reaching up to hand over the note to the woman in the booth. She took it and we waited and we waited for change. It never came. He went back and he asked – but there was no way.
This was just one woman, but I never felt the same about circuses. You remember black deeds done to small children.
Besides, we were not swayed by silly men with lipstick smiles chucking glitter over each other and bouncing about with toot-toot squeezy plastic horns.
We McCanns never forget.
So I hate circuses and sawdust and stupid clowns emptying buckets of God knows what over each other. Ha, ha, ha, ha – slapstick humour is not my poison.
Clowns are taboo about here.
Humour has moved on beyond the plastic flower that squirts water in your eye, the big stripy trousers and the red lipstick leer.
Then there was that poem that the teacher brought in.
Paul Muldoon writes memorably about the magic of the circus sweeping into town and that strange mysterious moment when he saw the "man sawing the woman in half".
Aha! The penny dropped long, long after I lost all those other pennies belonging to my poor mother on that long ago date at the circus.
Nevertheless, I feel a little sympathy for good honest hard-working clowns. When I get over my mild phobia, I might walk in support of them or at least speak out to clear their names.
Well, maybe.
Fudgie The Clown from New Jersey told the BBC that she's been playing her gig for 34 years but now the phone has just stopped ringing.
The current panic over dangerous clowns began in South Carolina in August with reports of people dressed in wigs and clown make-up trying to lure children into the woods.
It is not easy if you're a decent honest clown driving about in full make-up like Fudgie.
Even horror writer Stephen King who created his own maniacal monster clown, Pennywise, in his classic novel It, has tweeted for calm, claiming most of the clowns are "good" and cheer up the kiddies.
The jury is out on that.
Clowns and Santa Claus are slightly similar too.
We spend eleven months of the year warning our small children not to go near strangers or talk to them and certainly not to take sweets from them.
Then, come I December, we sweep them down some funky cave grotto full of psychedelic flashing lights and grown men and women dressed as elves and fairies.
We lift them up and plonk them proud on a stranger's knee. He has a beard and a bright red costume and he goes "ho-ho-ho, have you been a good girl?" and he might just offer them a packet of sweeties.
And then said child starts bawling, just when we're about to snap the photo with Santa Claus, and we wonder why?
In long long ago pictures, I am that child with the half startled/half dead scared look standing as far away from Santa's knee as possible. Not all the toys in Toyland would persuade made to go near him.
Besides the hatred of clowns, I have a morbid dread of Doctor Who. This may have to do with the Christmas when my father took us to the big department story with a real live Dalek rolling around with Santa Claus and threatening to 'exter-min-ate' the lot of us.
Treat? It was the stuff of nightmares – no clowning about.
