Bad Memories

According to a top psychologist, Rolf Harris's victims aren't just confined to those unfortunate women he sexually molested. Professor Roger Persil claims that many Britons feel traumatised by the fact that their cherished childhood memories of watching Harris have now been irrevocably tainted by his horrendous sex crimes. “His conviction has turned these memories from something joyful to something sick and sinister,” he says. “Where once they could only see innocent fun when they remembered these things, now they can only think of him sexually assaulting women.” A number of these new 'victims' have described the confusion and pain they have experienced as a result of Rolf Harris' conviction. “There are just so many things I used to associate with a happy childhood which instead now fill me with horror,” fifty two year old Kettering letting agent Kirsty Rampart told a recent local radio phone-in. “Kangaroos, for instance, have now become a symbol of sexual assault. Instead of thinking of them as exotic beasts, hopping across the Australian landscape with kindly 'Uncle' Rolf Harris, I can now only think of them as evil sexual predators, grabbing small children, stuffing them in their pouches, so that they can molest them at will!” Similarly, she claimed, the sound of the digeridoo , now strikes terror into her. “What was once a wonderful sound conjuring up visions of the outback, now brings me nightmare images of being bent across a table and relentlessly bum-raped by a hugely bearded pervert,” she told the phone-in, her voice quavering with emotion. “Only last week, whilst I was walking down the High Street here in Kettering, I heard the distant notes of one being blown – I immediately burst into tears and wet myself, before running screaming for the safety of my car!”

  Others have suffered even more severe reactions, with forty seven year old Plymouth sales manager Kirk Humpler telling his local Magistrates Court of how he punched out an eleven year old girl who was playing a stylophone – the electronic musical instrument popularised by Rolf Harris – at a bus stop. “She just wouldn't bloody stop, I just saw red,” he told the Court. “I saw Rolf Harris advertising stylophones as a kid and pestered my parents until they bought me one for Christmas one year – I loved it! I plated it all the time, but since he was convicted every time I hear one played, instead of music, I just hear the screams of his victims as he molested them with the instrument's stylus!” Humpler escaped with a suspended sentence after telling the court of how his post Rolf Harris conviction trauma had affected his family life, admitting that he had terrified his children after going beserk when a Warner Brothers cartoon came on the TV. “I used to love watching him on 'Cartoon Time' when I was a kid,” he sobbed from the dock. “Seeing Foghorn Leghorn like that just made so angry at the way his sex crimes have tainted those memories – instead of a man-sized rooster, all I saw was a bearded Australian doing unspeakable things to young women! I just flipped and threw the TV out of the window and smashed up the furniture!”

For Professor Persil, such cases serve simply to underline the true evil of Rolf Harris: “Even though he has now been locked away for his crimes, he's still ruining people's lives. The bastard!”

(Most of this was originally intended to be part of Right to Forget, the latest story over at The Sleaze, but was cut when that story went in a different - and better, I think - direction. But I don't like to waste anything, so here it is!)