Visit ... and experience ... the Trickeye Museum

The following story is 100% true. Not at all a made-up jumble where we’ve tried to piece together disparate pictures. That would be silly.

It all began at a museum in Phuket. We were surprised to find Van Gogh’s original ‘Starry Night’ on display at an otherwise limited venue and, to show our appreciation, we sat in the frame of this magnificent work of art.

Little did we know that Van Gogh had been waiting for two such art heathens to do this very thing, and his painting sucked us inside to live in a strange new dimension. Gawping, we found ourselves in an art gallery holding some of the world’s most famous artworks… without a security guard in sight! Stranger still was Van Gogh’s self-portrait which seemed so full of life that we gravitated towards it. Bizarrely, I felt the urge to reach out and touch Vincent’s troubled face. His bandages came away in my hand!

What tempted me then to pull at this poor invalid’s bandages I cannot say, except perhaps that I wanted to see in what state his head was, with only one ear. It was a sick fancy and I cannot excuse myself.

However, with this recklessness complete (leaving Vincent looking quite affronted), I could not sate a desire to destroy more artwork

At first Jonny found the whole situation amusing, and even joined in with some silly antics

but after blowing Mona Lisa to smithereens (she always struck me as a a moody old cow anyway), his sense of morality kicked in and he began cleaning up after our mess.

In fact, he got so into his duties, I had to tear him away before he cleaned up the paintings themselves!

After all this hard work, God himself offered Jonny a stiff drink from out of his ‘Creation of Adam’ painting. Top lad.

Jonny accepted gladly, but after my mischievous behaviour, all I was granted was some cherub’s piss.

Little did we know that our drinks were yet another step into our rabbit hole … as our vision blurred and swirled like another Van Gogh, we saw another painting form; this time it was E.T. who pulled us in! Thinking this was a sign to “go home”, we stepped forward to reach out to our alien chaperone.

Alas! This was no portal to normality but an ingress to a world where fun and danger blurred so confoundingly that we knew not whether to laugh at our sudden good fortune…

…or cry in terror, such as when we clambered up to the ceiling beams to avoid the gnashers of a giant croc!

If this all sounds totally unbelievable, we hear you. We couldn’t fathom what had happened either, or why we were in this terrible, terrific mess… yet here are the photos to prove it! Here, for example, is a picture which offers undeniable proof that we shrunk to a thousandth of our size and nearly got trampled upon by an unwitting passer-by, whom we could not discern between a real person who had stumbled into our world, or a figment of our ever-warping imaginations:

Don’t ask us how we got out of these perilous predicaments; in short, we couldn’t tell you. It was as if this was all some game on an unknown device, where the moment we got a grip on reality it would be washed away.

One moment we would have terrific power…

… the next would see us at the mercy of a hideous beast with a penchant for fresh human sushi:

In short, I was beginning to wonder why Lily had sent us on this curiously mind-bending experience. It seemed completely out of character. Nonetheless, never ones to shy in face of a challenge, we persevered, hoping that the resilience we learnt from brute survival…

…would pave the way to successful futures in our real lives:

True, some of our adventures in Trickeye led us down dark, argumentative routes where, instead of sorting out our issues over a cup of tea, we’d find our minds corporealizing cannibalistic revenge fantasies…

…or forging Tekken style combat games from our turbulent emotions:

But, overall, I’d say the experience brought us closer together. After all, they say you never really know a person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes; or, in our case, woken up trapped in each other’s bodies

As if to cement our bond, the final episode of our Trickeye adventures was a gaping crevasse which we could only cross if we worked as a team. Both Jonny and I experienced a stomach-clenching sense that, if we did not complete this challenge, we would be stuck in Phuket’s version of wonderland for ever. Forgetting that I had only recently tried to eat him, Jonny reached out and pulled me to safety.

On the other side of this gulf, our only option was to jump down a hole, which we did hand in hand… the darkness swirled in front of us, once more evocative of the starry night which had brought us into the frightful mess, and when we popped out of the museum we found ourselves ecstatic simply to be surrounded by normality.

I wouldn’t say the challenge changed us significantly, except that we now feel a greater sense of appreciation for a world at once normal and delightful and terrifying. Oh, and we now harbour an otherwise unfathomable phobia of Van Gogh paintings.

Thanks, Lily, for challenging us to visit the Trickeye Museum. Little did we suspect that such an easy-sounding challenge would turn into this very truthful (completely and utterly truthful, I tell you) account of terror and awe!