Stairlift to Heaven

You have to take your opportunities for a bit of fun when and wherever you find them so when I noticed a man of about my age approaching in the opposite direction I picked up the Zimmer Frame, twirled it round my head a couple of times and heaved it into the distance. It had not long since been announced that Britain had been granted the 2012 Olympic Games, and with it the Paralympics, and it was probably this, and the thought I’d just had about cripples taking up their bed and walking, that put the idea into my head.

After I’d gone to recover the Zimmer Frame and started to walk back the man had stopped to watch, and now looked on, puzzled. I turned to him and said, a little self-critically, “Not bad.”

His face was a picture of inquisitiveness. “What are you doing?”

“Training for the Paralympics.”

“Pardon?”

“Throwing the Zimmer Frame,” I explained. “It's a new event. Apparently the host country can pick an entirely new event and Britain has chosen ‘Throwing the Zimmer Frame’. It just nudged out the ‘Hop, Hop and Hop for the One-legged’ I believe.”

The story continues....

STAIRLIFT TO HEAVEN

Copyright © Terry Ravenscroft, 2011

Cover artwork by Tom Unwin

A RAZZAMATAZZ PUBLICATION

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About the author

The day after Terry Ravenscroft threw in his mundane factory job to become a television comedy scriptwriter he was involved in a car accident which left him unable to turn his head. Since then he has never looked back. Born in New Mills, Derbyshire, in 1938, he still lives there with his wife Delma and his mistress Divine Bottom (in his dreams).

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Also by Terry Ravenscroft

CAPTAIN’S DAY

JAMES BLOND - STOCKPORT IS TOO MUCH

INFLATABLE HUGH

FOOTBALL CRAZY

DEAR AIR 2000

DEAR COCA-COLA

LES DAWSON’S CISSIE AND ADA

I’M IN HEAVEN

THE RAZZAMATAZZ FUN EBOOK

ZEPHYR ZODIAC

Sample pages of each of these titles can be read at the end of this book.

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STAIRLIFT TO HEAVEN

FOREWORD

The day before my sixty-fifth birthday I decided to start a journal that would chronicle the first five years of my life as an old age pensioner.
The journal would largely be about my being old, about what it’s like to be an old age pensioner - I don’t like the term ‘Senior Citizen’, people my age are old and we draw a pension, neither is anything to be ashamed of, so why call ourselves senior citizens? Senior to whom? Try going to the chip shop and telling the yobbo with the number one haircut and the number four brain that you’re senior to him and therefore entitled to go before him in the queue and you’ll soon find out whether you’re a senior citizen or not.

My intention was not to write something every day, as with a diary, but only to record events that might be of interest. Therefore there are large time gaps in the narrative; if nothing interesting happened to me for a month then I didn’t write anything. There are quite enough uninteresting things being published nowadays without my adding to the total.

Given my background and what people have come to expect from me I have confined myself largely to events of a humorous nature: however I have also included a few ‘more serious’ items that I feel might be of use to people of a similar age as me, in the hope that the benefit of my experiences may be of help to them in their pensioner years.

Whilst all the events in the journal are true the dialogue is not a hundred per cent accurate, but as I remembered it. However it is always true in spirit and if I am guilty of embellishing it here and there it is only to make for a more entertaining read. A few names and place names have been altered to protect the guilty.

I have called my journal ‘Stairlift to Heaven’. It is a metaphorical stairlift on which I ride - as yet I have no need of the real thing, and sincerely hope I never will. But at my time of life I am certainly on it, sat at the bottom with St Peter and the Pearly Gates awaiting me at the top.

I cordially invite you to join me on my ride on the Stairlift to Heaven.

The principal
dramatis personae
in ‘Stairlift to Heaven’ are as follows.

Me. Now aged seventy-one next birthday. (I have learned that people of my age, when asked how old they are, never say the age they are at the moment but what age they will be next. Hopefully that is.) Ex-television and radio scriptwriter. Wrote for Les Dawson, The Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise, Not the Nine-o-clock News, Alas Smith and Jones and a few others. Wrote the radio series Star Terk 2. Now writes humorous novels.

My wife, Delma. Now aged sixty-eight. Hereafter always referred to as ‘The Trouble’. I call her this
not because of the cockney rhyming slang thing, trouble and strife, wife, but because she has a habit, when addressing me, of beginning her sentences with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Sometimes, when I have clearly upset her, she will insert my full Christian name, ‘Terence’ between the words ‘you’ and ‘is’....
viz
, “The trouble with you, Terence, is....” If she stresses either ‘you’ or ‘Terence’ I batten down the hatches. You’ll see.

Atkins, from down the road. Now aged seventy.
Atkins is a great friend of mine, a kindred spirit. I first met him about ten years ago when the Inland Revenue called me in to explain my debatable - their expression - claims for certain expenses incurred whilst following my profession. Atkins was the official delegated to grill me. In the event little or no grilling took place as we got on like a house on fire from the moment I mentioned that I used to write scripts for Les Dawson. Atkins turned out to be being a huge fan of Les and we spent about an hour talking about him and then about two minutes talking about my expenses claim, which Atkins then accepted without question.

During the interview it transpired that not only did Atkins live in the same town as me, but on the same road, about twenty doors down. We had been living in close proximity for the past five years, completely oblivious of each other, like near neighbours often do. Ours would seem to be the most unlikely of friendships considering our previous occupations, inasmuch as I spent my working life trying to make people laugh whereas Atkins made his living trying to make them cry. However in many other ways we share similarities; we are the same age, we both have a healthy distrust of solicitors, financial advisers and politicians, and we share the same sense of humour, or, as The Trouble succinctly if rather unkindly puts it, “Atkins is as daft as you are.” And although Atkins is sometimes responsible for getting me into some situations I would rather not be in, our occasional departures from sanity re-charges our batteries and makes life a little less run-of-the-mill and thus more bearable. We are neither of us are the worse for it and we like to think it keeps us young.

So here we go then:-

March 9 2006.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

Today I am sixty-five. In my head I feel like I’m twenty five; in fact I’ve been twenty-five in my head ever since I was twenty-five everywhere else, some forty years ago. Probably in an effort to compensate for this my body is well over sixty-five, at least eighty-five I would guess judging from all the aches and pains and things wrong with it. However in my mind’s eye I still look exactly the same as I did when I was twenty-five; no oil painting, but at least not the faded water colour that now looks back at me bleary-eyed from the bathroom mirror every morning.

Imagining myself to be still twenty-five catches me out sometimes, especially if I have accidentally made eye contact with someone young; for nowadays younger people, and especially young women, look straight through me. It’s not that they disregard me; they don’t even see me. It’s as if I’m The Invisible Old Man. I could easily sit in on their conversation without fear of being noticed. However, not wishing to learn how cool are the latest inane rantings of someone called Twopence Ha’penny or some other fanciful name, or how bladdered they all got last Friday night and wasn’t it funny when Melissa chucked up all over the chucker out, I have somehow managed to get by without that diversion. I suppose I was just the same when I was that age; although I remember myself as being quite perfect.

Two weeks prior to my sixty-fifth birthday I had received a letter from the local hospital, Stepping Hill (known to everyone as ‘Step in ill, come out dead’, not wholly without some justification). It informed me that I was to present myself at 10 a.m. on that day for a bladder examination. I showed the letter to The Trouble.

“That’s a nice birthday present for you,” she said, ever the droll.

“I’d rather they’d given me a pair of socks,” I said.

Having now had the bladder examination I would rather have had
anything
else. A pair of socks with a tarantula in each toe would have been lovely. A pair of underpants with a scorpion in them. A pair of trousers with a man-eating tiger in one leg and Jaws in the other. Bring them on. I once had a prostate examination that involved the doctor inserting his finger up my bottom and poking it about as though he were searching for a pound coin that had fallen down the back of the settee, which I thought was pretty painful. It was nothing. Compared to the bladder examination it was the caress of a lover.

Incidentally, quite a bit of the rest of these opening pages is about my waterworks. I’m afraid this can’t be avoided if I’m going to start at my sixty-fifth birthday as the first thing of note worth recording, given that The Trouble failed to give me breakfast in bed, or anything else for that matter, involves my waterworks. It won’t all be about my waterworks, but a fair bit of it will. However it’s doubtful I will be mentioning it again – my waterworks won’t be hanging over you whilst you’re reading the rest of the book, in a manner of speaking. But in the meantime you’ll just have to grin and bear it. As I did with my bladder examination.

 I’ve had trouble with my prostate gland for at least ten years, probably nearer fifteen, and I have to pass water quite frequently. About twenty times a day on average. That’s bad enough, but having found a place in which to pass water I can’t pass it, usually for a couple of minutes or so, but quite often for five minutes, even longer sometimes. At first I just stood there waiting. Then, to fill in the time, I started counting how many ceramic tiles there were on the walls - in our bathroom there are a hundred and eighty four, two of them cracked, but in an old-fashioned Victorian public convenience in Manchester I once counted four hundred and twenty three before the fountain started to flow. However tile counting gets a bit boring after a while so I started dreaming up other things to do to pass the time, given that I was temporarily incapable of passing anything else. Eventually I ended up with quite a few, so now, in the interests of helping any fellow sufferers who may also be at a loose end in similar circumstances - or more accurately an unloose end - here they are.