Stairlift to Heaven (11 page)

It immediately dawned on me that if Ted had twigged on what was happening earlier he might have saved dozens of lives but I wasn’t going to mention it, the poor bloke might not have been able to live with himself if he thought that. Eerily, as though he had read my thoughts, Ted said, “If I’d have twigged on earlier I might have saved dozens of lives

“Right,” I said. Obviously he could live with this knowledge.

“Of course,” he said, “whether I’d have told the police is another matter.”

What did he mean, ‘if I’d told the police’? Why would he not have told the police?

“I mean if the police had collared him earlier my business would have suffered,” he explained.

And then he cracked a smile, informing me that he was only joking. At least I think he was only joking.

****

September 13 2007.
MR WOO

Yesterday, six weeks to the day since our bed was given the Feng Shui treatment,
the well-upholstered blonde who had talked The Trouble into going along with all this Feng Shui nonsense in the first place arrived at our house along with the Chinaman who had talked the well-upholstered blonde into going into it. The purpose of their visit was to check whether The Trouble had placed various items of our furniture in the most conducive positions according to the dictates of Feng Shui.

I wish The Trouble had warned me beforehand as it would have saved me the embarrassment of walking in on them in just my boxer shorts on my return to the bedroom after my morning shower.

“This is Mr Woo,” said The Trouble, indicating the Chinaman, presumably in case I might be thinking the well-upholstered blonde was called Mr Woo.

“Shouldn’t he be outside cleaning the windows?” I asked.

“Cleaning the windows?” said the well-upholstered blonde, officiously. “Why should Mr Woo be cleaning the windows?”

I gave her a quick burst of George Formby’s Chinese Laundry Blues, accompanying myself on air banjo: “
Oh Mr Wu, what shall I do, I’m feeling kind of Limehouse Chinese Laundry Blues
.”

That was Mr Wu,” said The Trouble, with a ‘u’. “This Mr Woo spells his name W..O..O.”

“Oh, Mr Wooooo,” I said. “Like a puffer train.”

“No, Woo,” said the well-upholstered blonde.

“Take no notice of him,” said The Trouble, then, to me: “Mr Woo is a Feng Shui expert.”

Mr Woo smiled at me. “Nice underpants.”

“You’re not moving them,” I said, my hands going involuntarily to the sides of my boxers.

“Mr Woo has come along to check if your bed is in the correct place,” explained the well-upholstered blonde.

“I can save him the bother then,” I said. “It is in the right place. In the bedroom. Where else would you put a bed, in the greenhouse?”

“You’re embarrassing me,” said The Trouble, giving me a look that would have frozen Birds Eye’s annual production of peas.

“I’m
embarrassing
you?
” I said. “I walk into our bedroom in just my boxers to find you and your barmpot of a mate and a Chinaman who looks suspiciously to me like the one who keeps the Chinese chippy on Market St and
I’m
embarrassing
you?”

The well-upholstered blonde immediately leapt to the Chinaman’s defence. “He doesn’t look suspiciously like the one who keeps the Chinese chip shop,” she glowered. “He is the one who keeps the Chinese chip shop. He is multi-talented.”

“He is not,” I said, “he can’t cook chips for a start, he’s fucking hopeless at it, they’re always soggy.”

I had overstepped the mark, of course. Although the F-word now seems to be more or less compulsory in conversation between the sexes when spoken by the young it is still taboo for people of my generation when in the company of women. (Except in London of course, or when you are in the company of just your wife and no other word will do.) My choice was simple. I could apologise or face the silent treatment for God knows how long. I apologised.

After much deliberation and tut-tutting Mr Woo moved the bed about two degrees to the north. Having spent a night in it I can’t say I felt any happier in it. However The Trouble said she felt much happier in it and that the two degrees had made all the difference. I said that if the Three Degrees had been in it I would probably be happier, but if she was prepared to black-up that would do, but she just turned over and went to sleep, possibly because she’d have had a job getting hold of some burnt cork at eleven-o-clock at night.

****

October 22 2007.
FAT CHILDREN.

At the age of sixty six years and seven months I have just written only my second letter to a newspaper. (My first was to Uncle Ben of the High Peak Reporter when I was ten, complaining to him that my entry in his ‘What I did on my holidays’ competition was far better than the entry that won. It was totally disregarded, and is probably the reason I haven’t written to a newspaper since.)

The reason for abandoning my letters-to-the-editor stand was a newspaper article about Walkers Crisps. I wrote thus: -

‘
I read that in addition to encouraging Gary Mogadon to make those puerile TV commercials (as if we didn’t see enough of him already on Match of the Day and other programmes that the BBC for some unknown reason thing he’s good enough to present), that Walkers are to re-launch their ‘Free Books For Schools Programme’. ‘Since the scheme was launched in 1999 it has provided more than 6 million free books to schools across the country’, we were proudly informed by a Walkers spokesman.

Nothing of course is free, and in this case free means that Walkers will provide one book per one school for every five hundred tokens saved from their crisps packets. I hope one of the books is called ‘How To Lose Lots Of Excess Blubber’ and another ‘What To Do When People Start To Call You Fatty’, because there are surely going to be lots of grossly overweight children around if they have to munch their way through five hundred packets of crisps every time they need a new schoolbook.

Walkers of course are not the only food company who bribe schoolchildren to eat their products in exchange for educational materials. Cadburys are another, with their internet-based ‘Cadburys Learning Zone’, which offers, and I quote, ‘exciting and challenging materials for both school and home learning with online and download activities, fascinating facts and illustrations’. This must be the first ever programme that teaches children all about chocolate whilst at the same time teaching them how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, thus enabling them to calculate how many teeth they’ve lost due to eating the chocolate they’ve learned all about.

Cadburys also operate a scheme similar to that of Walkers and will benevolently stump up for sports equipment for schools in return for tokens collected from their range of confectionary. This of course encourages children to eat even more chocolate than they are already eating, and having eaten it presumably to take part in sports such as Five Ton-a-Side Football and The 100 Metres Very Low Hurdles Because If They Were Any Higher The Kids Wouldn’t Be Able to Jump Over Them Because They Are So Grossly Overweight, Better Make That Just Fifty Metres Then, these being the only sort of sports activities their bloated frames will allow them to participate in.

Naturally our old friends McDonalds have been into this sort of thing for years. In fact in yesterday’s paper there was a photograph of Newcastle and England footballer Kieran Dyer passing on tips to a clutch of schoolboy footballers who were wearing training bibs with a large McDonalds logo plastered on the front. Presumably Kieran Dyer himself eats McDonalds, and following his woeful performance in his team’s thrashing by Manchester United last Saturday you would have thought that both he and McDonalds would want to keep quiet about it, but no, footballers along with food companies were seemingly on the front row when brass necks were handed out.

Now it doesn’t take much of a brain to work out that the consumption of Big Macs and playing football are about as compatible as the eating of meat & potato pies and playing football, which is about as compatible as a tankful of petrol and two pounds of sugar; indeed in a fair world along with shouts from the terraces of ‘You fat bastard, you ate all the pies’ there would be at least an equal number of shouts of ‘You fat bastard, you ate all the Big Macs’.

I must confess to not knowing the full details of what exactly McDonalds offer up in the way of freebies to children in order to coerce them to eat Big Macs but if it’s anything less than a three weeks all expenses paid trip to Disneyland for each Big Mac eaten the children are being had.

McDonalds would no doubt argue, as would Walkers, that their products, in addition to being tasty, are nutritious and a source of energy. Well crisps are not too vile, as far as the plain variety goes, vileness kicking in with a vengeance when ‘flavours’ are added, but to defend Big Macs because they are a source of energy is like defending Saddam Hussein because he found lots of work for torturers.

Walkers, Cadburys and McDonalds are just three of the many food companies who induce children, and through them their teachers and parents, to consume their products. I don’t know whether they do it for altruistic reasons, whether they do it to salve their guilty consciences for encouraging children to eat junk food, or whether it’s just pure greed, but if I had to put a bet on it my money would be on pure greed.’

Yours etc

Terry Ravenscroft

And guess what? They printed it. Well some of it. Edited down to about a third of it. And so highly sanitised as to make it hardly worth the bother. They even cut out the bit about Gary Mogadon. The editor is probably a descendant of Uncle Ben. I have written my last letter to a newspaper. Definitely.

****

October 30 2007.
HORSESHIT.

In the long ago people needing to get from one place to another by the quickest means possible would go by horse. Then the motor car was invented, rendering the horse redundant as a mode of transport. Not only was the motor car quicker and a far more comfortable ride whilst travelling the country’s highways and byways but it had the added benefit of not shitting on them whilst it was doing so. This happened over a century ago yet people today still feel the need to ride their horses on our roads and their horses still feel the need to shit on them.

Living in a small town with open countryside all around has a lot going for it. One of the things not going for it is having horses shit on the street where you live. There are upwards of fifty horses grazing in the fields surrounding the small housing estate on which I live. Every day at least four or five of these horses are saddled up by their owners and ridden down my street. At weekends
all
the horses are saddled up and ridden down my street. All of them shit in my street. And there the shit lies, in a big heap. Until such time as a car drives over it and bonds it to the road in a bigger, flatter, heap. And there it stays, until the rain eventually washes it away. One day I counted fifty eight heaps, some newly dumped and still steaming, some by now flattened, in the hundred yards length of my street. The situation is getting so bad that a week or so ago I sent a letter to the council suggesting they alter the name of my street from Lingland Road to Shit View. They replied that they have noted my comments and it would be discussed at the next council meeting. Yes, I’ll bet it will be .

Sometimes the people who own the horses don’t ride them down the street. They put the horses in the back of a van and drive the van down the street. Unbelievable. Someone invents the motor vehicle so people no longer have to ride a horse to get from A to B then the people put their horses in a van and drive it from A to B. At about ten miles -an-hour. And you drive behind it at ten miles an hour. Seething. But at least the horse isn’t shitting in the road. It’s shitting in the van. And you can smell it. Until such time as the van turns off, about twenty miles up the road. If you’re lucky.