Stairlift to Heaven (23 page)

“That’s all right,” I replied. “Actually it was a bit of a laugh.”

****

March 3 2010.
DRUG TRIP.

My anal pain continues to plague me. It hasn’t got any worse but then it hasn’t got any better. It’s a bit like having Jonathan Ross come to stay for a week - I could just about put up with it but I’d far rather do without it. I thought I’d tried everything in my efforts to rid myself of it, but no; apparently there was hope in the shape of space cakes. Also in the space cakes, along with hope, was something else, for space cakes, I have since found to my cost, are chocolate brownies with the addition of a quantity of cannabis resin.

My nephew Glen suffers from multiple sclerosis and I had learned that he regularly takes doses of cannabis to ease the pain of this condition. I wondered if it would do the same for my anal pain and asked him. He confirmed what I had been told, highly recommended it and offered to furnish me a supply. Glen explained that he took the cannabis rolled up in cigarettes along with tobacco, a concoction known as a spliff I’m told, but I said I didn’t want to do that as it took me ages to give up smoking and I didn’t want to take the risk of it starting me off again. No problem, Glen would get his fair wife Lorna to bake me some space cakes. A couple of hours later I returned from Glen’s with a brown paper bag containing eight of the so-named cakes.

The following day The Trouble had gone to visit her sister so I had the house to myself. Armed with the space cakes and the new David Lodge book I made myself comfortable on the settee. My favourite author’s intelligent prose was very soon way beyond my comprehension, in fact I doubt very much if I could have managed to make sense of the ‘Mr Men’.

I had asked Glen how many space cakes I would need to take. He advised that a certain amount of caution was required and that I should first try one, and if nothing happened have another one. I tried one. Nothing happened. I tried another. Whether something would have happened if I’d waited a little longer for the first space cake to work I will never know, but what I know for certain is that something definitely happened about two minutes after I’d eaten the second space cake.

It was a good job I was seated because the room suddenly started to go round and round. And kept on going round. Faster. For about two hours. I’d never wondered what it would be like to be in a spin-drier set on maximum but if I had that’s what it would have been like. After about two minutes of the two hours the sound effects started up in the form of a big drum being beaten at about the rate of one beat every second. It was very loud but at the same time seemed far away and sort of hollow, ethereal, funereal even. After two more minutes I became totally consumed by abject fear. For the life of me I couldn’t say what I was frightened about, either now or then. What I can say is that I was ten times more frightened than I’ve ever been in my life, and then some. Maybe it was the wallpaper that frightened me, previously an off-white with a light brown and green bamboo here and there, now purple and emerald stripes with orange stars here and there. I will never know.

And that was it for the next two hours, at which point I began to feel slightly better, inasmuch as I was then only scared shitless.

Throughout the two hours I had been absolutely, totally helpless. If someone had told me they would give me a million pounds if I raised one of my arms in the air I wouldn’t have been able to do it. If someone had told me Kristin Scott Thomas was mine for the asking she would have remained unasked for. Whether or not the space cakes had done anything for my anal pain I have no idea, but very probably, as I’m pretty sure that if someone had hit me over the head with a lump hammer I wouldn’t have felt a thing, let alone a pain in my bottom.

My mouth now began to feel dry. Within seconds later it was absolutely parched. The Gobi Desert isn’t drier. I had to have a drink of water. I tried to stand up. I would have stood more chance trying to poke half a pound of butter up a hedgehog’s arse with a red hot needle. After another fifteen minutes or so I just about managed to roll off the settee and onto my hands and knees. I don’t know how long it took me to crawl from the living room into the kitchen but it seemed like two years.

I made my way to the sink and managed to drag myself up far enough to get my mouth under the tap and turn it on. I must have drunk at least a gallon of water before my thirst was quenched. I sank to my knees. It had now been over two hours since I’d had a pee, a long time for me, especially as I’d just drunk a gallon of water, and now I had to go to the toilet. I dragged myself up the stairs one at a time. I will skip the job I had having a pee after I eventually made it to the bathroom as it is far too embarrassing but a mop was later involved. When I’d finished I just sat there on the bathroom floor, not daring to go downstairs in case I had to go back up again.

It took the best part of five hours before I was anything like back to normal. I phoned Glen and told him what had happened. He just laughed and said that I’d slightly overdosed and been on a trip. It was a trip I will never be going on again and to make sure I didn’t I threw the remaining space cakes in the bin. When The Trouble returned a bit later on I was sat on the settee reading my book. “I hope you haven’t been sat there all day,” she said.

“No, I had a trip out earlier,” I said.

****

March 16 2010.
BREASTS.

The Sunday Times TV listings tells me that on BBC 3 tonight there is a programme called ‘My Breasts and I’. I thought at first it might be a new situation comedy, about the Breast Family, Joanne Breast, her thick husband George Breast, their children Jason and Samantha Breast who keep coming through doors and grinning like loonies, and their next-door neighbour Jeremy who is so thick that if he fell into a barrel of tits he’d climb out sucking his thumb; sort of like ‘My Family’ but with laughs. But no, apparently it is a documentary about female breasts.

The Sunday Times writes of it - ‘More than you could possibly want to know about how the former Atomic Kitten Jenny Frost feels about her bosoms (‘Two tea bags after they’ve been dunked’, is how she sums them up). Plus how lots of other women (among them Joan Collins) feel about them, and a bra-fitting from the Queen’s corsetiere (though not, as you might guess, with an appearance from the Queen)’.

I don’t know the feelings of others on the subject but a glimpse of the Queen’s breasts is not high on my list of things I am aching to see, so the news that we won’t be seeing the royal nipples is by no means a disappointment. Having said that there is no reason to suppose that Elizabeth Regina’s knockers might be, like
Atomic Kitten
Jenny Frost’s, like two tea bags. On the contrary there is every reason to suppose that the Queen’s breasts will be firm and pert, their nipples pointing outwards rather than at her feet; after all, her hairstyle hasn’t altered since she was an eighteen-year-old so why should her breasts have changed? Her hair has changed colour of course, from brown to grey, so maybe she has grey breasts now, or breasts with grey hair on them, but I’d wager quite a bit that they’re still the same shape.

I should of course know for a fact if the Queen’s mammaries are the same shape, God knows there’s been enough pictures of her in the newspapers and on television over the years to enable one to form an opinion, but since I was old enough to think for myself whenever I see a picture of the Queen in the newspapers I move quickly on to something less boring, without taking the trouble to examine the latest state of her breasts.

There is still an Atomic Kitten’s tea bag tits to look forward to seeing though, in addition to those of Joan Collins, whose tits by now must also look like two tea bags, or if they don’t it can only be because she’s had them pumped full of silicone.

Thank Christ I won’t have to watch it.

****

April 4 2010.
WHEELIE BINS.

“I’d like a picture of a pizza.” I said to the man at the pizza shop.

He frowned. “A picture of a pizza?”

I pointed to a picture of a pizza Napolitano on the wall. “That one would suit.”

“You don’t want a pizza?

I explained. “We only have one every couple of weeks or so and we had one last week. Very nice it was too. A Four Seasons with extra garlic. But today it’s just a picture of one that I want. I’ll quite willingly pay for it.”

“Why do you want a picture of a pizza?”

I told him and five minutes later walked out with a rolled-up picture of the Napolitano under my arm, free of charge, and a bag of chips in my hand which I didn’t really want but which I’d bought because the pizza man had been so nice about letting me have the picture for nothing.

About a couple of months ago the town council had delivered a green wheelie bin to my door, a companion for its black brother. With it came a list of things I could throw into it and which I would no longer be allowed to throw into the black bin. I would be given a month to get used to the new system of only throwing certain things in one bin and certain things in the other bin, thereafter if I put a certain thing in the wrong bin the bin men would refuse to empty it. There was no mention of uncertain things, such as something for the green bin which had become contaminated by something for the black bin, such as a shoe box with the remains of the Sunday dinner in it, but I suppose the council can’t think of everything. There was also no mention as to how the bin men would know if someone ignored the new system and just carried on putting all their refuse in one or other of the bins and used the other bin as a mobile water butt or something. I asked.

“The refuse collection operatives have been instructed to look inside your bin from time to time,” said the council official. “And in answer to your other question, who would be daft enough to put the remains of a Sunday dinner in a shoe box?”

“Me,” I said. I paused, giving him the chance to apologise for calling me daft. No apology was forthcoming, so, pausing only to mount my high horse, I went on. “There was nothing daft about it. Both as a method of maximising available bin space and as a means of keeping the inside of the wheelie bin free from encrusted food it was quite the reverse of daft, it was eminently sensible.”

“Well it isn’t eminently sensible any more, it is contravening our new refuse disposal guidelines,” he said. I didn’t argue with him. I know when I’m beaten.

One morning last week I answered the door to one of the bin men.

“There’s a cardboard box in your black wheelie bin,” he said.

I didn’t argue with the bin man either. He was right, I realised as soon as he said it. A couple of nights previously The Trouble and I had dined on a takeaway pizza. Just as we were about to eat it a friend of The Trouble’s brought round some home-made apple pie, still hot from the oven, and to do it justice we’d left a good half of the pizza, which I then threw into the bin along with the box.

“So we’re not moving it,” the bin man smirked.

It was the smirk that did it. If it hadn’t been for that I would have put my hand up, maybe even apologised, offered to separate the pizza from the box, put them in their respective black and green bins and let the matter go. But there are certain things I won’t stand for and one of them is public servants, whose wages are partly paid for by me, smirking at me.

Two days later me and the man from the council who had put me in my place made our way to my black wheelie bin.

“I can see how your refuse collection operative made the mistake,” I said. “Especially as at that time in the morning the light wouldn’t have been too good.”

I swung back the lid of the wheelie bin. At the top of the assorted household rubbish was the pizza box. I had previously removed the pizza from it and in its place had put the picture of the pizza Napolitano kindly donated to me by the man at the pizza shop the day previously. “As you can see, he was wrong. Furthermore there was no need for him to take pleasure in informing me that I had transgressed your regulations and I insist that you to take him to task about it.”