Stairlift to Heaven (3 page)

“And you have baked potatoes?”

“Yes. But not together. The battered haddock and chips is a special, we’re not allowed to mess about with specials.”

“I’m not asking you to mess about with it. All I’m asking you to do is to replace the chips with a baked potato.”

She batted this back as effortlessly as Don Bradman in his prime facing a rookie bowler. “That’s messing about with it.”

I considered the problem for a moment. I was aware it wouldn’t be an easy one to crack; after all I was dealing here with someone who didn’t have the brains to put her knickers on the right way round, let alone see sense. Nevertheless I managed to come up with a solution. “Could you do a battered haddock and chips, and leave off the chips?”

She thought about it for a moment. “You’ll have to pay for the chips.”

“No problem. Could you also do me a baked potato and a beef casserole, but leave off the beef casserole?” Then, anticipating her answer, “Which I know I will have to pay for.”

“Yes,” she said, though now with a little uncertainly, with the air of someone who suspected she was being talked into something, but not knowing what. She was.

“Excellent.” I said. “Could you then take the baked potato off its plate and put it on the plate that contains the battered haddock, then bring it to me.”

Her reply was immediate and uncompromising. “That’s battered haddock and baked potato.”

“Yes,” I smiled.

“We don’t do battered haddock and baked potato.”

“Come on,” I said to The Trouble, getting to my feet, “We’re going.”

“The trouble with you is….” she started, but I was halfway to the door by then.

On the way home we got a takeaway from the Chinese down the road; sweet and sour pork, beef in black bean sauce, egg fried rice, prawn crackers. I asked the owner if I could have a discount even though I couldn’t prove I was an old age pensioner. He said he wouldn’t give me a discount even if I could prove I was Confucius.

Happy birthday.

***************

April 27 2006.
GOODRAMGATE.

The trip to the charity shops of York had gone off reasonably well until Harrison spoiled it by shitting in Atkins’s trousers.

Atkins and I, accompanied by Harrison and Hargreaves, acquaintances of Atkins, had been moved into taking the trip to York in response to an email I’d had from John Laithwaite, an old friend of mine.

I’ve always felt that charity shops are a perfect example of the distribution of wealth, stocked as they are largely by donations from twenty to sixty-five-year olds, people in work, and frequented largely by people under twenty and old age pensioners, people not in work. I’ve always made good use of them, hence the email from my friend John, who, aware of this, let it be known that he’d recently been on a trip to York and had been greatly enthused by the abundance of charity shops to be found there. He went on to say that there must be at least forty, and of that number upwards of twenty were to be found in one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Goodramgate, close to the famous Minster.

The only fly in the ointment, John warned, is that York is a university city and as such is infested with a large population of students, and that because the vast majority of students are poor the charity shops are an obvious attraction as not only do they offer them the opportunity to rig themselves out in decent clothes but do so without causing too much of a dent in their beer money. Consequently students are frequent and voracious users of the shops and this often brings about occasions when a non-student charity shopper and a student make for the same item. The way to deal with them when this happens, advises John, is to poke them sharply in the ribs with the pointed end of a rolled umbrella, or, if they are particularly persistent, an electric cattle prod.

York is a lovely city, one of my favourites, and John’s email reminded me that it had been far too long since I’d last walked its impressive walls. News of all the charity shops to be found within those walls - especially in Goodramgate, which sounded to me to be very much like the Bond Street of charity shopping - only increased my desire to pay it another visit, and very soon; charity shops were certainly not there in anything like that number when I last visited York, but that must have been about ten years ago, the scale on which you get them nowadays being a quite recent phenomenon.

I mentioned John’s email to Atkins, who is an even keener patron of charity shops than I am, quite unable to turn down a bargain, and, courtesy of the joint efforts of Help the Aged and Oxfam, probably the only man ever to venture out in broad daylight dressed in a bowler hat and a kilt in the tartan of the MacGregor clan. This he did when we went together to the 2002 Commonwealth Games in nearby Manchester and he wanted to see if dressed in that fashion he could get into the Lawn Bowling for free by telling the man on the gate he was the entry from British Caledonia. The man on the gate, dressed in an even more bizarre manner than Atkins in the official Games uniform of multi-coloured shell suit, flat hat and trainers, took one look at him and let him in without batting an eyelid.

The upshot was that Atkins and I decided on a trip to York in the not too distant future. This would be followed by a visit to the Jorvik Viking Centre, which neither of us had visited before, and where Atkins hoped to get in for nothing provided he could pick up a helmet with horns in it at one of the charity shops.

The day before the trip I popped into our local Age Concern; spring had suddenly arrived, I was short on lightweight trousers, and I thought if I could pick up a decent pair I’d be able to wear them on our outing.

Many people draw the line at buying clothes from charity shops on the grounds that there’s a fair chance that previously they will have been worn by someone who has died, but the only way this would ever put me off buying them would be if the man who had died was still in them, and even then I still might be tempted if they were in better condition than he was. Whenever I’m considering the purchase of new trousers I always ask myself which I would rather have, a brand new pair of trousers or a pair of second-hand trousers with lots of wear left in them, plus a couple of bottles of decent wine. The second-hand trousers and wine win every time.

When I entered the shop I noticed a new assistant behind the counter. When I say ‘new’ I mean new to the job, as opposed to not old, it apparently being a rule in charity shops that none of the staff should be younger than ninety and have the appearance of someone who is in far more need of charity than the customers. In this instance the new assistant passed with flying colours, or maybe, given her advanced years, shuffling colours.

As is my custom with all new members of staff at Age Concern, on first making their acquaintance, I put on a worried expression, hobbled up to the counter and said, “I’m concerned about my age.” This always gets one of two responses: - (a) They look at me for a few seconds as though I’m stark-raving mad and set about tidying the nearest rack of clothes, or (b), they say: “We only sell second-hand clothes and books and things.” However on this occasion the new assistant rang the changes. She looked at me up and down and said, “Well we all have to go some time, love, but I’m sure you’ve got time to buy something before you pop off.” She should do well.

In all charity shops the stock of women’s clothes outnumber men’s by a ratio of about seven to one. This isn’t, as one might suspect, because women are seven times more generous in the gift of their cast-offs, but because they have seven times more clothes to cast off, as any man who has compared the contents of his wife’s wardrobe with his own modest collection of clothing will be well aware. Consequentially the men’s section is only one-seventh as large as the women’s section and can usually be found, just, hidden away in the farthest corner of the sales floor from the door. This is the case with my local Age Concern.

There were about a hundred pairs of trousers on offer, a hundred and six if you include the five pairs of combat trousers and a pair of jodhpurs, but as it’s unlikely I will ever be waging war on anyone, especially on horseback, I passed up on them. I soon found something suitable, a nice pair of Chinos in pensioner grey, and took them to the counter to be bagged and paid for. The new assistant regarded them with approval. “Very nice,” she said. “They should last you a lifetime.” Then she cracked a horrible smile. I shall have to watch that one.

The following day, when our party arrived in York, we discovered that the shops in Goodramgate were all that my friend John had promised and more, and the four of us had a great time. I spent about fifty pounds on ‘new’ clothes, including a superb black and white hound’s-tooth check sports jacket from Oxfam, a fiver, which complemented perfectly the pair of charcoal grey Daks slacks I acquired from SCOPE - Atkins said I would look like a bookie but I think he was a bit jealous because I’d spotted the jacket before he had - and the others spent about the same.

Despite my telling him that John was probably joking when he’d mentioned that a good way of dealing with students was to poke them with an umbrella Atkins, lacking an umbrella, had brought along a cricket stump. Happily we experienced no problems with students so he had no need to poke them with it; much to his disappointment, I might add, as he said he quite liked the idea of poking a student as it was a student who had recently poked his granddaughter and put her in the family way before going up to Cambridge and leaving her in the lurch.

Ironically the only problem we had in this regard was when Atkins and Harrison both went for the same pair of trousers. Harrison claimed he had laid hands on them first, a claim hotly disputed by Atkins. The matter was resolved only when Atkins pointed out that not only was he the driver of the car that had conveyed all of us to York, but would not necessarily be conveying all of us back, but he also had a cricket stump that he was itching to try out, whereupon Harrison reluctantly let go his grip on the trousers and Atkins bought them for £3.50, a bargain.

After we had gorged ourselves on all that the charity shops had to offer and had stowed our purchases in the boot of Atkins’s car, Atkins and I made our way to the Jorvik Viking Centre, as planned. Harrison and Hargreaves had chosen not join us, claiming they’d already seen the Viking Centre a couple of years ago and apart from that they’d had more than their fill of Scandinavians what with ABBA. Atkins, perhaps getting the wrong end of the stick, asked them if they played ABBA records at the Viking Centre as he wasn’t all that keen on them either and might forego the experience of seeing a long boat if it meant he had to put up with hearing ‘Waterloo’ and ‘Dancing Queen’ again, but Hargreaves assured him they didn’t. So we agreed to meet back at the car later and went our separate ways.

At least one of the separate ways that Harrison and Hargreaves went led to a pub, because when we met up with them some two hours later they were both the worse for drink. Another of the separate ways they went was to the banks of the River Ouse where, no doubt due to his inebriated condition, Harrison had tripped and staggered into the river almost up to his waist.

If he had fallen into the river headfirst and wet his top half it would have been fine, for Harrison’s purchases from the charity shops had included a variety of shirts, sweaters, waistcoats, jumpers and jackets. However he had not bought any trousers, the only pair he fancied having been bought by Atkins, as explained earlier. Atkins, who can be quite uncompromising if you get on the wrong side of him, was all for making Harrison travel all the way home in wet trousers until I pointed out that if he were to do this he would leave the back seat of the car wet-through and smelling of the River Ouse for weeks, something which Mrs Atkins might have a thing or two to say about. Atkins, Harrison and I had all purchased charity trousers so clearly a loan of a pair of them to Harrison was the solution.

Hargreaves is a much smaller man than Harrison so any trousers he had purchased would clearly be unsuitable, and both Atkins and I, whose trousers would be approximately the right size, were reluctant to loan them to Harrison. In the end we tossed-up for it, and Atkins lost. Atkins, true to form, demanded the best out of three, which I acceded to, and won again, but when he then demanded the best out of five I demurred. Harrison went into a gents’ toilet to change into the trousers. When he emerged I remarked how smart he looked in them and what a perfect fit they were. Atkins gave me a dirty look and warned Harrison to look after them and treat them with respect. Some hopes.