Stairlift to Heaven

by Terry Ravenscroft

  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.

  From reading the above it might be construed that I don’t like horses. Wrong. I don’t mind horses at all; especially when one of them has won me a few quid at Haydock Park. It’s their shit I don’t like, especially when it’s in the road outside my house.

  Nowadays when responsible dog owners walk their dogs they carry a poop scoop and a plastic bag and when their dog defecates they put the offending turd in the plastic bag and take it home with them. There is no reason on earth why horse owners shouldn’t do the same. They would probably need a couple of bags, granted, and the filled bags would be quite heavy, but so what, they could hang them either side of their horse like saddlebags. I am seriously thinking of starting a national campaign to implement this idea. So if sometime in the future you see a horse walking along with a bag of shit slung either side of it you’ll have me to thank for it.

  ****

  November 2 2007. GOING FOR PETROL.

  The phone rang. It was The Trouble.

  “There’s a light on in the car.”

  “What sort of light?

  “On the dashboard thingy.”

  “Describe it.”

  “Well it’s just a light.”

  “What colour is it?”

  “Do you remember those curtains we used to have in the spare bedroom? A sort of burnt orange?”

  Is she joking? Probably not. “When this light came on, was there a pinging sound?”

  “Er...I think so.”

  “You need to put some petrol in.”

  “How do you do that?”

  It must be at least twenty years since I taught The Trouble how to drive - after insisting of course that she first had ten lessons from a qualified instructor - I’m a supportive husband, not a fool. One day when she was reasonably proficient, i.e. when people had taken to the streets again and she had mastered the nine point turn - I asked her to take the next turn on the left and pull up. She did. She looked around her and said, non-plussed, “We’re in a garage.”

  I corrected her. “A filling station.”

  “Why?”

  “Your next lesson. It’s called ‘Going for Petrol’.”

  I had her get out of the car and showed her how to unlock the petrol cap and use the petrol pump. I stopped when I’d put in a couple of gallons. Then I had her do the same, going through the complete routine. Three times. Satisfied that she now knew how to put petrol in the car I took her to the kiosk to show her how to pay for it. Sorted. Or so I imagined.

  From that day to this I don’t think she’s put petrol in our car more than half-a-dozen times, and not at all in our present car, which we’ve had for about eighteen months. Which had prompted her question as to how to go about putting petrol in it. On more than one occasion I’ve seen her get in the car, switch on, notice that the needle on the fuel gauge was getting dangerously near to the red zone, and get out and either walk or take a bus to where she was going. This time she must have failed to take that precaution.

  The tone of my voice was deliberately long-suffering so as to register my disapproval. Water off a duck’s back I know, but you have to make an effort. “Go to the nearest garage.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Where are you now?” She told me. “Make for Tesco’s.”

  “Do they sell petrol?” There was real surprise in her voice. “I’ve never noticed when I’ve been there shopping.”

  “It’s not on the shelves next to the cereals and tins of soup, it’s at a separate building with a giant sign on it that says ‘Petrol’ - you’ll see about eight things outside it that look like one-armed monsters out of Doctor Who; they’re called petrol pumps.”

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

  “There is every need to be sarcastic.”

  She arrived home about an hour later, not a happy bunny. “I didn’t know it cost as much as that,” she complained.

  “Well why would you?”

  “Ninety eight pence a litre!”

  “Right. How much did you put in?”

 
; “Well a litre of course. Oh by the way, that light came on again on the way home.”

  ****

  November 17 2007. MISTEAK.

  You could urn up to £20 an hour working form home after a Chapterhouse proofreeding and editing coarse.

  Co-respondence courses and seminars. Fifteen ears of publishing training. Exerpt personal tutors.Advice on getting wok

  Mark he errors nad send this ad to us with your name and a dress and we’ll send you our free prospectus. If your two bussy a phone call will do. 0800 3328 8396

  www.chapterhousepublishing.com, 16 Magdalen Road, Exeter, EX2 45Y

  I marked the errors ‘MISTEAK’, ‘cuold’, ‘urn’, ‘form’, ‘ears’, ‘exerpt’, ‘he’, ‘a dress’, ‘your’ and ‘bussy’. I missed the spelling mistakes ‘coarse, ‘nad’, ‘proofreeding’ and ‘Co-respondence’. I also marked as errors the correctly spelled words ‘publishing’ and ‘prospectus’. I sent the ad off to Chapterhouse and a few days later I received their reply, which I reprint below.

  Save up to £35 for early booking

  Dear Mr Ravenscroft

  Welcome from all at Chapterhouse! We offer - a choice of course unrivalled personal tuition a track record of success full assessment of all courses a guide to finding work After a Chapterhouse course you could be set for a full or part-time career earning up to £20 an hour from home. Please read our Brochure and Book of Success We would love to have you as a student! With best wishes

  Daisy Crowther, Course Director

  And that’s after returning their form with six glaring errors! Christ knows what they’d have offered me if I’d got everything right, a directorship a least I would have thought.

  I wrote back to Daisy Crowther and told her to go fcuk herself.

  ****

  December 29 2007. GOOSE.

  I answered the door to Atkins. He was carrying what looked to be a coil of washing line. “What’s the rope for?” I said, in a state of suspicion, which isn’t a bad state to be in when dealing with Atkins.

  “Didn’t you once mention you used to be in the Boy Scouts?” he said, ignoring my query about the rope. It didn’t take me long to find out. “Can you do a noose?” he asked, stepping inside.

  Alarm bells rang. Atkins has been having an ongoing battle of wills with the paperboy, who persists in leaving the majority of his Daily Mail on the outside side of his letter box where it gets wet through if it’s raining when the paper is delivered. Personally I think giving the Daily Mail a thorough dousing can only improve it but Atkins says the he likes it for the cartoons.

  “You’re not going to hang the paperboy, are you?” I said. “You’ve only got to tip him at Christmas like everybody else and he’d push your paper all the way through.”

  “I’ve never tipped in my life and I don’t intend starting now,” said Atkins. “It’s against my religion. Anyway I’m not going to hang the paperboy, it’s for the wife.”

  “You’re going to hang Meg?”

  Atkins looked at me impatiently. “I’m not going to hang anybody. She wants a goose for our New Year’s Day dinner.”

  It transpired that Mrs Atkins had been very disappointed with the turkey they’d had for Christmas Day lunch and wasn’t about to risk another disappointment. Atkins had been charged with providing a goose.

  “That still doesn’t explain why you want a noose,” I said.

  Atkins snorted. “Have you seen the price of them? If she thinks I’m forking out fifty quid for a goose she can think again. No, there’s a flock of Canada geese on the canal, must be a hundred of them. I’m going to bag one. Lasso one. Make it wish it had never left Canada. When you’ve made me a noose.”

  What Atkins had in mind was a bit ambitious, even for Atkins. “You’re going to lasso one of the Canada geese on the canal?”

  “Well why not?”

  “Well for one thing they’re protected.”

  “What, you mean they were shin pads or something? Give over. Anyway I’m having one, protected or not, they won’t miss one.” He proffered the rope. “So if you’d be good enough to do the honours?”

  I took the rope off him. “It isn’t a noose you want,” I said, “It’s a slip knot. You want a lariat, like cowboys use.”

  “That’s it, a lariat. Make me a lariat.”

  “You can use a lariat?”

  “We won’t be able to miss. They’re all together in a big flock just sat there paddling around, the noose bit is bound to go over the neck of one of them. Then all we have to do is drag it out.”

  Normally when Atkins says ‘we’, automatically incorporating me into one of his wilder schemes, I demur, or at the very least take some time to consider what I might be getting myself into. Not this time. Atkins lassoing a goose was not a sight I wanted to miss. Geese, especially large Canada geese, are very strong birds, and once Atkins tightened the lasso round the neck of one of them it would be a racing certainty it would be the goose dragging Atkins into the canal rather than Atkins dragging the goose out of it.

  After I’d made the lariat and Atkins had tried a few practice throws at our garden gnome - which he managed to lasso once out of twelve attempts, and it wasn’t moving about like a Canada goose would be - we set off for the canal, Atkins claiming that he would have had much more success with the gnome had there been as many of them, and as closely bunched together, as there were of Canada geese.

  We arrived at the canal. The geese were only yards away. Atkins was right, it would be more difficult to miss them than lasso one. He commenced to prove this by lassoing one at the first attempt. With a smirk and a cry of ‘Yahooo’ that would have done credit to Hopalong Cassidy or a demented line dancer he pulled the lariat tight. Then a strange thing happened. As I’ve already said, I expected the goose to pull Atkins into the canal. Not a bit of it. Instead, it just sort of stood up in the water, rather like a horse rearing up on its hind legs, then flew straight at us at about a hundred miles an hour.

  “Shit a brick!” yelled Atkins.

  I didn’t say anything. Speechless people can’t. I just turned, flew across the towpath and leapt over the stone wall into a farmer’s field. Just before leaping I turned to see the goose batting Atkins round the head with its huge wings, Atkins trying manfully but unsuccessfully both to shield himself with his arms and fight off the beast at the same time.

  I recovered my powers of speech just enough to shout “Let go of the rope you bloody fool!” before landing on the other side of the wall and haring off down the field fifty yards or so before slithering to a halt and chancing a look back. A second or so later Atkins’s head, dishevelled and sorry-looking, appeared above the wall, his hands pulling small feathers from his hair.

  “You got rid of it then?” I called.

  “It flew off,” he answered, then added, sorrowfully, “And so did all its mates.”

  I made my way back to him. “What are you going to do then?” I asked.

  “She’ll have to settle for duck,” he said. “Anyway I prefer duck.”

  ****

  February 22 2008. AIR MAIL.

  About ten years ago, whilst flying home from a holiday in Lanzarote, I was served the most revolting lasagne I have ever tasted. It was so bad that if I’d had to choose between eating it and death I would not be here now, death being the preferred option. The following day I wrote about it to Air 2000, the airline company concerned. I presumed that they would have fielded many complaints about their lasagne and so in order to ring the changes I wrote in praise of it. This is the letter: -

  Dear Air 2000

  I recently had the pleasure of flying for the very first time. I’ve always been afraid to up until now, but I finally plucked up courage. I am certainly glad that I did, and for two reasons. One, it wasn’t half so bad an experience as I had imagined it would be, and two, I had my first meal on an aeroplane. Why all the jokes about airline food? The fare we were served by Air 2000 on our flights down to Lanzarote and back were quite excellent, a
nd I speak as a man who knows good food, eating as I do at least five ready-to-heat-up-in-the-microwave or boil-in-the-bag meals a week. Both the turkey and stuffing going down and the lasagne coming back were quite mouth-watering. Nor could I fault the starters and desserts, although it must be said that the couple seated next to me detected a ‘soapy’ taste in the trifle, although if you ask me it was their imagination, because it certainly tasted all right to me.

  Is it possible to buy your meals? If so, could you please reply, with details of any other meals you do, your price list, and any discounts you allow for quantity.

  Yours sincerely

  T Ravenscroft (Mr)

  Air 2000 replied to my letter much as I suspected they might, pleased to note that I enjoyed the lasagne but regretting that the meals they served onboard were not available for re-sale. The matter would have ended there if they hadn’t then added the following sentence, which was, and I quote, ‘Nevertheless, we would be very pleased to welcome you on board again in the near future, to sample the refreshments within our service once again’.

  Now I could have taken this two ways; one, that they would be very happy if I chose to fly with them again (which is what they had meant). And two, that they were offering me a free trip in order that I could have another one of their delightful meals (which is what I chose to believe they had meant).