Stairlift to Heaven

by Terry Ravenscroft

  “You’re driving too close to that car in front, Ethel.”

  “But I want to see the baby.”

  CRASH!

  “I think that’s it there, Ethel, the one with the busted head and the rattle.”

  On thinking about it I’ve reached the conclusion that it must be some sort of announcement - the mother, now swollen with pride instead of the baby, proclaiming to the world that she has now had the baby, but at this moment isn’t out with it showing it off to her friends, or pushing it around in its trendy three-wheeler pram, or has it slung to her front like some tiny mountaineer trying to scale the twin peaks of Mount Tits, but has her new pride and joy in the car with her, where it can’t for the moment be admired by everyone. So she has to tell everyone. “Baby on Board!”

  I noticed recently that there are now adaptations of this ubiquitous sticker. One such is: ‘Small Person on Board’. The first time I saw one I thought at first it meant the car was being driven by a midget and was a variation on the Long Vehicle/Short Vehicle sticker joke, but on looking inside the car saw that the small person referred to was a toddler. Since then I’ve seen quite a few ‘Small Person on Board’ stickers. And two or three ‘Cheeky Little Monkey on Board’ stickers. I have not however, as might be expected, all children by no means being little angels, see any ‘Little Horror on Board’ or ‘Whingeing Little Twat on Board’ stickers. There is obviously a gap in the market here. I don’t suppose it will be long before someone fills it.

  ****

  April 25 2009. THE WOMAN FROM GLOSSOP.

  On a flight home from Lanzarote, due to a mix-up at the check-in desk, The Trouble and I were split up and I found myself seated next to a Woman from Glossop who spent the entire flight telling the man seated the other side of her all about her timeshare apartment in Puerto del Carmen, the main resort in Lanzarote.

  Like me the Woman from Glossop had been split up from her spouse on the flight but apparently this had been arranged by design rather than by accident as “We always sit apart on flights as we see enough of each other while we’re in Lanzarote.” I have little doubt it was the Man from Glossop who insisted on these travelling arrangements, indeed if I had been he not only would I have insisted on a separate seat but it would have been on a separate aeroplane. Prior to the flight I knew next to nothing about timeshare apartments, which is about as much as I want to know, but by the time we’d landed at Manchester Airport about a million hours later the Woman from Glossop had ensured that I knew much more about them than I wanted to know, to the power of ten.

  Her current apartment, ‘south-facing, veranda, two bedrooms both with en-suite, loads of storage space and a communion pool - I think she meant communal pool, but you never know, perhaps the timeshare complex has a resident vicar and they have a ‘Baptism ‘n Barbecue Night’ - was her third, all of them in Puerto del Carmen, the present one acquired in 1999, the first - no en-suite unfortunately, but a bidet - acquired in 1985. At first the Woman from Glossop had just the one week’s timeshare entitlement per year but by now she and the Man from Glossop were up to six weeks per year, in two week segments. During the last twenty-three years they had never been anywhere else for a holiday other than to their timeshare apartment in Lanzarote.

  Now I’ve got nothing against Lanzarote - you’re certainly not going to die from over-excitement there but in a clean, easy going, always nice weather, not-too-many-Germans sort of place, it is ideal. But six weeks there every year? While places such as Provence and Tuscany and the Greek Islands remain as unvisited as a virgin’s vagina?

  I learned that for the remaining forty-six weeks of the year the Woman from Glossop and the Man from Glossop spend their time in Glossop, saving up like mad to spend the other six weeks in Lanzarote. They never go anywhere else, so the Woman from Glossop informed the Man not from Glossop seated the other side of her, because if they did they wouldn’t be able to afford their full quota of six weeks in Lanzarote. Now I’ve been to Glossop, and while it is by no means the worst place I have ever been to – I once went to Rotherham - it is certainly not the sort of place you would wish to spend forty-six weeks of the year in.

  Yet this couple have deliberately chosen to live out their lives in it for forty-six weeks in every year, and the other six weeks in Lanzarote. Nowhere else on Earth existed for them. Their entire life consisted of being in Glossop, or in Lanzarote, or on the twenty-five mile stretch of road between Glossop and Manchester Airport, a road only slightly more enjoyment-fulfilling than the road to perdition.

  Can anyone credit this? They had deliberately consigned themselves to a world without France and Italy and Greece, a world where the Lake District and the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales don’t exist, a place where Edinburgh Castle and York Minster and Stonehenge might just as well be on the Moon. What sort of person can do this? The mind boggles. Mine did, on the flight back. And whilst it was boggling I fell asleep and thankfully didn’t wake up until we had started the descent to Manchester Airport. When I did The Woman from Glossop was telling the Man not from Glossop that next year she and the Man from Glossop hoped to be going to Lanzarote for seven weeks. Still, looking on the bright side, that’s one less week in Glossop.

  ****

  May 27 2009. THE NATION’S FAVOURITE.

  Once again I have been lumped together with all the rest of the people in Britain and informed that someone is my favourite something or other. You know the sort of thing, you read it in the newspapers all the time – ‘Trevor McDonald, the nation's favourite newscaster’, ‘Cilla Black, the nation's favourite auntie’, ‘Sean Connery, the nation's favourite Scotsman’; not forgetting the one we used to get once a week on average until she popped her clogs, ‘The Queen Mother, the nation's favourite granny’.

  I once read that Michael Barrymore was ‘the nation's favourite funnyman’. I doubt very much if he was the favourite of the poor sod who died in his swimming pool and while he was drowning he thought it was funny.

  This time it is Cliff Richard, who I am informed is ‘the Nation's favourite Oldie’. Well I am a member of our nation and he certainly isn't my favourite oldie. I know a lot of Oldies who I prefer to Cliff Richard. In fact I know a lot of Richards who I prefer to Cliff Richard - Keith Richards, Viv Richards, Little Richard and Richard Branson, being just four of them. Nor is Trevor McDonald my favourite newscaster (John Suchet), my favourite auntie Cilla Black (my Auntie Annie) nor Sean Connery my favourite Scotsman (Billy Connolly). And the Queen Mother was certainly not my favourite granny. In fact had there been ten million grannies resident in Britain when the Queen Mother's extravagances were still a drain on the taxpayer then she would have been my ten millionth favourite granny, and only then because there weren't ten million and one grannies, even if the additional granny had been Granny 'Chainsaw Anna' Hargreaves.

  ****

  June 2 2009. POTTERING ABOUT.

  I don’t know in which book I first came across the expression ‘pottering about in the garden’, but it was probably in one of the Just William books or maybe The Famous Five series I read when I first became interested in reading when I was aged about twelve. I was attracted to the phrase at once; it sounded such a cosy, English, way in which to occupy oneself, and I couldn’t wait until I was a grown up and would be able to potter about in a garden myself (I assumed that children couldn’t potter about in the garden because whenever I came across the phrase it was always being done by an adult, invariably an old one).

  In those days I couldn’t even pretend, as children do, to potter about in the garden; we lived in a mean terraced house which didn’t have a garden in which to potter, just paving stones at the front of the house and a backyard hardly big enough to swing a landlord in. So when I married The Trouble and we eventually got a house of our own, with a small garden, I was naturally eager to get some pottering time in.

  It never happened. Since I first ventured into a garden all those years ago with a virgin spade and un-calloused hands I have never onc
e pottered. I have potted. And I have dug, double-dug, forked, raked, hoed, chopped, sawed and hammered, all of which are far too strenuous activities to be called pottering, which is defined in the dictionary as ‘to busy oneself in a mild way with trifling tasks’. I have mown lawns, trimmed hedges, turned over flower beds, laid paving stones, humped bags of compost and fertilizers, and in the course of this have been bitten by ants and stung by wasps, bees and hornets, and on one occasion savaged by a stray dog; none of which can remotely be termed as mild or trifling.

  It eventually dawned on me that there was no such thing as pottering about in the garden, except in books, and that I never would potter, that I would go through life as a non-potterer. Until yesterday.

  I’d been giving the garden a general tidying up, uprooting triffids and other monster-like weeds that had sprung up in the borders, like they do, preparatory to planting something more colourful and less invasive. One of the weeds was particularly hard to dislodge. I took a firm hold of it, braced myself, gave an almighty heave….and it shot out of the ground much more easily than I had bargained for and sent me staggering back a couple of steps. The second of the steps caused me to put my foot onto the business end of a garden rake I’d carelessly left on the ground and the other end of it shot up and cracked me a nasty blow on the side of the head, gashing my temple. When I’d stopped hollering and seeing stars I went into the kitchen to attend to it. The Trouble was one the phone. “Your dad?” she said, to whoever was on the other end of the phone, either my son or one of my daughters, “Oh, he’s pottering about in the garden.”

  ****

  June 10 2009. SNOOKERED.

  About twenty years ago, when I was scriptwriting and travelling down to London on a regular basis, the train stopped to pick up at Stoke-on-Trent as usual. However, far from usual, who should board the train and sit down opposite me but snooker star Ray Reardon, who was then the current world champion. With him he had a long, thin tube, which obviously contained his snooker cue - unless he had a very thin wife he wanted to keep hidden from sight - so he was probably on his way to take part in a competition, or maybe play an exhibition match. As he took his seat I made eye contact with him and gave him a friendly smile, which he returned. I leaned forward slightly to look at him more closely and allowed the light of recognition to illuminate my face. “Excuse me,” I said, and then as I paused for effect I saw in his face just the faintest look of ‘Oh here we go again, another fan who’s going to be asking me all the ins-and-outs of what it’s like to be a famous snooker player’. However I wasn’t going to let that stop me. “I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it,” I went on, “But....aren’t you Hurricane Higgins?”

  He saw the joke and laughed generously. We chatted for a while. Ray of course, due to his dark-eyed sallow features and jet black hair with its prominent widow’s peak was known throughout the snooker world by the nickname ‘Dracula’, but I must say I found him to be a perfect gentleman and he didn’t bite me once. He laughed again when I mentioned that I enjoyed a game of snooker myself and told of the day I’d been playing in my local club and had compiled a break of thirty-six when I suddenly broke off and walked over to a yucca tree standing in the corner, which I then proceeded to stare at with great concentration. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

  “I was looking at a plant.” I said.

  That joke started life as what is known in the comedy scriptwriting world as a ‘quickie’, a very short sketch, usually just a set-up followed by a punch line or dramatic twist. Sometime previously I’d sent it in to one or other of the many sketch shows that were on television in those days. It was used but I can’t remember by which show. One ‘snooker’ quickie I sent in which wasn’t used, probably on the grounds of cost, was when the previously mentioned Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins won the World Championship at the Crucible in Sheffield and immediately after being presented with the trophy was joined on camera by his pretty young wife, carrying their new-born baby. My idea was to re-enact this scene but have the winner of the trophy joined by about twenty more pretty young women carrying babies in their arms.

  I was reminded of the Ray Reardon incident when I was channel-hopping tonight, trying to find something on the TV that I could bear to watch - usually a forlorn hope - when I lighted on the snooker. There was a time when I could pass a pleasant hour with televised snooker, in the days when it was only on for an hour, but that isn’t the case nowadays, it’s on for hour after hour after interminable hour, television as usual, having given birth to a good idea, then proceeding to strangle the life out of it through over-exposure. I might just possibly have watched it for a bit had anyone actually been playing snooker but these days they spend more time talking about it than playing it, which is what they were doing when I zapped on to it.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake shut up!” I said to John Virgo.

  “He can’t hear you, you know,” said The Trouble.

  “It wouldn’t make any difference if he could, he’d still keep on talking” I replied, zapping John Virgo into oblivion, which is just about the best place for him and the Scottish woman who does chirpy he was ‘chatting’ to.

  “I don’t understand you,” said The Trouble. “If you don’t like what’s on the television why don’t you just do something else instead of talking to it?”

  “I like talking to it.”

  The Television now joined in our conversation. “And now it’s time for EastEnders,” it said.

  “Oh no it bloody isn’t,” I said. ZAP!

  The Trouble looked up from her magazine. “Why don’t you just switch it off? Instead of switching from channel to channel all the time? That remote doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going.”

  “It’s going. On the tip with the telly if they don’t start putting some decent programmes on.”

  “You said that last week but you keep watching it.”

  “Only in the way that Captain Bligh kept scanning the horizon when he was cast adrift on an open boat; in the hope that if I keep looking I might one day finally see land.”

  “There’s plenty of land to be seen now if you’d look properly.”

  The Shakespeare in me emerged, probably because I’d just zapped off yet another showing of ‘Shakespeare in Love’. “What land is this of which you speak?”

  “Well there’s ‘The Royal’.”

  At first I thought she meant a documentary about the Queen or one of her flawed offspring, then I realised she meant the hospital thing on Sunday nights, a soap-ish drama whose only redeeming feature is the sixties music that punctuates the scenes. “The Royal?” I said. “The Royal isn’t land. Or if it is it’s a swamp. I wish it was a swamp then Wendy Craig might fall into it and be sucked under, I saw quite enough of her in fucking Butterflies.”

  “Fucking Butterflies? Wasn’t that one of David Attenborough’s?”

  “Bill Oddie I think.”

  “He’s never off the box these days, is he.”

  “He should be in a box. With Wendy Craig.”

  “Oh I quite like him.”

  “He’s a self-satisfied pretentious little prick. Like Noel Edmonds.”

  “Don’t you like anybody on television?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “I quite like one of the presenters.” I don’t, I was lying, I don’t like any of them, especially Trevor McDonald, the lot of them would be knackered without the autocue, but I wanted to keep the conversation going. Television hasn’t killed the art of conversation in our house. It fuels it.

  ****

  June 18 2009. FREE CDs.

  After a late breakfast I strolled along to the public library, conveniently only a couple of minutes away, to read the morning newspapers. I can afford to buy my own paper but I stopped buying one a year ago on principle.

  About eighteen months prior to that I received a free music CD, ‘Tom Jones and Friends’, along with my morning paper. It was quite a surprise because I wasn’t aware that Tom Jones had any friends, the We
lshman being the owner of a voice designed to make enemies rather than cultivate friendships, but there you go. I looked at the cover. The first song was Tom Jones singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’. The second song was Engelbert Humperdinck singing ‘Please Release Me’. Next up was Tom Jones singing ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’. Next was Wilson Pickett with ‘In the Midnight Hour’. Next was Tom Jones singing….well you get the idea.

  There were twelve tracks on the CD, six by Tom Jones and six by six other artists. Now I might be a bit naïve but I would have expected an album called Tom Jones and Friends to consist of songs sung by Tom Jones accompanied by his friends, but apparently not. Tom Jones and Friends indeed! Who do they think they’re kidding? I wouldn’t mind betting that Tom Jones has never even met half the people on the CD and in all probability has never even heard of the singer of the final track, Hoagy Carmichael singing ‘Stardust’.

  Actually I would have quite liked to listen to Wilson Picket singing ‘In the Midnight Hour’ but not at the expense of having to listen to Tom Jones so I threw it in the bin.

  I wouldn’t have thought it possible that there was a less sick bucket-inducing CD than ‘Tom Jones and Friends’ but a couple of months later one turned up secreted in the pages of my newspaper. ‘Engelbert Humperdinck and Friends’. The first track was Engelbert Humperdinck singing ‘Please Release Me’, the second track was Tom Jones singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’, the third was Engelbert Humperdinck singing ‘The Last Waltz’.... surprise, surprise, there were six songs by Engelbert Humperdinck and six by six other artists. I threw it in the bin. My privilege. Besides, like the Tom Jones and Friends CD, it hadn’t cost me anything, it was no skin off my nose. Two weeks later my newspaper went up by 3 p. Due to rising production costs.