Stairlift to Heaven

by Terry Ravenscroft

  You have to take your opportunities for a bit of fun when and wherever you find them so when I noticed a man of about my age approaching in the opposite direction I picked up the Zimmer Frame, twirled it round my head a couple of times and heaved it into the distance. It had not long since been announced that Britain had been granted the 2012 Olympic Games, and with it the Paralympics, and it was probably this, and the thought I’d just had about cripples taking up their bed and walking, that put the idea into my head.

  After I’d gone to recover the Zimmer Frame and started to walk back the man had stopped to watch, and now looked on, puzzled. I turned to him and said, a little self-critically, “Not bad.”

  His face was a picture of inquisitiveness. “What are you doing?”

  “Training for the Paralympics.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Throwing the Zimmer Frame,” I explained. “It's a new event. Apparently the host country can pick an entirely new event and Britain has chosen ‘Throwing the Zimmer Frame’. It just nudged out the ‘Hop, Hop and Hop for the One-legged’ I believe.”

  The story continues....

  STAIRLIFT TO HEAVEN

  Copyright © Terry Ravenscroft, 2011

  Cover artwork by Tom Unwin

  A RAZZAMATAZZ PUBLICATION

  ****

  About the author

  The day after Terry Ravenscroft threw in his mundane factory job to become a television comedy scriptwriter he was involved in a car accident which left him unable to turn his head. Since then he has never looked back. Born in New Mills, Derbyshire, in 1938, he still lives there with his wife Delma and his mistress Divine Bottom (in his dreams).

  email terryrazz@gmail.com

  facebook http://on.fb.me/ukZ78e

  twitter http://bit.ly/t0mVyB

  website www.topcomedy.co.uk

  Also by Terry Ravenscroft

  CAPTAIN’S DAY

  JAMES BLOND - STOCKPORT IS TOO MUCH

  INFLATABLE HUGH

  FOOTBALL CRAZY

  DEAR AIR 2000

  DEAR COCA-COLA

  LES DAWSON’S CISSIE AND ADA

  I’M IN HEAVEN

  THE RAZZAMATAZZ FUN EBOOK

  ZEPHYR ZODIAC

  Sample pages of each of these titles can be read at the end of this book.

  ****

  STAIRLIFT TO HEAVEN

  FOREWORD

  The day before my sixty-fifth birthday I decided to start a journal that would chronicle the first five years of my life as an old age pensioner. The journal would largely be about my being old, about what it’s like to be an old age pensioner - I don’t like the term ‘Senior Citizen’, people my age are old and we draw a pension, neither is anything to be ashamed of, so why call ourselves senior citizens? Senior to whom? Try going to the chip shop and telling the yobbo with the number one haircut and the number four brain that you’re senior to him and therefore entitled to go before him in the queue and you’ll soon find out whether you’re a senior citizen or not.

  My intention was not to write something every day, as with a diary, but only to record events that might be of interest. Therefore there are large time gaps in the narrative; if nothing interesting happened to me for a month then I didn’t write anything. There are quite enough uninteresting things being published nowadays without my adding to the total.

  Given my background and what people have come to expect from me I have confined myself largely to events of a humorous nature: however I have also included a few ‘more serious’ items that I feel might be of use to people of a similar age as me, in the hope that the benefit of my experiences may be of help to them in their pensioner years.

  Whilst all the events in the journal are true the dialogue is not a hundred per cent accurate, but as I remembered it. However it is always true in spirit and if I am guilty of embellishing it here and there it is only to make for a more entertaining read. A few names and place names have been altered to protect the guilty.

  I have called my journal ‘Stairlift to Heaven’. It is a metaphorical stairlift on which I ride - as yet I have no need of the real thing, and sincerely hope I never will. But at my time of life I am certainly on it, sat at the bottom with St Peter and the Pearly Gates awaiting me at the top.

  I cordially invite you to join me on my ride on the Stairlift to Heaven.

  The principal dramatis personae in ‘Stairlift to Heaven’ are as follows.

  Me. Now aged seventy-one next birthday. (I have learned that people of my age, when asked how old they are, never say the age they are at the moment but what age they will be next. Hopefully that is.) Ex-television and radio scriptwriter. Wrote for Les Dawson, The Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise, Not the Nine-o-clock News, Alas Smith and Jones and a few others. Wrote the radio series Star Terk 2. Now writes humorous novels.

  My wife, Delma. Now aged sixty-eight. Hereafter always referred to as ‘The Trouble’. I call her this not because of the cockney rhyming slang thing, trouble and strife, wife, but because she has a habit, when addressing me, of beginning her sentences with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Sometimes, when I have clearly upset her, she will insert my full Christian name, ‘Terence’ between the words ‘you’ and ‘is’....viz, “The trouble with you, Terence, is....” If she stresses either ‘you’ or ‘Terence’ I batten down the hatches. You’ll see.

  Atkins, from down the road. Now aged seventy. Atkins is a great friend of mine, a kindred spirit. I first met him about ten years ago when the Inland Revenue called me in to explain my debatable - their expression - claims for certain expenses incurred whilst following my profession. Atkins was the official delegated to grill me. In the event little or no grilling took place as we got on like a house on fire from the moment I mentioned that I used to write scripts for Les Dawson. Atkins turned out to be being a huge fan of Les and we spent about an hour talking about him and then about two minutes talking about my expenses claim, which Atkins then accepted without question.

  During the interview it transpired that not only did Atkins live in the same town as me, but on the same road, about twenty doors down. We had been living in close proximity for the past five years, completely oblivious of each other, like near neighbours often do. Ours would seem to be the most unlikely of friendships considering our previous occupations, inasmuch as I spent my working life trying to make people laugh whereas Atkins made his living trying to make them cry. However in many other ways we share similarities; we are the same age, we both have a healthy distrust of solicitors, financial advisers and politicians, and we share the same sense of humour, or, as The Trouble succinctly if rather unkindly puts it, “Atkins is as daft as you are.” And although Atkins is sometimes responsible for getting me into some situations I would rather not be in, our occasional departures from sanity re-charges our batteries and makes life a little less run-of-the-mill and thus more bearable. We are neither of us are the worse for it and we like to think it keeps us young.

  So here we go then:-

  March 9 2006. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

  Today I am sixty-five. In my head I feel like I’m twenty five; in fact I’ve been twenty-five in my head ever since I was twenty-five everywhere else, some forty years ago. Probably in an effort to compensate for this my body is well over sixty-five, at least eighty-five I would guess judging from all the aches and pains and things wrong with it. However in my mind’s eye I still look exactly the same as I did when I was twenty-five; no oil painting, but at least not the faded water colour that now looks back at me bleary-eyed from the bathroom mirror every morning.

  Imagining myself to be still twenty-five catches me out sometimes, especially if I have accidentally made eye contact with someone young; for nowadays younger people, and especi
ally young women, look straight through me. It’s not that they disregard me; they don’t even see me. It’s as if I’m The Invisible Old Man. I could easily sit in on their conversation without fear of being noticed. However, not wishing to learn how cool are the latest inane rantings of someone called Twopence Ha’penny or some other fanciful name, or how bladdered they all got last Friday night and wasn’t it funny when Melissa chucked up all over the chucker out, I have somehow managed to get by without that diversion. I suppose I was just the same when I was that age; although I remember myself as being quite perfect.

  Two weeks prior to my sixty-fifth birthday I had received a letter from the local hospital, Stepping Hill (known to everyone as ‘Step in ill, come out dead’, not wholly without some justification). It informed me that I was to present myself at 10 a.m. on that day for a bladder examination. I showed the letter to The Trouble.

  “That’s a nice birthday present for you,” she said, ever the droll.

  “I’d rather they’d given me a pair of socks,” I said.

  Having now had the bladder examination I would rather have had anything else. A pair of socks with a tarantula in each toe would have been lovely. A pair of underpants with a scorpion in them. A pair of trousers with a man-eating tiger in one leg and Jaws in the other. Bring them on. I once had a prostate examination that involved the doctor inserting his finger up my bottom and poking it about as though he were searching for a pound coin that had fallen down the back of the settee, which I thought was pretty painful. It was nothing. Compared to the bladder examination it was the caress of a lover.

  Incidentally, quite a bit of the rest of these opening pages is about my waterworks. I’m afraid this can’t be avoided if I’m going to start at my sixty-fifth birthday as the first thing of note worth recording, given that The Trouble failed to give me breakfast in bed, or anything else for that matter, involves my waterworks. It won’t all be about my waterworks, but a fair bit of it will. However it’s doubtful I will be mentioning it again – my waterworks won’t be hanging over you whilst you’re reading the rest of the book, in a manner of speaking. But in the meantime you’ll just have to grin and bear it. As I did with my bladder examination.

  I’ve had trouble with my prostate gland for at least ten years, probably nearer fifteen, and I have to pass water quite frequently. About twenty times a day on average. That’s bad enough, but having found a place in which to pass water I can’t pass it, usually for a couple of minutes or so, but quite often for five minutes, even longer sometimes. At first I just stood there waiting. Then, to fill in the time, I started counting how many ceramic tiles there were on the walls - in our bathroom there are a hundred and eighty four, two of them cracked, but in an old-fashioned Victorian public convenience in Manchester I once counted four hundred and twenty three before the fountain started to flow. However tile counting gets a bit boring after a while so I started dreaming up other things to do to pass the time, given that I was temporarily incapable of passing anything else. Eventually I ended up with quite a few, so now, in the interests of helping any fellow sufferers who may also be at a loose end in similar circumstances - or more accurately an unloose end - here they are.

  1. Do a crossword puzzle. My first job every morning is to cut out the crossword from the Daily Telegraph and prop it on the toilet roll holder in the bathroom. On average I fill in about six answers per visit so after about seven visits I’ve usually finished it. A word of warning though; if you have visitors who are likely to want to use the lavatory find somewhere to keep the crossword other than propped on the toilet roll, especially if the toilet roll needs changing and there’s only the cardboard tube left, as in the past I’ve lost a couple of half-completed crosswords that have been used as emergency toilet paper and have had to go out and buy another Daily Telegraph.

  2. Do a few simple keep-fit exercises. However, on no account do any exercise which involves rotating the hips from side to side because if your waterworks suddenly decides to start up you might find yourself peeing on the bathroom floor, with all the subsequent earache from your wife that peeing on the bathroom floor inevitably brings with it.

  3. Sing (daytime only). Don’t be embarrassed, people sing in the bath so why not in the bathroom whilst waiting to pee? I’ve been doing it for years and while my peeing has been getting increasingly poorer my singing has got increasingly better, so much so that Mrs Baxter next door sometimes sends in requests. For added enjoyment give some point and focus to your singing. I once sang the first line of twenty-seven Frankie Laine songs and it would have been twenty eight if the twenty-seventh hadn’t been ‘Cool Clear Water’, which set me off peeing.

  4. Make plans for the day. On one waiting to pee occasion I planned to mow the lawn, weed the flowerbeds, wash the car, clear out the garage, put up a kitchen shelf and change a light bulb. However I only managed to change the light bulb as I spent most of the day waiting to pee.

  5. Read a book. Word of warning though; be careful in your choice of literature. Over the course of four days I once read ‘The Exorcist’ whilst waiting to pee, but at times it got so exciting I carried on reading it after I’d had a pee and was halfway to wanting the next pee before I realized, and by then it was hardly worth while going downstairs again. So to ensure you don’t spend any more time than necessary standing at the lavatory pick a book you will be glad to put down after you’ve finished peeing. I recommend something by Jeffrey Archer or Jilly Cooper, or anything by Tolkien. Young boys with waterworks trouble should read Harry Potter. Adults who read Harry Potter deserve to have trouble with their waterworks and should be made to read a proper book.

  6. Put a television in the bathroom and watch Daytime TV. The programmes are absolute drivel, but there is something oddly satisfying and not inappropriate about watching ‘This Morning’, ‘Trisha’ and ‘Loose Women’ with your dick hanging out.

  But back to my bladder examination.

  I hadn’t really thought much about how the nurse was actually going to examine my bladder but if I’d been asked to hazard a guess I would have suggested it might be something not dissimilar to having an X-ray of the digestive system after swallowing a barium meal. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  As requested I had undressed and put on the smock-like garment beloved of hospitals, the one for which you need the abilities of a contortionist to tie the strings at the back, and which, if by some miracle you have managed to tie them, need the skills of Houdini to untie them, and was now seated nonchalantly with my legs dangling over the side of the operating table awaiting the ministrations of the nurse who had been charged with carrying out the procedure. I hadn’t observed anything overtly pain-inflicting amongst the apparatus laid out in antiseptic neatness on the nearby table, so it was more to make conversation than a search for knowledge that I asked the nurse what the two long thin plastic tubes were for.

  “I insert them in your penis and push them down into your bladder,” she said, matter of fact.

  I blinked. “Down my penis?”

  The nurse nodded. I gulped. “Both the tubes?”

  The nurse affirmed this with another curt nod. I gulped twice, once for each tube. “At the same time?”

  She nodded a third time. I didn’t ask for any more details as I was sure it would only elicit another nod and I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to handle the things she’d already nodded for.

  “There’ll be a bit of discomfort,” she added.

  This snippet of information seemed to me to be about as necessary as telling someone who was about to be hung, drawn and quartered that it wasn’t going to be a picnic. It crossed my mind that being hung, drawn and quartered might be preferable to the bladder examination, and I was just about to ask the nurse if this was an option when she went into action.

  “Lie down please,” she said, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves in the expert way that all medical staff do, probably in the hope that it demonstrates their efficiency, when all it achieves is to fill you
with an even greater sense of dread.

  Although the nurse wasn’t particularly attractive she was still a young woman and I must confess that initially I was more than a little worried there might be some spontaneous and unwelcome stirrings in my loins once she’d started to handle my private parts. Believe me, after realising what the nurse was about to do to me she could have been as desirable as Angelina Jolie and assisted by Nurse Cameron Diaz on one side and Nurse Penelope Cruz on the other and my penis would still have remained as limp as Dale Winton’s wrists.

  “This will help deaden the pain,” she said, spraying my genital area with an aerosol. Having done this she selected one of the pieces of plastic tubing and eyed me ominously.

  I had no wish to see what she was about to do with the tube, enduring it would be bad enough, so clamped my eyes firmly shut. The nurse went about her business. It was immediately obvious that the moment I closed my eyes she had swapped the thin plastic tubing for a Dyno-Rod, for surely it was something capable of clearing blocked drains that she then started shoving down my urethra with gay abandon.

  I had no way of knowing whether the anaesthetic spray helped to deaden the pain but felt that if it did it was wasting its time, for the pain was truly excruciating. When I was in the army a bloke in my platoon had been unfortunate enough to catch gonorrhoea, the symptoms of which he reported were ‘Like pissing broken glass’. By the time the two plastic tubes had been pushed into my penis as far as the nurse deemed sufficient I felt like I was passing not broken glass but broken bottles, and very large bottles at that.

  The tubes inserted, I then had to stand up, my smock pulled up and gathered round my waist so that it wouldn’t foul the plastic pipes now dangling from my willy, whilst the nurse proceeded to slowly pump what seemed like the contents of Lake Superior into my bladder.