Stairlift to Heaven (20 page)

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 once 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.

Ab
out 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 Welshman 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.

A few weeks went by and I received another free CD, ‘Twenty Golden Disco. It went straight in the bin. Over the next twelve months I received another three CDs. All unwanted. All unplayed. All binned. Two weeks later my newspaper went up another 2 p due to rising production costs. The penny dropped. Could these rising production costs have anything to do with the costs of producing CDs of Tom Jones and Friends and all the other unasked for and unwanted CDs that had been forced on me over the last few months? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Far from it not being any skin off my nose it was by now a wonder I had any skin left on it . I cancelled my newspaper.

I had thrown every one of the CDs I received in the bin, as I suspect most people do. People who like Tom Jones already have CDs of him warbling his songs (they also have my sympathy), likewise Engelbert Humperdinck, likewise all the other artists on the ‘free’ CDs all the newspapers give away nowadays, so they are of no benefit to anyone whatsoever. Except of course the artists on the CDs, in the form of royalties, and the newspapers, in extra revenue every time they put up the price of their newspaper. But that doesn’t bother me anymore because I’ve stopped buying them, apart from the Sunday Times, and I wouldn’t buy that if it’s countless unread supplements didn’t provide excellent bulk for my compost bin.

****

July 3
2009.
IDIOT-PROOF.

Atkins and me have another new daft game, albeit one with limited opportunities for playing it often, if ever again. In it Atkins takes the part of someone who isn’t quite all there - not much acting ability needed there then - whilst I take the part of his carer. I dreamed it up this morning after I’d I passed a shop that sold cameras and telescopes; a large ‘Sale’ sign in the window had attracted my attention and I’d stopped to see what they had as I’m on the lookout for a pair of zoom lens binoculars. There weren’t any but there was something far better. A bit of fun. In the form of a small camera, on offer at £10.99, which was claimed, according to its sale sticker, to be idiot-proof.