Stairlift to Heaven (9 page)

The food served in the tavernas is hot, rather than something which has made its way from the kitchen to your table via the North Pole.

You can walk around town without your nose being assaulted by the stink of drains every few yards.

They don’t have at least twenty different spellings of the word hamburger. Just three of many examples I’ve seen are humbleburger, harmburger and hambugger, which, although misspellings, were spot on as to the quality of the hamburgers in question.

Power cuts are the national sport.

You can walk past a restaurant without being accosted by a young Greek who is far better-looking than you and who implores you to step inside for ‘many of our lovely foods’ and won’t take no for an answer.

You can dine outside without being up to the arse in stray cats.

You can put used toilet paper down the lavatory instead of having to put it in a bin overflowing with other used toilet paper.

There is a sporting chance of getting hot water in a reasonable quantity when you turn on the hot water tap.

They have plugs for the sinks so that you don’t have to fashion one out of rolled up toilet paper which you then have to drop in a bin of used toilet paper because you can’t flush it down the toilet when you’ve finished with it.

You can’t hear exactly the same bouzouki music playing everywhere you go.

Cockroaches are looked upon as pets.

I’m sure there are many more examples of the real Greece but I have to stop now to cook a moussaka for dinner. Take a gallon of olive oil….

****

June 18 2007.
MARBLES.

I had the most wonderful news today! Along with my monthly credit card statement from Marbles came the offer of ‘Two nights away with the one you love for only £99.’ The offer consists of a two night stay in any Hilton Hotel in Great Britain and Ireland, the price to include bed, breakfast, dinner on the first night, plus a complimentary bottle of house wine ‘when you whip out your Marbles card!’

Thankful that my Marbles card would be all I will be required to whip out in order to qualify for my complimentary bottle of wine I rang them immediately, quoting the booking reference number as requested. “I’d like to take you up on your most generous offer of two nights away with the one I love for £99,” I said.

“Very good, sir,” said the Marbles man, all obsequiousness and efficiency.

“Will Miss Scott Thomas be there when I arrive?” I asked him.

“Pardon, sir?”

“Kristin Scott Thomas. She’s the woman I love. I’ve loved her ever since I saw her naked in ‘The English Patient’, what a body, all that pubic hair, like a forest, well I’m Jungle Jim so just lead me to it.” There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. I broke it. “Hello? Hello, are you still there?”

The obsequiousness remained but the efficiency had taken a holiday, possibly a two night stay with the one it loved. “There....er, seems to be some sort of misunderstanding, sir.”

“Misunderstanding? You
are
offering two nights in a Hilton Hotel away with the one I love for £99 are you not?”

“Er....yes. But we mean your wife.”

“My wife?”

“Or girlfriend.”

“Your leaflet didn’t say my wife or my girlfriend, it said the one I love,” I pointed out to him.

“Yes....well....we assumed that a man’s wife or girlfriend would be the one he loved,” he bleated.

“That’s a pretty all-encompassing assumption to make if you don’t mind my saying so. Given all the divorces and extra-marital affairs and wife beatings one hears about nowadays.”

He stuck to his guns. “Well that’s what we meant, sir.”

“Well then that is what you should have said. But you didn’t. You said two nights with the one you love for £99. And if you don’t see to it that I get two nights with the one I love, i.e. Miss Kristin Scott Thomas, she of the glorious beaver, for £99, I will sue Marbles for every penny it has got!” Then I put the phone down.

I don’t love Kristin Scott Thomas of course, I love The Trouble’; although I quite fancy Kristin Scott Thomas and if anything should ever happen to The Trouble....

I suppose that will be the end of the matter. But it might not be. Even at this very moment the people at Marbles might be trying to contact Kristin Scott Thomas in an effort to help them to get out of the tricky situation they’ve landed themselves in with a dirty old man from the Peak District, just so the dirty old man won’t sue them for every penny they make in exorbitant interest rates. Although probably not. But at least next time it might make them think before offering deals that they cannot possibly hope to fulfil.

****

July 24 2007.
THE BEST OF IT.

I was feeling in a philosophical mood today and my philosophising led me to the conclusion, on comparing the world as it is today to how it was fifty sixty years ago, that I’ve had the best of it, that I was born into it at the perfect time, at a time when there were no such things as diversity and outreach officers, a time when a race card was a list of the runners and riders at Kempton Park and not something played by an ethnic minority to gain an unfair advantage, a time when people who ran banks were known as bankers not wankers.

I certainly wouldn’t like to have been born now, despite all the advantages of inventions like television and computers and mobile phones, which weren’t around when I popped out into the world, because along with all the televisions and computers came darker inventions like smart bombs and nuclear missiles and other abominations that can destroy the world in about five minutes flat, and probably will do before we’re very much older.

And I wouldn’t have liked to have been born very much earlier either, say a couple of centuries or so ago, because that would have landed me in an age when people got hung for stealing a loaf of bread, and if they managed to miss out on that probably died before they were thirty from the plague or rickets or scarlet fever or any of the countless other diseases the medical profession had still failed to get to grips with. Amputation without an anaesthetic? Yes, I’ll certainly take a pass on that.

Being born at the time I was my childhood was a joy, a magic time, an age when despite being born to mothers who drank and smoked like chimneys, in spite of the lack of childproof locks and childproof caps on bottles of pills and being allowed to play with lead toy soldiers painted with lead paint, regardless of the fact that we rode bikes without the need of more body armour than an American footballer and were allowed to eat white bread with butter on it and play conkers and climb trees which we fell out of from time to time because then there was no such thing as Health and Safety, and notwithstanding that we were allowed to stay out until dark without our mothers knowing where we were, we somehow all managed to survive intact.

And so we left school - but only after receiving quite a few hefty clouts round the head by the teachers, which didn’t seem to have done us any harm and probably did us a lot of good - and then got a job, which I seem to remember was a much easier undertaking then, as nowadays you seem to require a university degree of not less than a 2.1 to even stand an outside chance of getting a job behind the counter at McDonalds.

Of course in those days you had to be clever to go to university, and if you happened to be one of the lucky ones you took a degree in Chemistry or Physics or English Language, unlike today where you don’t have to be anything like so clever - you certainly don’t have to be able to read and write any better than the average seven-year-old of my childhood - and along with subjects like Chemistry you can take a degree in Folk Music or Interior Decorating and quite possibly Advanced Train Spotting & Bungee Jumping. And it doesn’t make a scrap of difference if something like Advanced Train Spotting & Bungee Jumping is the only degree you’re capable of gaining you’ll still probably end up at McDonalds dressed in a silly hat cooking French fries alongside the girl with a First in Economics.

And could I have chosen a better time to be a teenager? I don’t think so. It was the era of the birth of rock and roll. We had Elvis and Little Richard, then a year or two later the Beatles and the Stones. What have the teenagers of today got? Rap. My parents used to complain that you couldn’t tell what Mick Jagger was saying, nowadays not only can you not tell what they’re saying you don’t want to know what they’re saying because it’s usually all about stabbing each other, bro.

Even much later, when I was about fifty and this country had started to go pear-shaped, I could still pat a child affectionately on the head without the risk of being put on the sex-offenders register; if I caught a burglar breaking into my house, detained him by force and called the police it would be the burglar they locked up, not me; if I happened to take ill at weekend the doctor would come out and treat me, unlike today when I’m likely to be given the once-over by a moonlighting Albanian over for the weekend who can speak about as much English as our budgie; a time when the England cricket team still didn’t win any more often than they do nowadays but at least more than half of them weren’t born in South Africa; and when politicians, even in those days, were people you wouldn’t trust as far as you could throw them, but were still a quantum leap better than the lying, thieving, self-serving excuses for human beings we have representing our interests today. No, like I said, I’ve had the best of it.

Whew, glad I’ve got that off my chest. I might start to enjoy myself again now.

****

August 2 2007.
FENG SHUI

You would have thought that after seventeen years in our present home I would know the whereabouts of the bed, but no, for when I went to bed last night I walked straight into it. Naturally I hadn’t switched on the bedroom light as I am under strict instructions from The Trouble not to do this whenever I turn in after her as it wakes her up and she can’t get back to sleep, but that shouldn’t have presented a problem as I’ve been finding my way to bed for some time now without the assistance of the North West Electricity Board or whatever fancy new meaningless name it calls itself nowadays.

Another factor which may have influenced matters was that I’d had one of my rare nights out at the pub with Atkins. At first it led me to believe I’d maybe had a little more to drink than was good for me, and that this was why I’d been unable to successfully navigate the two yards or so between the bedroom door and the bed. The truth is I did successfully it, or at least I would have done if the bed hadn’t been rotated sixty degrees to the left.

“Feng Shui, and there’s no need to swear,” said The Trouble, after I’d picked myself up off the floor and asked her why the bloody hell the bed was where it was. “Having the bed facing east to west will ensure optimum happiness for the occupants,” she blithely went on.

“Not if they can’t find the way to it,” I said, rubbing my shin where I had barked it on the bedpost.

“The trouble with you is that you won’t make an effort to embrace other cultures,” said The Trouble.

“Not other cultures that believe moving the bed will make a ha’porth of difference I won’t.”

I might have known of course. In the two days since The Trouble allowed herself to become influenced by the oriental claptrap that is Feng Shui she had already moved the three-piece-suite to a position from where it’s impossible to see the television from my favourite chair without getting a rick in my neck and moved a standard lamp from a perfectly good position in the corner to a perfectly crap position just by the door where I keep walking into it every time I come in.

Normally The Trouble is one of the most level-headed and pragmatic of people who views the latest fads and fashions with a degree of scepticism, but a couple of years ago, shortly after she bought a wok, a Chinese acupuncturist cured her of a long-standing back problem. This, along with the fact that she claims to have felt a lot better since employing the wok to cook healthy stir-fry dishes, seemed to influence her judgement because from then on all Chinese beliefs, no matter how outlandish, were the bees knees, and soon the mysteries of Tai Chi and acupuncture and Yin and Yang had joined the mysteries of the local Chinese chip shop in our lives. I’m just glad that Mao Tse-Tung is no longer with us otherwise she might be quoting passages of his Little Red Book at me every five minutes.