The Environmental Health Officer

May 22nd 2006  

I answered the door to Mr Vizard of the local Borough Council Environmental Health Department. I suspected that when it was time for his arrival Sod’s Law would automatically kick in and the Pollitt’s dog You Twat would stop barking and howling for the first time since it arrived, but no, it was barking and howling at full volume, bless it.  

“Mr Vizard, I’ve called about the barking dog nuisance,” said my visitor, all business and purpose I was glad to note.    

“Good. Well you can hear the problem for yourself.”  

“Er…well actually, no. You see I only have partial hearing and my……  

I hit the roof. “The Council have sent a deaf man to investigate a complaint about a barking dog?

Well I also have a complaint about the height of next door’s leylandii hedge, perhaps you could get them to send a blind council official along to take a look at it, and a dumb one to describe…..  

“Hold up, hold up, you didn’t let me finish. I was about to say I only have partial hearing and my hearing aid is on the blink. Must be the battery.“  

The dog was barking loud than ever. “I’ve got news for you,” I said. “You haven’t even got partial hearing if you can’t hear that bloody racket.”    

“What?”  

“For fuck’s sake!”  

“What are you shouting at,” shouted The Trouble, from indoors. 

“The council have sent a deaf Environmental Health man,” I shouted back.  

“I heard that,” said Mr Vizard. He strained to listen. “I can hear the dog barking too now.”     

“Well if you can hear it without your deaf aid think what it must be like for someone with normal hearing. And it’s like that all the time they’re out of the house. Which is every working day from eight in the morning to about four in the afternoon when the kids get in from school, or more likely from playing truant. So what do you intend to do about it?”    

I’d taken care to shout the above and Vizard obviously got the gist of it because he replied: “Right, I’ll set the wheels in motion to get it stopped. It will take about three months altogether.”  

I congratulated him. “Three months. My word, you local government officers really know how to pull out all the stops, don’t you.”  

My irony was completely wasted on him. “We aim to please,” he smiled.  

“Why does it take so long?”  

 “What?”  

“WHY DOES IT TAKE SUCH A LONG TIME?”

“Procedure. Initial letter. Follow up letter in stronger terms when they ignore the initial letter. Then a letter threatening them with County Court when they ignore the letter in stronger terms. Three months.”  

“And in the meantime we have to suffer?”    

“What?”    

I didn’t bother repeating the question. I already knew the answer.  

 

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Razzamatazz

Hi. I’m Terry Ravenscroft, I’m aged 67 and…..whoooah, come back, I’m not ready to have the lid nailed down on my coffin just yet. Anyway I’m a very young 67. (About five years ago I went to see Pulp at the Manchester Evening News Arena. I was older than everyone else by at least 35 years. The eighteen-year-old next to me asked me if I’d ever been to the venue before. I replied ‘Yes I saw George Formby here once’. She’d never heard of him.) This blog is going to be about my life and the way I see things. Before I retired I was a comedy scriptwriter for Les Dawson and Smith and Jones amongst others so there’s a sporting chance that some of the things I write will be funny. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog, although by no means the only reason, is because I have a website www.topcomedy.co.uk which I hope you will log on to occasionally. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like Dear Air 2000…. My hobbies are walking, playing crown green bowls, watching football, birdwatching , cooking, and, according to The Trouble, moaning. Oh, and I have a thing about Kristen Scott Thomas. A couple of people I will be mentioning from time to time are The Trouble and Atkins Down The Road. The Trouble is my wife. I don’t call her The Trouble because it’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife, trouble and strife’, but because she has the habit of starting sentences, especially to me, with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Then goes on to complete the rest of the sentence with words like ‘you never listen when I’m talking to you’ or ‘you never see the other person’s point of view’ or some such other frivolous complaint. Atkins Down The Road is my best friend and lives, not surprisingly, down the road. I started a weblog a couple of years ago but stopped doing it to write a novel about golf called ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ If you want to read the weblog it can be found on my website, if you want to read the novel it can be found on my other website, Razzamatazz, at www.razza.fsnet.co.uk along with lots of other things. Hi. I’m Terry Ravenscroft, I’m aged 67 and…..whoooah, come back, I’m not ready to have the lid nailed down on my coffin just yet. Anyway I’m a very young 67. (About five years ago I went to see Pulp at the Manchester Evening News Arena. I was older than everyone else by at least 35 years. The eighteen-year-old next to me asked me if I’d ever been to the venue before. I replied ‘Yes I saw George Formby here once’. She’d never heard of him.) This blog is going to be about my life and the way I see things. Before I retired I was a comedy scriptwriter for Les Dawson and Smith and Jones amongst others so there’s a sporting chance that some of the things I write will be funny. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog, although by no means the only reason, is because I have a website www.topcomedy.co.uk which I hope you will log on to occasionally. I have yet to meet anybody who doesn’t like Dear Air 2000…. My hobbies are walking, playing crown green bowls, watching football, birdwatching , cooking, and, according to The Trouble, moaning. Oh, and I have a thing about Kristen Scott Thomas. A couple of people I will be mentioning from time to time are The Trouble and Atkins Down The Road. The Trouble is my wife. I don’t call her The Trouble because it’s cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife, trouble and strife’, but because she has the habit of starting sentences, especially to me, with the words ‘The trouble with you is….’ Then goes on to complete the rest of the sentence with words like ‘you never listen when I’m talking to you’ or ‘you never see the other person’s point of view’ or some such other frivolous complaint. Atkins Down The Road is my best friend and lives, not surprisingly, down the road. I started a weblog a couple of years ago but stopped doing it to write a novel about golf called ‘A Good Walk Spoiled.’ If you want to read the weblog it can be found on my website, if you want to read the novel it can be found on my other website, Razzamatazz, at www.razza.fsnet.co.uk along with lots of other things.

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