April 28th 2006
Writing about my wife and her difficulty with cooking yesterday reminded me of the odd story of The Trouble and the Fish.
This crawled out of the woodwork some time after we were married. We were talking one evening about when we were younger, in the days before we’d met, and The Trouble said at one point: “It was before I got my fish.â€
Before she got her fish? What did she mean? She’d naturally taken me home to meet her parents when things started to get serious between us but I didn’t recall ever seeing any fish there, neither in a goldfish bowl or tropical fish tank nor in a pond in the garden. Nor had I ever heard her express any love of anything Piscean. Intrigued, I asked her what she meant.
It emerged that The Trouble was fifteen years old at the time, it was one Friday tea time, and she had started work the week previously. The Friday before, as always on Fridays, the meal came from the chip shop. On the plates of her father and mother were fried fish, chips and peas. On the plates of The Trouble and her twelve-year-old sister were just chips and peas. However on the week in question things were slightly different. On the plates of her father and mother were, as usual, fish, chips and peas. Her sister’s plate showed no change either, being just chips and peas. But on The Trouble’s plate, along with the chips and peas, was a fish.
At first she thought she had been given the wrong plate by mistake. But no, when she looked at the plates of her parents she saw that both of them contained a fish. Had her sister also been given the benefit of a fish, The Trouble wondered? No, on looking she saw that her sister’s plate was as fishless as it had always been. Why the change? She had to know.
“Why have I got a fish?†she asked.
“Well you’re working now, you’re bringing in a wage packet,†said her mother.
I knew that the story was true, you couldn’t make up a story like that, but even so it was difficult for me to comprehend. For what happened could never have happened in my parent’s house. When we had fish we all had a fish, father, mother, me and my two sisters, and if fish wasn’t affordable that week we would all do without it.
The thing is nowadays The Trouble doesn’t like fish, whereas I love it. Mind you I had a fifteen year start on her to get used to its taste.
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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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