Tree Surgeons

May 6th 2006It’s the time of year when you get men in important-looking green overalls knocking on your front door asking you if you want any of your trees topped, lopped, felled or otherwise assaulted. The tree-felling close season is over at last and they’re raring to go with their screaming chainsaws at the drop of a tenner. “That one needs to come down, tree that size, the roots will be right under your conservatory already, leave it any longer and your floor will be like the deck of the Titanic at iceberg time.”

These men are only marginally easier to get rid of than Irishmen who have some tarmac left from a job up the road and who for a mere couple of hundred pounds will re-tarmac your drive with it to the depth of the thickness of the walls of a condom.

A few years ago, tired of the annual intrusions of the tree-fellers, I devised a plan to rid myself of them with the minimum of fuss. I would simply tell them that my house was for sale, and therefore I am not a man who is about to spend any money on it, as obviously it would only be to the benefit of the new owner. It has always worked like a charm. Until yesterday.

“Good morning. Ace Tree Surgeons. Do you want any of your tree’s branches pruned or trees felling?” As he said this he was expertly eyeing our small oak tree and no doubt the probable distance of its roots from our conservatory.

“Sorry we’re moving house.”

“Oh.” He almost went, but then turned and stood his ground, clearly not completely happy with my excuse. “Where’s your sign?”

“What?” My reply was the old standby of the guilty.

He pointed across the road to the ‘For Sale’ notice planted on the Rigby’s front lawn.

“Your For Sale sign? Where is it?”

The first thought that entered my head was to tell him that a tree surgeon had cut it down yesterday in mistake for my oak tree whose roots were about to undermine the floor of the conservatory, but he was a big bloke and I wasn’t at all sure he’d appreciate the wit of this riposte.

“Kids stole it,” I said, “Little bastards will pinch anything round here,” and closed the door quickly before he offered to massacre them for me with his chainsaw, only a tenner.

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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.

3 thoughts on “Tree Surgeons”

  1. Tree fell from the pavement into me fence and just missed the cars. After it’d been cleared away my neighbour said “You should have called me”. “Why?”. “You could have laid under the tree n had me photograph you n then sued the council for millions”. Am I gettin’ slow in me old age or should I just live on a different planet?

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