Month: May 2006

A Money Making Scheme

May 4th 2006“What’s this?” said Atkins Down The Road.When I answered the door he was standing there, his arm round an inflatable rubber woman. I hazarded a guess. “Your new girlfriend?”

“Very funny. Now be serious.”“It’s an inflatable rubber woman. And you’d better come inside with it, I don’t care for men standing on my doorstep with an inflatable rubber woman, people might think you’re delivering it.”

“The only think I’m delivering is our very rosy future,” smiled Atkins, stepping inside.I already didn’t like the sound of it. From time to time Atkins has ‘bright ideas’ which will make him a fortune. They never do. And for some reason he always wants to involve me in them, usually because he’s too broke to finance them himself. It will be a long time before I forget his mobile massage parlour idea that cost me eight hundred quid and almost cost me my marriage.

“Let’s be having it then,” I said, once we’d reached the living room, “The bright idea,” I quickly added, in case he thought I meant the rubber woman.

“What you are looking at,” said Atkins, going into his sales pitch, “is not an inflatable rubber woman. It was an inflatable rubber woman. Now it is an Artificial Passenger Aid. Or APT. Or at least it will be when I’ve got some clothes for it.” A thought struck him. He weighed up the rubber woman for a moment. “She’s about the same size as your wife. I don’t suppose….?

I nipped this in the bud straight away. “What exactly is an Artificial Passenger Aid?”

“Or APT. Well apparently they’re making one lane of the motorways for the exclusive use of cars carrying at least one passenger.” He patted the inflatable rubber woman on the bottom, affectionately. “One passenger.”

“You intend to sell inflatable rubber women to drivers so that they can use them as pretend passengers?

“Got it in one.”

It seemed like a good idea by Atkins’ standards but I immediately saw a snag. “Why won’t car owners simply buy an inflatable rubber woman themselves?”

“Embarrassment. Would you go into a shop and buy an inflatable rubber woman? No. Hardly anybody would. I wouldn’t.”

“You bought that one.”

“Yes but the people I bought it off didn’t know what it was. The Age Concern shop. They were using it as a mannequin. I’d have bought the clothes it was in too but they wanted too much for them. We can do it all mail order. All very discreet, plain brown packaging. I’ve costed it all out, we can get the rubber women for about a tenner, say another tenner for charity shop clothes, twenty quid all in, we charge fifty plus p and p. We’ll clean up.


I must admit it seems like a good idea on the face of it. But then all Atkins ideas do. I told him I’ll give it some thought.
   

 

Buying Petrol

May 3rd 2006
The phone rang. It was The Trouble.
“There’s a light in the car.”
“What sort of a light?”
“On the dashboard thingy.”
“Describe it.”
“Well it’s just a light.”
“What colour is it?”
“Do you remember those curtains we used to have in the spare bedroom? A sort of burnt orange?”
“When this light came on, was there a buzzing sound?”
“Yes.”
“You need to put some petrol in.”
“How do I do that?”
It must be at least twenty years since I taught The Trouble how to drive – after insisting of course that she first had ten lessons from a qualified instructor, I’m not a fool. One day when she was reasonably proficient, i.e. when people had taken to the streets again and she had mastered the nine point turn – I asked her to take the next turn on the left and pull up. She did. Then said, surprised: “We’re in a garage.”
I corrected her. “A filling station.”
“Why?”
“Your next lesson. It’s called Going for Petrol.”
I had her get out of the car then showed her how to unlock the petrol cap and use the petrol pump. I stopped when I’d put in a couple or so gallons. Then I had her to the same, going through the complete routine. Three times. Satisfied that she now knew how to put petrol in the car I took her to the kiosk to show her how to pay for it. Sorted. Like hell it was .
From that day to this I swear on my life that she has never put so much as a single drop of petrol in any of the six or so cars we’ve had since she passed her test. On more than one occasion I’ve seen her get in the car, switch on, observe that the needle on the fuel gauge was getting dangerously near to the red zone, and get out and either walk or take a bus to where she was going. This time she must have failed to take that precaution.
The tone of my voice was deliberately long-suffering so as to register my disapproval. Water off a duck’s back, I know, but you have to try. “Go to the nearest garage.”
“Where’s that?”
“Where are you now?”
She told me.
“Make for Tescos.”
“Do they sell petrol? I’ve never noticed when I’ve been there shopping.”
“It’s not on the fucking shelves next to the tins of dog food, it’s in a separate building, with a giant sign that says Petrol, you’ll see about eight things outside it that look like one-armed monsters out of Doctor Who, they’re called petrol pumps.”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
“There’s every need to be sarcastic.”
She arrived home about an hour later, not a happy bunny. “I didn’t know it was that price,” she complained.
“Well how would you?”
“Ninety eight pence a litre!”
“Right. How much did you put in?”
“Well a litre of course. Oh by the way, that light came on again on the way home.”

The Art Of Conversation

 

May 1st   2006

“Bugger all on the telly again.”

The Trouble looks up from her magazine. “So why don’t you switch it off ? Instead of hopping 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 something decent on.”

“You said that last week but you keep watching it.”

“Only in the way that Captain Bligh scanned the horizon when he was cast adrift on an open boat; in the hope that if I keep looking one day I’ll finally sight land.”

“There’s plenty of land to be seen already if you’d look properly.”

The Shakespeare in me emerged. “What land is this you speak of?”

“Well there’s The Royal.”

At first I thought The Trouble meant a documentary about Prince Charles or one of his dodgy offspring, then I realised she meant the hospital thing on Sunday Nights,
a soapish 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 in 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 little prick. Like Noel Edmonds.”

“Don’t you like anybody on the television?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t mind one of the newsreaders.” 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 want to keep the conversation going.
Television hasn’t killed the art of conversation in our house. It fuels it.