Trip to Turkey

17th December 2006

I’ve just got back from a trip to Turkey where The Trouble and I went for a weekend courtesy of a company called Parador Properties. The purpose of the visit was to look at flats with a view to buying one if we saw something we liked at the right price. We saw something we liked and bought. Not without a few trials and tribulations of course. The first trial, or maybe it was a tribulation, I’ve always had difficulty knowing which is which, happened at Manchester Airport prior to boarding the plane.

The information on the departure board reference our flight had just changed from ‘Proceed to Gate 44’ to ‘Now Boarding’. The Trouble, perfectly on cue, now decided she wanted to go to the lavatory. I pointed out to her that we had been sat in the departure lounge for the past forty five minutes and asked her why she hadn’t gone then. She said she didn’t want to go then. This didn’t come as news to me, the self same thing has happened scores of times before, in fact every time we fly somewhere. Apparently there is some mechanism in her system that takes her directly from a state of not wanting to go to the lavatory to a state of wanting to go to the lavatory in an instant, and at the precise moment the departure indicator information changes from ‘Proceed to Gate 44 or whatever’ to ‘Now Boarding’. It’s the same mechanism that causes her to want to go to the lavatory every time we are going out together and immediately after she’s just said ‘Right, off we go then’ or something similar, and acting in good faith I’ve gone to the front door and opened in readiness for our departure.

Knowing I was wasting my time but asking her all the same, just to let her know I was annoyed with her, I said: “Why don’t you go when you get on the plane?”

I was well aware of the futility of this enquiry because to my certain knowledge The Trouble, despite being an inveterate traveller who must have racked up more air miles than Prince Andrew, has in all her years of air travel yet to see the inside of an airplane lavatory. They are a complete mystery to her. For all she knows orgies could be taking place in them, although she probably suspects this isn’t the case otherwise I’d be visiting them a lot more than I do.

One of her many flights was to Australia, first stop Singapore. She must be the only person in the world to have travelled from Manchester to Singapore without having a pee. To make sure that she wouldn’t have to pee while on the airplane she had a pee before getting on board – when the departure indicator changed from ‘Wait in Lounge’ to ‘Proceed to Gate 37’ – and had nothing at all to drink during the entire journey.

I don’t know why she refuses to use the onboard toilet facilities; I’ve asked her but all I get for my pains is a look of wonder that anyone should risk using an airplane lavatory. Maybe because she has visions of falling through the bottom of the W.C. from a height of 35,000 feet. Suggestions on a postcard or in the Comments sections please.

Ignore this if you have already read it. My books Dear Air 2000 and Football Crazy are now in print. They are priced at £8.99 each and are available from Amazon, but readers of my blog can buy them direct from me for £7.50 including p & p. Just send me a cheque and I will send the book/books by return.

My address is –

Terry Ravenscroft

19 Ventura Court

Ollersett Avenue < BR>

New Mills

High Peak

SK22 4LL

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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 “Trip to Turkey”

  1. maybe your wife has a fear of having a pee which falls out of the plane and freezes in the shape of a very sharp blade which carries on further down to split somebody in two in the middle of your nearest high street.

    well, you did ask …

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