Sat Nav

17th January 2007

I have cost Atkins Down The Road a hundred pounds.
It was last week that he proudly told me about the new Sat Nav system he’d had fitted to his car. He’d drove the car the fifty or so yards from his house to mine so that I could inspect its fine design and desirability for myself, then offered me a ride in his car so that he could demonstrate the wonders of the Sat Nav. I accepted and we got in the car.
“I’ll just tell it where I want to go,” he said, punching in this information on his new toy.
“Where are we going then?” I asked.
“Disley,” he replied, naming a village about a couple of miles away.
“You already know how to get to Disley,” I felt obliged to point out.
He looked at me with the sort of bemused tolerance look that teachers use when dealing with retarded members of their class. “Yes but the Sat Nav doesn’t know that I know does it? I could be a one-legged Latvian banjo player on his first visit to England for all the Sat Nav knows.”
“Then again it might want to take us via Hardnott Pass in the Lake District and a track ending up in a farmer’s field,” I suggested.
“Do I detect a note of jealousy?” said Atkins, meanly.
I ignored the taunt. We set off. We’d travelled only a few yards before a voice said: “In fifty yards take a left turn.”
Atkins smiled at me and nodded towards the Sat Nav box perched atop the car’s dashboard. “Smart eh?”
“It’s a woman,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s a woman,” I repeated. “Bloody hell Atkins, you of all people. I mean it’s bad enough having a woman sat at the side of you telling you what to do, now you’ve got another woman in the car telling you what to do.”
The smile left his face faster than shit off a shovel. (Does shit depart a shovel particularly quickly? I’d have thought it would stick to it. I must shit on a shovel one day and put it to the test). “I never realised that,” Atkins said, crestfallen.
Anyway he took the Sat Nav back to shop where he got it from and asked for one with a male voice. They didn’t do them in that model. They had two with male voices in other makes, but they were dearer. Atkins bought the cheaper of them, which was a hundred pounds more than the one he’d bought with the woman’s voice. He told me he would gladly have paid two hundred pounds more. Who wouldn’t

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Terry Ravenscroft, 19 Ventura Court, Ollersett Avenue, New Mills, High Peak, SK22 4LL

Dear Air 2000

Football Crazy 

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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 “Sat Nav”

  1. We have one in the Pathfinder which has a womans voice.
    Pathfinder woman, ‘in 100 yard keep right’
    SWMBO, ‘shouldn’t we turn left here’
    Pathfinder woman, ‘keep right’
    SWMBO, ‘I’d have gone left there’

    Two irritating bastards trying to give me instructions.

  2. My pal Tracy uses a SatNav. She has yet to find anywhere with it switched on. At the 2006 British Aerobic Gymnastics Championships she called me on my mobile.
    “I’m lost” said Tracy
    “Where are you?” I asked
    “Near a hospital” Tracy replied
    “You’ll be in the bloody hospital if we’re not there soon” said her gymnast daughter in the background
    “Turn left here” said the (male) SatNav
    “Oh shut the fuck up” said Tracy.

    It took the combined efforts of myself, the venue receptionist, a canteen lady and a coach from Romania to get her to the venue.

    I must introduce Tracy to Atkins.

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