Idiotproof

30th January 2007

Today Atkins Down The Road and I played a new game suggested by fellow blogger Scaryduck.
The game is for either Atkins or me to pretend we are someone who is mentally ill and has been released into the community, while the other of us acts the part of his carer. Ever since Scaryduck suggested the game I have been on the lookout for the chance to try it out and such an opportunity presented itself this morning when I passed a shop that sold cameras and telescopes. There was a large SALE sign in the window that drew my attention and I had stopped to see what they had in their window as I’m on the lookout for a some zoom lens binoculars. There weren’t any binoculars in the sale but there was something far more desirable. Gold. In the form of a small camera, on offer at £10.99, which was claimed, according to the sale sticker on it, to be idiotproof.
Before anyone else could buy it I immediately called in on Atkins, and thirty minutes later we were in the camera shop asking to see the idiotproof camera. The sales assistant got the camera out of the window and placed it on the counter for our consideration. “There you go.”
“It is idiotproof, is it?” I said, looking at it doubtfully.
“Oh absolutely.”
Atkins looked at the camera in big-eyed awe then turned to the assistant and said, like a little boy in a pet shop asking if he could hold a puppy, “Can I hold it please?” 
“Jimmy is on day release from the mental hospital,” I explained to the assistant, in hushed tones.
“Ah,” the assistant nodded knowingly. He didn’t know anything, poor bugger. “Of course you can pick it up, Jimmy,” he said to Atkins, with a condescending smile.
Atkins picked up the camera, examined it as though it could just as well have been a piece of moon rock as much as a camera, as far as he knew, then smashed it down viciously on the counter top. The first time he did this it probably rendered the camera beyond repair but just in case it hadn’t Atkins repeated the treatment two more times then dropped it on the counter. It sat there looking like something that had just emerged from a car crusher.
Atkins looked at me. “It broke, Arthur,” he said. “Camera broke.”
“Yes Jimmy,” I said. I turned to the assistant and said: “I thought you said it was idiotproof?”
The assistant was in shock. He just stood with his mouth open, looking at Atkins.
“I thought you said the camera was idiotproof,” I repeated, this time a little testily.
“But…but he smashed it,” the assistant said, still not quite able to believe what he had witnessed. “He smashed it to bits.”
“Well of course he did,” I said. “He’s an idiot. That’s what idiots do.”
Atkins picked up a piece of the camera and examined it. “Camera no good now Arthur,” he pronounced, wisely.
“Not much good in the first place if you ask me, Jimmy,” I said, with a meaningful look at the assistant. “And certainly not idiotproof. Come along, we’ll try Boots, I believe they do a good throw away camera.”
“Can Jimmy throw it away?” said Atkins. “Jimmy like throwing things.”
We left the shop without looking back. Five yards down the road I thought I heard a shout of ‘Hey, come back here!’ from the shop but I probably imagined it.

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.

You can write to me at –

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.

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