Directions

1st February 2007

Someone stopped to ask me directions the other day and this never happens to me without it reminding me off my Dad, bless him.
After he had retired he used to spend at least an hour a day, when the weather was fine, on the bench at the end of the street on which he lived. This street formed a T junction with the main road into town, about half a mile distant.  Very often lorry drivers, aware that they were about to come into town, would stop, wind down their windows and ask my dad if he knew where such and such a factory or such and such a place was. No matter what the question was, Dad’s reply was always the same. “You’re miles out of your way. Turn round, go back up to the traffic lights, turn left, carry on, turn right again at the White Lion, next on the left and you’re there. If you’ve gone for a mile and you haven’t seen the White Lion you’ve passed it.”
Now I’ve know why of knowing how many times the lorry drivers turned their lorries round looking for the White Hart or how long they spent looking for it, but they could still be looking to this day without finding it because there isn’t a pub called the White Lion on that road. There’s a Red Lion, and, a hundred yards farther on, a White Rose, but no White Lion.
Probably the lorry driver would think that my dad, being old, was probably a bit confused and had meant the Red Lion or the White Rose, and had tried them both. Turning right at the Red Lion would have brought them to a dead end three miles up the road, which would have got them cursing, but not as much as when they had turned right at the White Rose, which would have eventually led them, after about six miles of a gradually narrowing road, eventually becoming a track, to a pig farm.
By the time someone had put the driver right and he again passed the spot where my dad gave them directions my dad would be long gone. According to him, when I once asked him about this, only one driver had found him still sat on the bench when he had passed for the second time. The conversation had gone like this –
DRIVER: I thought you told me that Birch Vale Printworks was back the way I came and right at the White Lion!”
DAD: “Is that Birch Vale with a B?”
DRIVER: “Yes.”
DAD: Oh, I thought you meant Birch Vale with a Z. Birch Vale with a B is straight on. You can’t miss it.”

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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.

One thought on “Directions”

  1. In my brief sojourn as a police cadet I often got asked for directions. “Straight on” was the staple reply regardless of where I was or where they wanted to be. Legend had it that I was responsible for an old granny going the wrong way around the Manchester Ring Road. Me? Never.

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