Children

22nd February 2007

Atkins Down The Road sometimes joins me for my daily walk and last Friday was such a day. During our stroll we noticed at the side of a small cobbled road leading to a cottage a painted wooden sign which read ‘Children! 5 M.P.H.’ I remarked to Atkins that I had never in my life come across a five miles per hour child, all the children I’ve ever seen being quite motionless and gazing at a computer screen or tearing about at a speed in excess of 100 m.p.h. Atkins’ said that his experience in the matter of mobile children was similar to mine and we agreed that we would not rest until we had seen the phenomenon of 5 m.p.h. children. Were they walking? Were they on roller skates? Were they mechanically propelled in some way? We had to know.
We walked down the cobbled road, round the bend, and up to the house. On our way we didn’t see any 5 m.p.h. children, nor indeed any children travelling at any speed at all, so I knocked on the door. A man answered it.
“My friend and I would like to see the 5 m.p.h. children,” I said. “As advertised on your sign.”
He gave me an odd look. “What?”
“Your 5 m.p.h. children,” reiterated Atkins. “We’d like a view of them if it isn’t too much trouble. That’s if you’re open.”
The man looked at us sharply. “Is this a wind-up?” He started looking for TV cameras. He didn’t see any of course but that didn’t do anything to remove his suspicions. “It is, isn’t it,” he said. “It’s a bloody wind-up isn’t it.”
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s just that Atkins here and me have never seen a 5 m.p.h. child and we’d very much like to see one before we die.”
“Which could be imminent in my case,” said Atkins. “With my heart.” 
The man chose not to dwell on Atkins’ medical condition (entirely fictitious) and after bestowing on us a look of long-suffering that would have done credit to Oliver Hardy when Stan Laurel was being at his most frustrating he said: “The sign doesn’t mean that. It means that cars shouldn’t travel at over five miles an hour because I have children. And they might knock them over.”
My eyes widened in enlightenment. “Ah.”
“In that case,” said Atkins, a more pedantic man than I, and thus not as ready to accept the man’s explanation, “Wouldn’t it be better if your sign said ‘Speed limit 5 m.p.h.’ or something like that?”
“How would that be better?” said the man, obviously a person not to be swayed easily.
“Well for one thing it would stop people knocking on your door and asking to see your 5 m.p.h. children,” I said.
I passed the sign again today. It had been altered to read ‘Speed limit 5 m.p.h.

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.

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

Dear Air 2000

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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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