Free Stairlift to Heaven by Terry Ravenscroft

toilet paper which you then have to drop in a bin of used toilet paper because you can’t flush it down the toilet when you’ve finished with it.
    You can’t hear exactly the same bouzouki music playing everywhere you go.
    Cockroaches are looked upon as pets.
     
    I’m sure there are many more examples of the real Greece but I have to stop now to cook a moussaka for dinner. Take a gallon of olive oil….
     
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    June 18 2007. MARBLES.
     
    I had the most wonderful news today! Along with my monthly credit card statement from Marbles came the offer of ‘Two nights away with the one you love for only £99.’ The offer consists of a two night stay in any Hilton Hotel in Great Britain and Ireland, the price to include bed, breakfast, dinner on the first night, plus a complimentary bottle of house wine ‘when you whip out your Marbles card!’
    Thankful that my Marbles card would be all I will be required to whip out in order to qualify for my complimentary bottle of wine I rang them immediately, quoting the booking reference number as requested. “I’d like to take you up on your most generous offer of two nights away with the one I love for £99,” I said.
    “Very good, sir,” said the Marbles man, all obsequiousness and efficiency.
    “Will Miss Scott Thomas be there when I arrive?” I asked him.
    “Pardon, sir?”
    “Kristin Scott Thomas. She’s the woman I love. I’ve loved her ever since I saw her naked in ‘The English Patient’, what a body, all that pubic hair, like a forest, well I’m Jungle Jim so just lead me to it.” There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. I broke it. “Hello? Hello, are you still there?”
    The obsequiousness remained but the efficiency had taken a holiday, possibly a two night stay with the one it loved. “There....er, seems to be some sort of misunderstanding, sir.”
    “Misunderstanding? You are offering two nights in a Hilton Hotel away with the one I love for £99 are you not?”
    “Er....yes. But we mean your wife.”
    “My wife?”
    “Or girlfriend.”
    “Your leaflet didn’t say my wife or my girlfriend, it said the one I love,” I pointed out to him.
    “Yes....well....we assumed that a man’s wife or girlfriend would be the one he loved,” he bleated.
    “That’s a pretty all-encompassing assumption to make if you don’t mind my saying so. Given all the divorces and extra-marital affairs and wife beatings one hears about nowadays.”
    He stuck to his guns. “Well that’s what we meant, sir.”
    “Well then that is what you should have said. But you didn’t. You said two nights with the one you love for £99. And if you don’t see to it that I get two nights with the one I love, i.e. Miss Kristin Scott Thomas, she of the glorious beaver, for £99, I will sue Marbles for every penny it has got!” Then I put the phone down.
    I don’t love Kristin Scott Thomas of course, I love The Trouble’; although I quite fancy Kristin Scott Thomas and if anything should ever happen to The Trouble....
    I suppose that will be the end of the matter. But it might not be. Even at this very moment the people at Marbles might be trying to contact Kristin Scott Thomas in an effort to help them to get out of the tricky situation they’ve landed themselves in with a dirty old man from the Peak District, just so the dirty old man won’t sue them for every penny they make in exorbitant interest rates. Although probably not. But at least next time it might make them think before offering deals that they cannot possibly hope to fulfil.
     
    ****
     
    July 24 2007. THE BEST OF IT.
     
    I was feeling in a philosophical mood today and my philosophising led me to the conclusion, on comparing the world as it is today to how it was fifty sixty years ago, that I’ve had the best of it, that I was born into it at the perfect time, at a time when there were no such things as diversity and outreach officers, a time when a race card was a list of the runners and riders