PEOPLE

On a weekly basis people talk to me about Mr Benn, I order a coffee or a beer and they’re off. Crazy when you think about it. I started recording thirteen in 1968 and finished them eighteen months later. But ’68 to 2014? My voice must have changed but it doesn’t seem to stop them.

Now another old favourite (of mine) has crawled out of the woodwork. Big Deal. That has emerged on the recognition stakes.

Last week, wheeling my youngest granddaughter Grace around a fairground, both dizzy from a few turns on the Carrousel. a bloke runs over to me.

‘It’s you!‘ he screams. Grace goes loopy. ‘Robbie Box!. My favourite TV programme.’

I had to peel him off me before he went through all the plots quoting all the dialogue.

The other day having a coffee outside (no Grace), a bloke sits down next to me. ‘Hi, Ray.‘ he says.

I don’t know him from Adam but I smile politely.

‘Big Deal.‘ he says. ‘That set me off. I’m a professional gambler now.’

He told me that he plays at poker tables three times a week. ‘Won 90,000 dollars  on on-line gambling. He went on and on about his achievements. ‘I studied to be a croupier. Two of my pals on that course have done well for themselves. One has a casino in Sun City and three in this country. The other is a professional card counter. Blackjack. Made a fortune.’

Then a pal of his turned up and I slipped off. I think I prefer Mr Benn people to certain Big Deal freaks.

Now a strange request arrived. In an Edinburgh cinema, on the 30th of this month, they are showing Cathy Come Home to sponsors of a homeless charity. They want to Skype me for a Q&A session with the audience. If anyone’s reading this, I wonder if you’ve ever used this way of communication? I have and it’s like talking to men on the Moon.

The other stumbling block might be that the Scottish people are voting on independence before this Skype business. If the ‘Yes‘ voters get their way, what new rules will they bring in?

They might block Skyping from over the border.

I’ll have to wait and see.      

FALLING TO PIECES.

I’ve noticed, walking through a shopping precinct or high street, that six out ten people are staring down at their smart phones. Occasionally flicking a glance in shop windows to check they’re as fantastic as the Selfie they took of themselves five minutes before. Narcissistic? You bet.

Some people think that this is the ruination of social life. But it suits me fine. Being noticed is very low on my list. Why? Because my various ailments are virtually invisible. Apart from my ear, which looks like Luis Suarez has a good chomp at. The damage is concealed behind a plaster. For those interested in medical terminology it is ‘Keratoacanthoma, left pinne. Whatever that is? But for conversation with it I simply call it Luis.

Add to that my occasional limp brought on from my experience on the helter skelter and my Macular Degeneration of my left eye. Yes, it’s nice to be invisible.

My Luis ear was due to be attended to today but a phone call cancelled it. Tom, my youngest son, had asked to kept informed with progress.

I texted him. ‘Ear appointment cancelled. I have to see a plastic surgeon first. What a pisser.’

He replied. ‘Oh, rubbish. On the plus side you could get a face lift too!’

How sweet.  

PANIC OVER

I went to the Seattle Hotel nervous. I swopped my talk around and around in my head but finally settled on my original idea.

I arrived at the bar at the hotel. Greeted by Gareth, my agent, and Judy Cornwall, with her husband John and Jenny Hanley, both ladies I knew. This didn’t lower my tension.

With a glass of red wine, I decided not to have lunch with them but arranged to get back in the hotel by 2 o’clock. I walked around the Marina. Eventually ended at a pub that didn’t serve beer, so I had a half of Guinness and smoked a couple of fags.

I arrived at the hotel and went into the room where there were about forty or fifty people who had finished their lunch. Gareth introduced me. Applause. And I started talking. There was a certain amount of laughter (I did have a couple of funnies in my locker) and possibly more importantly they listened. They a lady fainted, nothing to do with me I assure you, and had to be taken out on the terrace. I picked up my thread and continued.

The fifteen minutes allotted time was out of the window. I remember Max Miller, who was a very famous British comedian in the forties and fifties. I saw him many times at the Brighton Hippodrome. The story of him running over time when doing a Royal Command Performance is worth telling bearing in my caviler disregard to the clock.

Max is on second to last in R.C.P. The manager of Moss Empires, the biggest chain of Variety theaters in the land, tells Max. ‘Look, you’ve got twelve minutes, I don’t want Jack Benny, who’s following you, hanging around. And anyway, he’s a bigger star than you.’

Max took exception to last remark. He goes on stage. The act is going well. He sees the manager waving to him from the wings. Max takes no notice. He’s going well. Finally he comes off stage.

The manager is fuming. ‘You’ve done it now, Max, you’re never, never work in our theaters again.‘ Max smiled at him, and said. ‘You’re £100,000 too late, son.’

Well I’m not Max. Anyway, I finished. More applause. I sell ten books. Thrilled. One more drink then home. I’d taken twenty books with me (always the optimist). I emptied the bag but there only nine left. Sold ten. Ah.

Someone had nicked one. What a cheek!  

PANIC

On the 14th of August I’m going to the Seattle Hotel at the Marina in Brighton. There are going to be sixty odd people having lunch there. The are known as The Media Group. I’ve been asked to speak to them about my career.

Unfortunately they have only allocated me fifteen minutes to deliver it. Fifty years in the business in fifteen minutes! I know brevity is soul of wit but. hell’s bells, I’ll either have to rattle through it like a rocket or leave chunks out. What chunks, though?

My trouble has always been that I go off in tangents. Mention one thing and I shoot off talking about something different. I met up with Barry Cryer the other day for a chat. We sat down with a beer at four o’clock and I was still there at seven thirty. I say something and that triggers him off on another story. Crazy.

He’s doing a week at the Edinburgh Festival. His act has got to last forty minutes because someone else is booked at the same space straight after him. Barry just tells joke after joke, he’s not aware of time but he’s got an arrangement with his pianist, who plays a chord, to alert Barry, and he launches into his Zimmer Frame song which hits the button dead on the forty minutes.

I haven’t got a pianist and I don’t know the Zimmer song, so I’m up the creek. I’m scratching my head like a lunatic trying to work something out, which is not good for my ever increasingly depleting locks. The floor around me is littered with wispy hair.

There’s no doubt, I’ll be completely bald by the time I face The Media Group. Oh, gawd.

Later P.S. I think I’ve cracked it!   

HELP

I'm so sorry I haven't posted for a long time. In truth I've been nervous with this new site without son Tom holding my hand.

Another reason I've held back is that I've busy try to finish my novel LIES. The cover is done, all I've got to do is tidge the book and get it printed. All? Ha, ha, ha.

Also my out-of-the blue extraordinary Emailer Sam Westerby has fixed me up with interviews with Ken Bruce, Steve Wright, both Radio 2 and Robert Elms of  Radio London. Amazing.

Whoops! Now thew phone's ringing and someone's knocking on the door. Oh, lord. I've got to go. Will I ever finish the bloody book!

Security

Text: ‘Unsure if you qualify for a refund of PPI paid on a loan or credit card? Reply PPI and we will run a no obligation check or reply STOP to opt out. TPPCO.’

STOP, STOP, STOP! Who are these people? I get so many of these queries. Very spooky. I’ve heard so many stories of people being ripped off. Push the wrong button on your phone and they’ve got your bank details, they’ll have the shirt off your back in a trice. In 2014 there seems to be these sort of con men everywhere. 

Now I get gobbledegook texts from apparently Barclays Bank: ‘We want to verify recent activity on your debit card. We will text further details in a SMS, We require your response.’ 

Days pass. No SMS (?) is delivered.

Then another text ‘Your credit card is cancelled.’

Followed, minutes later, from wonderful Barclays. ‘Your debit card is now active and ready to use.’

Great. I rush rush round to the cash machine. Put in my number, the amount of money I want and wait. Nothing. Then the card pops out. I go into the bank (Barclays) and tell them what happened.

‘I’ll phone Security. What’s your password? Are you paying rent? What is your post code?’ I stared at this 35 year old man, a couple days growth adorning his face and a signet ring that resembled a knuckle-duster. Instinctively, I didn’t like him. He represented all those twits that keep sending me texts about my card.

‘I’ve been with Barclays for over fifty years and you still keep asking questions.’ He shook his head and went back to the phone. He was speaking quietly. I waited and waited, wanting to have a wee or a fag, anything to get out of this place. He pushed the phone under the grill. ‘They want to speak to you.’

‘Hello?’

The voice was incomprehensible, like a demented wasp in my ear.

‘Can you slow down, please.’

No, he put his foot on the gas, now there half a dozen wasps on the rampage. I handed the phone back to the unshaven man. The miming continued. He put the phone down. ‘Right, you have to go to another branch with an ID and they can print you a new one.’

‘Can’t you just send it through the post?’

He looked at me as I was mad. ‘No, of course not. We have to think of Security.’

That bloody word again.

Outside, I light up, ‘ping’, a text.

‘Thanks for contacting Barclays. We’ve cancelled you Debit Card you need to come to a branch with an ID.......’

Alright, twit face just told me. 

Then a letter from Barclays. ‘Urgent-Please open immediately.’

I open it quickly as instructed and there it is..the cause of this chaos that released Barclay’s dogs of war to send texts galore. It’s a simple transaction, I gave Tom, my son, my card number to pay Internet charges that had been sent to him in error.

My conclusion is simple: why, why send all these texts when a simple letter, as I’ve just received, explaining what the problem is, it would have sorted the matter out in seconds.

No, texting is the main way of connecting, hundreds of staff at Barclays are poised to text in the name of Security and probably just a couple of people with pens who can write letters.

Yes, the world has gone crazy. For instance, I read about this in a newspaper (a reliable  one by all accounts), a man pressed a button and ordered a penis enlarger. When the package arrived he opened it eagerly. It was a magnifying glass. 

I quote: ‘Security functions as a kind of soothing, brain-deadening Unspeak to bamboozle us into supposing that whatever is done under the rubric must be for the best.’

FOR THE BEST!? Rubbish.

I rest my case.

  

SILENCE IS GOLDEN?

I’m standing in an enormous queue in the Post Office. There seem to be dozens and dozens of people in front of me. We’re all hemmed by barriers to keep us in order, not unlike the penned sheep in One Man and His Dog.  

There is very old man coughing incessantly behind me. ‘Are you alright?.‘ I say to him.

‘I’m only waiting for my pension. Look at all these people queuing, with closing post offices all over the place, it’s a Government plot hoping us old folk’ll die before we pick up our money.’

I often go shopping early and dotted around at that time in the morning are old granddads or grandmothers wheeling prams with screaming babies on board. They’ve probably got a single parent daughter working. ‘Can you look after Pricilla for me?‘ So, dad or mum walks the little granddaughter round and round, changes nappies, trying to pacify her when she cries and feed her five days a week. They won’t last long at their age with that routine.

In London last week and I noticed another ‘old folk‘ hazard. We all know Pedestrian Crossings: the Red man is showing, wait, then the Green man pops up and off you go. But now things are different, there is a small screen below the Green man. The minute he shows up, the screen displays the number 10 then 9 followed by 8, counting down the seconds for you to cross the road. Shit, imagine an old soul using a Zimmer frame trying to cross Regents Street in 10 seconds! ‘The Quick and the Dead’?

Two possible explanations for the 10 second time scale: (1) Maybe it’s assumed the ‘Old Folk‘ don’t come into central London or (2) The the ‘coughing man‘ in the post office was right. There is a government plot. 

With the terrible weather we’ve been having the media is full of Global Warming. One thing that car manufacturers are contributing to the problem is trying to achieve is a cheaper version of the Electric Car.

Rack forward twenty years. There are Electric Cars everywhere. Global Warming Emissions are now at an acceptable level. All Seasons are in the right place. Enough rain for the farmers. Enough sun for seaside holidays. The Economy is stable. Everyone is happy. In one fell swoop the government has solved all of our problems. Everything is stable. Everyone is happy. And electric cars are cheaper and most people have one.

But grown up Pricilla isn’t happy. As her mother before her, she’s been put up the duff by a man who’s disappeared and she has no one to look after her baby.

Why? Because all the ‘deaf as posts’ old folks are dead. Killed on crossings, worn out by grandchildren, dyeing in queues or mown down by the silent electric cars all for the greater good of Global Warming.

The coughing man was right.....There was a Government Plot