Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
Chris is roped into a charity fête – and leaves with his reputation in tatters
The fact that I write about pets has often made me a target for pet charities. I’m not saying pet charity workers try to gun me down or anything, but I do tend to frequently get cajoled into “getting involved”, usually totally against my will. For instance, no matter how hard I tried not to be, I’m patron of a northern cat charity. I don’t even know any northern cats. Also, just the other day, I somehow found myself running the bottle tombola at a local cat charity fête, forced to watch in despair as people took “my” malt whiskies away in exchange for little numbered tickets
During the course of the afternoon, and after being instructed to “get in the spirit of things” I donated a weekend’s free catsitting as a raffle prize.
If ever a raffle could have too many prizes, this was the one. As ticket after ticket came out of the hat, and prizes ranging from spa weekends, through umpteen boxes of homemade cakes to (bizarrely) a pair of knickers, even the originally exuberant ticket-caller began to sound bored as she gave lengthy details on the origin of every single prize.
How typical it was that her microphone should begin to intermittently fail just as she reached the seventeenth and last prize… my catsitting weekend. I will never forget her words… “And last but not least, is a weekend’s free cat sitting! That’s actually been donated by one of our volunteers today, Chris Pascoe, who runs his own catsitting business, but at the moment he’s on the bottle –”
Yes, it was at that very moment the microphone cut out, leaving the crucial words – “tombola stand” – totally unheard. The announcer had no idea her mic had failed, and no idea she’d just told 500 people I was an alcoholic. After what appeared to be a long pause, her voice came booming back through the speakers with the words, “So if you’d like Chris to come and look after your cat while you’re away on holiday, you know who to speak to.” Yes, definitely not Chris, considering everybody thought I was on a bender!
When I voiced my concerns over the announcement to my wife Lorraine, who was desperately trying to win a bottle of gin from my tombola and so in no way helping with our newfound family reputation, she told me I was being paranoid and to forget it. I tried to do just that, but couldn’t help but notice the first three winners of the prize didn’t actually come forward.
As the day ground on, I spotted somebody at the fête who I was fairly sure had been one of my first ever friends in nursery school. We said our hellos, and I told him how impressed I was that he’d learned to speak since I last saw him.
Well, I was impressed – until his second sentence anyway, which, much to Lorraine’s amusement was, “I hear you’ve been hitting the bottle lately, Chris?”
I was impressed he’ d learned to speak since I last saw him