When Ray Liddell of Hartlepool in the UK spent £500 on an inflatable Christmas Grinch over the internet, he hadn't really considered how big his purchase might be.
All he wanted to do was to make his daughter Jasmine's Christmas a happy one. But when he went to inflate it for the first time - he realised his mistake.
He told First Up he knew when he ordered it that it was 10m high, but hadn’t considered what it would look like at his two-storey house.
Photo: Ray Liddel supplied
“It wasn’t due for delivery till the 8th of December and a fortnight ago two boxes appeared. One box it said a blower so I knew in the other it was the Grinch, the strange thing was the box with the blower was bigger than the box with the Grinch so I thought ‘Oh I’ve been scammed’, it’s come from America, it wasn’t that heavy, I thought ‘I can’t believe it’, so I decided to unpack the contents, it was in a small bag, I rolled it out and thought ‘I’ve just completely wasted me money’.
“I’ve got a reasonable factory here and I created a bit of space to inflate it and I unpacked it, me and the girl here, we started blowing it up, oh my god it got out of control, it started pushing the desks aside, the benches to one side, we were separated from the electrical box, we couldn’t switch it off, I managed to sort of tear the zipper open to let some air out to and crawl underneath it to switch it off. Then I was like ‘oh my god, what have we got?’”
Liddell says he couldn’t wait to show it to his family.
“What I did was, I bundled it straight in me van, total excitement to get it home.
“I spoke to my wife ... she knew a little bit about it and she said ‘the kids are in the kitchen, let’s put it up’, there’s Olivia and Jasmine [his daughters] there and we put this thing up and it was just magnificent… it looks real… you can see it from space, it’s a marvellous thing.
“Anyway we get it up, we go and get Jasmine and Olivia [they’re] excited but to be honest I don’t know what their expression was because at this point all the traffic outside of the house had stopped, the road was blocked, there was people taking photos, people coming down the drive, so that moment [his kids’ reactions] got a little lost in all honesty.”
Not one to pass up an opportunity, Liddell and his amateur photographer friend began taking photos of families in front of the Grinch for charity.
The £18,000 he’s managed to raise already is going towards the local Alice House Hospice that cared for his father Frank, who died of Covid-19 in May.
