From Blank Page to Full Stop

From Blank Page to Full Stop ©

By Michael Casey

I was having breakfast with my meds, just as my pharmacist orders when I was thinking about what to write about today. The idea of a blank page and a full stop beckoned. So I was going to start with a fair wind to my back but then I stumbled over PMQs or Prime Minister’s Questions so I watched that. Then the love of my life, as she tells me she is, or the witch as we call her rung to command me to bring in the washing.  Then there was the very latest Windows 10 update so I had to wait for that. Afterwards my small daughter arrived, so with her watching the computer I went shopping for her chocolate biscuits. 

The Windows 10 update finally finished and I had one, just one chocolate biscuit. Then the pain monster decided to pay a visit, so I have just slapped it on and rubbed myself down, while stood in the front room window. Our Polish neighbours think I’m an exhibitionist, the little old ladies wish they were 30 years younger, me, I just wish Arthritis never came my way. I inherited it from my mother, and my heart from my father. It’s nice being a close family but you could do without the diseases.

So to today’s theme From Blank Page to Full Stop. 

We start as a blank page, as virgins, we are pure and white, we are babies, I hope I don’t need to mention other colours and don’t need to say I’m not actually talking about sex or colour. I’ll take it as read that there are no pedantic readers with nothing better to do.

So we start all shiny and new without a clue, then we watch and observe and are influenced by events all around us. I grew up in a busy house and we shared the house with our lodgers, then we had the house next door too, just by accident. My dad’s brother was going to buy it but tragedy stuck their sister in law died in childbirth. So dad’s brother Willie went back to Kerry to help Danny raise the ten children. So the lawyer changed the name and our dad bought the house instead of his brother.

So the page was changed, events had changed History and the Future, the family future changed here in Birmingham and over in County Kerry.  This meant we had more lodgers for me to watch and observe, making it real life theatre for me. Growing up watching mainly alcoholic lodgers was different to the average family in the 1960s onwards.

Good things and bad things can little tour life page, some things tear strips off the page. Or screw and scrunch the page up entirely, I’d had a scrunched up page several time, you just have to iron out the rough spots as the songs goes. Or even throw away one page and start again. Don’t be so obsessed with keeping the original plan. A new page can be a lifeboat to a new future, such as me stumbling in my computer operator job. As I talk to you my Bourne Jones angle looks down at me, a leaving present from that 21year job in computers. Another totally different page was my 3 years as a concierge plus everything else, or you could just call my porter.

My daughter had just started a new page by going to her new 6^th form college a good  bus ride away. Meeting new people and studying hard for A levels with high hopes of doing Medicine at Cambridge, or anywhere that’ll have her. This is her page. We all need to have dreams and hopes. Even if we never attain them, without direction we are just like those zombies on stunk you stumble over in some cities.

Influences and winds of change alter our direction on the page that is our life. If this were a Winnie the Pooh Cartoon the artist would draw as I talk to you. Sadly I cannot draw and the stormy weather has not brought an artist to me, maybe I’ll stumble over one in a bar. Maybe even a Polish artist as I seem to have many Polish readers, even if they never buy a book on Amazon. 

So our lives continue and the page gets fuller, just like the space on the fridge where every family leaves its diary, outside of the fridge, inside is the dairy. You can use a rubber to make space on the page, you can retreat and  regroup or cordon off some ME Space in your life. You may even wish you had used London Rubber then you’d have more space in your home. 

Nothing is set in stone, you can have that North Korean Lover, even if in your imagination, or you could have that Parisian Romeo, life is up to you. We’ve all seen those romcoms on tv after all.  However a word of caution, there is only so much space on the page. At some point the space runs out, the page is full.

So you have to ask yourselves did I waste my page, my space, my time, would I have used crayons or fine liner, would I have used capitals or a different font to my life. Or am I happy the way I filled the page that is my Life.  The way my own life turned out with lots of pain punctuating it has coloured my page, but all in all I’m glad how my life has filled the page. I have had lots of time with my dad when he was alive. I have well I won’t be gushy, I am not American. I am glad I was born into the family I was born into. 500 years of Kerry Ireland farmers so I’m told. Now my own family which comes from rice farmers from Shanghai to match the Kerry side.

So Chinese Rice had met Kerry Potatoes, and my kids will write their own pages, as a doctor and maybe as an actress. This is their Future the blank pages lie before them. Me I continue to write in the vain hope of making a bit of money so we can move house. I’ll continue filling my pages until I come to my final  full stop.