Many Nations

	Thanks to all the world wide visitors

don't forget my 10 books are on Amazon just look for my face, they are very affordable too.

www.michaelgcasey.typepad.com to HEAR 50 of my stories just scroll down. Angel Investor needed too for my teach English via humour idea

40 stories with 40 facing

page translations plus my audio in each book,

I've passed 750 stories now

United Kingdom
United States
Isle of Man
Portugal
Poland
Russia
Australia
Kuwait
Ukraine that's  all Michael Casey here in Birmingham still hoping to earn some money so I can move house and then pay for both my daughters to become Doctors and then buy them both a house and a car, that's if I live that long.

Cross Conversations

Cross Conversations ©

By Michael Casey

We all talk, we all have conversations, we even have cross conversations and  we also can have cross conversations. No I’m not stuttering, by cross conversations I mean cross conversations and not just cross conversations, we can even have cross cross conversations. Shall I explain?  A conversation is just that a conversation, a cross conversation can mean you are angry, so really it’s an argument and not a conversation at all. But a cross conversation is a cross purposes conversation, or two actual conversations weaving in and out.

I hope I’ve explained it simply for you, me and my sister used to regularly have cross conversations. We’d be at the family house and talking to dad in my case and to mum in her case, then we’d switch for 5 minutes before we’d jump in my sister’s car and we go home to our own homes. This was the case for years, it kind of stopped 20 years ago when mum died suddenly and dad nearly joined her 8 bare weeks later. Some of it is explained in Padre Pio and Me.

Now my sister would speak of this and that, and did I know old Mrs Smith had died, not the fat Mrs Smith from Winson Green down by the Prison, no the slim Mrs Smith from the city centre, the one who’d won the lottery and bought that flat by the canals. I would talk over her and tell her I had diarrhoea from a dodgy kebab I’d had on my way home from work, but it had tasted so good I’d promised myself another. Now I was disappointed where would I find the perfect kebab, we weren’t on the Internet back then maybe 25 to 30 years ago so finding a good kebab was all about trial and error, not to mention lots of toilet paper.

I did in fact nearly die in Paris, I was on a trip in 1998 and JC had said stay by the Gare Du Nord,  little did I know it as a red light area. So I went out and had a Chinese, I looked like a German Policeman in my leather jacket, I could hear people on the bus comment, Flic Almand, I knew enough French to understand. I had too much wine with my meal, and was tipsy on the Metto, I ended up at the Eiffel tower with a broken camera, so I was asking the girl in the box at the bottom of the Eiffel tower how I could I could fix the camera.

Anyways on the way home I had a kebab, they were like whole sheep on a spit, it was fabulous. Then I stumbled into to my kiosk of a hotel, next to a huge church on the corner with Film Blache shops outside, this means sex films, as skin is white after all. In the middle of the night I erupted like a fountain of filth, from both ends. My bathroom  was a wardrobe, without a lion nor a witch, but with a sink, toilet and shower all squeezed in. I spent forever in there, I thought I’d die, I swore I’d never eat a kebab again, then I saw reason and compromised, I’d never come to Paris again.

And I never have, Kebabs are more sacred so I have had those. In the morning I found a pharmacy and asked in my best French “avec vous des asprins” and I received a box which on opening had a tube inside which said “tamponee”. So obviously I was confused and wondered how as a male I’d use this asprins. Luckily inside the tube were extra stong mint size asprin. I put one in my mouth, only for it to turn me into a rabid dog. They were meant to dissolve in water, I just foamed at the mouth, on the street outside the pharmacy, next to the condom machine, which at first I had thought was a bubble gum machine. It is France after all, in UK such machines are hidden in the filth of gents toilets in pubs.

Now I just went off at a tangent then, the Corrs are singing “everybody is searching for intimacy” on my hifi as I talk to you, have they ever been to France I wonder.  So we used to have conversations at rapid fire, because we only had a few minutes together in the car before we got to our own home. It was a way of sharing our hopes and dreams and worries and supporting each other. To an outsider, to a fly on the wall it could be incomprehensible, and just as I typed that word the Corrs sing it, they actually sung comprehend, this is my life a rich pageant of nonsense.

I’m trying to have a straightforward life but God intervenes at cross purposes and just as I do X He decides Y is far better, but I am still alive after my triple heart bypass, which was it God turned into a quadruple, because it would be better for me. I only found only 6 months later that it was a quadruple, 4 grafts.

So as I talk to you I hear the tv in the other room and wonder what am I missing, so I have the Corrs, conversation in Mandarin and children’s laughter floating all around the house. Then Totoro our cat smiles at me from behind the chair in the window, it’s very off putting and could make me cross, but then I suppose it highlights what I was trying to talk about in the first place, which was cross talking, don’t be cross I’m finishing now.   

this is me in Malta 2013 I just wish I could go back, anybody got a spare bed at the Hilton?

Who's been reading my stuff

Who’s Been Reading My Stuff?©

By Michael Casey

Well tomorrow 8th June 2016 marks the end of my stuff being in the Daily Telegraph, it’s not as if I’m invited to write and paid as much as Boris, though my silver hair is far nicer than his, I use Aldi Tea Tree shampoo, perhaps he should. No, I write in the my telegraph  area, which will disappear overnight just as spilt beer does, and pee on the bathroom floor, I’m sure the cat does it. So it’s the end of an era, though I do write in two other places so I can still be found.

So after I write I check back to see if I have any visitors, and google even tells me where they are located. Today it was Australia and 13 from Isle of Man, so it got me wondering who could it possibly be? Who is it, could it be one of the Bee Gees? So I checked for famous people who live on the Isle of Man and up popped one of the Bee Gees, the last living one that is. So I must have a Bee Gee fan, singing staying alive as he reads my stuff. Yes Really.  Ok, that’s a big stretch, but you never know, you never know.

Then I discovered that Jeremy Clarkson lived on Isle of Man, that’s a big stretch, or rather he is a big stretch just how does he fit into the cars, I’m sure they take the bottom of the seats out so he can fit in, or even saw a hole out the bottom, so his bottom scrapes on the road beneath the car. That would explain his facial expressions, and he’s always droning on about ride and suspension, wouldn’t you if your bum burnt more rubber than the tires. Or do they coat his undercarriage with something to lesson fiction as he test drives the cars, maybe a kind of KY gel for motorists, or motoring journalists?

Then I thought it must be something to do with cats, as I have put Totoro our family cat in some of my pieces, maybe it’s a cat lover, in search of a tail or is it tale? I won’t say the obvious but you are all thinking it. Go to confession immediately. Then I thought it could be Fr. George whom I mentioned at the end of Face Values my previous post, I spotted that there are Catholics on the Isle of Man, part of Liverpool diocese, so Fr. George could stumbled over me.

Ukraine popped up too, so obviously it must be the billionaire candy man reading my stuff, he just adores my stories. Really though it’s either hackers or porn sites stumbling over me, Ukraine is full of them. Though with my luck it’s probably Putin people thinking I’m Leslie Nielsen and wanting my autograph. For my birthday at Pinsent Masons in the print room, large posters of him were placed on the windows, but they were 6 weeks out.

Then Portugal seem to like reading my stuff so it must be retired football managers  and retired rich people gazing at my photo, and even reading a few words. I put a photo with each piece of writing to identify me as he writer and sole copyright holder. My writing still gets lifted so I remove it after a couple of weeks and add new material, but still the Far East borrows my stuff.

So as you see the whole world reads my stuff, I just wish they went to Amazon and bought a few ebooks on any of the Amazon national sites, here’s just one.

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-Casey/e/B00571G0YC/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0  

So my imagination soars, hope springs eternal and so on, I even had Malaysia looking recently, anybody in Antarctica or the Space Station not busy with science they can always pass by. I did of course have the Man on the Moon look at my stuff, he even left a comment.  Literary agents are even rarer than Clangers, just whistle and they never ever come.

Face Value

Face Value ©

By Michael Casey

We all discriminate, we all  look the other way to avoid Mrs Smith or Mrs Jones, because we don’t like the way they look. Or in Mrs Jones case how she smells, it’s either the lack of water in her house or the buckets of £2.99 a litre perfume she uses, and I don’t mean Jeyes Fluid either. There are some ladies perfumes that ARE beyond the pale, Jack and Jill would go nowhere near them.

WE discriminate because he’s a rambling old fat  silver haired guy who annoys us when we are busy on the till in Aldi or any other store he shambles into. Its normal its natural, but once we interact, such a posh word for actually talk to each other, then barriers do come down. How else would we breed the next generation, without barriers coming down.

It can be that somebody is Gay, and we never talk to gay people do we, don’t want our friends to think we are weak or even a closet gay. We don’t to Asians or Blacks or men with pony tails, not unless he owns a strip club, then it’s different, isn’t it. We don’t talk to the old, because they are boring and have an old people’s smell, and they repeat themselves, and they repeat themselves, and they repeat themselves ad infinitum, doesn’t ad mean something about asvertising? God knows what infinitum means, only really strange people know Latin, or that blonde haired guy on tv, Boris or is it Norris something, lost his job in London, but still he bores everybody about his shampoo.

So on it goes, we really hate somebody, there is even a Mike and The Mechanics song from years ago, about somebody always hating somebody. We can hate people in wheelchairs because they block the pavement, we hate fat people in mobility scooters who nearly run us down as the speed on the pavement, perhaps we should have speed bumps on the pavements to slow them down.

Then there are people with walking sticks who swing and swagger as they move along, why can’t they only be allowed out at certain times to free up the pavement so normal ordinary people can get to Greggs for their morning food rush.

Did you spot yourself amongst  all the negative people. I hope you didn’t, perhaps the lady with Jeyes Fluid dabbed behind her ears, is the only one we might all be tempted to hate or avoid. Now what  brought on today’s piece? I read in the DT about a lady who was going to have twins via a surrogate, she has and still suffers so much because of an accident. I’d never heard of her before until I read the DT. I say God Bless Her and her husband.

The adventure that is called Parenthood is the biggest thing in her life, and her husband. All the business experience and even being in the House of Lords is frankly worthless compared to what is to come. So I know she’ll enjoy it so much, she can hold her babies up and show them the stars in the night skies and remind them to reach for the sky and the stars beyond.

Reach for the Sky was the title of a book about Douglas Bader the pilot with tin legs in the war, in today’s world would he have been despised? The lady I mention uses a stick and has fought tremendous battles with her health, there are millions of us who fight battles with our health, or against prejudice, just because of the colour of our skin, think back to Ali. Or because we believe this or that because of Face Value.

So as Fr. George, who used to work on the track at Longbridge before becoming a priest, who had a very thick Brummie accent once said in a sermon, put yourselves in others’ shoes, the Augustinian way, think 360 degrees, and then maybe we’ll all be in the shoes of the fisherman. And won’t judge on Face Value, you may even make loads of friends.

2016 The Year of the Dead

2016 The Year of the Dead ©

By Michael Casey

Mohammed Ali died today, it’s all over the news, he was part of my childhood, and part of people’s lives all over the world. He did in fact come to Birmingham and such was the crush at the old Bull Ring that the escalator broke under the weight.

2016 seems to be the year of the dead, famous people are all dying all over the place. It’s sad because through them we remember our own lives, when Prince sang Purple Rain we were doing this or that. When Bowie was dressing like a clown we were going through grammar school, or sitting our finals before we became an MD, or just joined the Navy, now we are a Navy Seal with a guilty secret, we are a Bowie fan. Whatever we are or were it is punctuated by the celebrity whose music or films we were watching.

I used to work at CPNEC Birmingham in a variety of roles, maybe 10, I literally did everything. One day on a quiet weekend Henry Cooper strolled in, actually he was Sir Henry by then. Now whey do I mention him? Because he was the British fighter who knocked Ali on his back, and only because Ali’s glove split did Ali get a break and win the fight. It’s all on Utube somewhere no doubt. So if you like my memory is touched by the eternal memory because I happened to be on reception that day.

Alice Cooper was a guest too on one occasion, so I actually met and talked to him, this was 25 years after his song Schools Out for Summer first hit the charts. So if you like my life was touched again by the eternal memory. I even met Eric Clapton and went to the wrong end of the car, worth twice my house, in an attempt to carry his bag. So I said sorry the wife drives a Skoda, which made Eric laugh. So if you like you and me, ordinary people can be touched by the mega stars of today’s world.

Why do we care when the Stars die? It’s because part of us die too, they are the stitching that holds society together. Of course they are not as important as our mum and dad, and 20 years ago in a matter of weeks I nearly lost both parents, read Padre Pio and Me for details. My point is that celebrities are like our clothes they stop us from being naked, without their gifts enriching our lives we are a little naked, they add something to our lives.

The delivery driver whistles a song or sings along as he drives and comes up the garden path with that parcel, the music helps his day. Music helps all our days, that why music is on the radio everywhere. The parcel may be a few cds of Elvis or the Cure or the latest X factor sensation. It could be your Polo or Vera Wang clothes, it might even by your Beckham perfume, though JP Gautier is my own choice, or even a little Ck.  So it is the products that you like which are the things that make you happy and make you you.

So when the creator of your style, clothes, music, perfume, or even homewares dies you take it personally. Where will you get your stuff again? Alexander McQueen was a great talent and sadly too sensitive for this world so with his death we lost a very sensitive person and an outstanding fashion designer. So we mourn him for what he was and for what the future his future could and would have been. If only his friends were able to save him from his grief, there are lessons to be learnt there.

With Ali we mourn more than a fighter, we mourn a multifaceted man, Ali lifted spirits worldwide, he had the gift to do that.  So many famous people lift us up by their gifts, music or words or creations in art and fashion. So they are worthy of tears because their lives enriched ours.

But the obvious thing to remember is that we too, all of us can do the same, we won’t touch millions, I’m not naïve enough to think millions will one day read and be touched by my words, but each and every-one of us can reach out and touch one person at a time and change their life, or even save their life. So reach out and touch today and together we’ll be remembered when we die because we loved one person at a time.