From Joyce Grenfell to Family Traits

From Joyce Grenfell to Family Traits ©

By Michael Casey

First of all apologies to David, I said this story would be online by 4pm, but as its 3.55 and I’ve only just started he’ll have to forgive me. David is the church organist for the choir the girls are in, he and his wife are also the Godparents for the girls.  So think of Al Capone who can hit a high C but rides a bike to and from Aldi, and yes that’s where I just bumped into him. He was also a member of the Inland Revenue or IRS as they say in USA, and as we all know it was the IRS who finally put Al Capone away, hence the circle, the wheels on David’s bike.

Now where was I before David led me astray or is it ashtray, it must be astray as we are both non-smokers. So today I’m going to talk about Family Traits, the things that make us alike to our siblings and parents, assuming you were not adopted after being left on the doorstep at Aldi in a Moses basket, slowly drifting away in the puddles of water that gather in the ally leading to the car park.

When I talk to you or write these stories I am speaking to you all as I hope eventually my stories will be broadcast on radio, so once they are written  I post them on www.michaelgcasey.wordpress.com and on https://butcherbakerundertaker.blogspot.co.uk/  then once I’ve done my security I shout to the girls who are watching Peppa Pig in the next room, do you want to hear the latest story.

They always say yes dad, because they want me to continue buying chocolate biscuits from Aldi for them. Then I read aloud the latest story, and it’s here that Joyce Grenfell comes in, because as I read a story back for the 1^st time I realise that Joyce Grenfell a dotty comedienne from 1950s and 1960s+  is reading the story, or rather the writing style is her performance style. No I have not copied her and as her material is not broadcast in decades it’s as if she has percolated inside me without me realising it. Now I want you all to go and google her and watch old black and white material on Utube, I only discovered it was there a couple of days ago when the idea for today presented itself.

Welcome back from your googling, which sounds like a real dirty word, something that a lady like me should not use, ever. See  that was Joyce Grenfell herself speaking not me, perhaps it explains why I like dressing up in women’s clothing, thank God David has never spotted me in the bargain basket in Aldi with my bum in the air as I root in the bottom of the basket.

There is a manner a way of talking that adds something to my words, to everybody’s words, the little touches that makes the difference. It’s the way I tell them as Frank Carson  used to say, he nearly died in Birmingham you know, Roger our driver at the hotel was taking Frank to the airport and Frank was cracking so many jokes that Roger nearly crashed the van he was crying with laughter.

So as I read back my stories the intonation has been influenced by Joyce Grenfell, directly and indirectly. We are all influenced by our surroundings, by the voices we hear and by the way in which words are used. I am talking to my girls and quiet often I’ll stop myself and say I sound like uncle X or uncle Y my brothers. How can this be? WE are all related that’s for sure, but sometimes out pops something even though you only see this relative at Christmas. It’s in the breed as my dad used to say.

So is it the rhythm of life itself, as I’ve shared a womb and we all share rooms or offices we share the same sounds and vibrations, just as we do in the womb itself. So we have a similar sense of humour and enjoy similar things, we are mass produced if you like, mass liking for this and for that. So family traits come about, those Caseys are all like this or all like that.

By coincidence the sound of the womb plays as Depeche Mode sing the next song in the background, music and football add to family and group traits, both have tremendous passion and influence, the heartbeat of life itself. With the heartbeat fading in the background of the Depeche Mode song I’ll finish for today, tomorrow they’ll be another story. What it’ll be about and which style it’ll be in I don’t know, but it will be different, as David might say Michael Casey is different, very different. What does he mean by that? Come back get off that bicycle, I want a word with you, where’s my Police Whistle as Joyce Grenfell might say.

Thanks to France and Germany for reading my stories, if its Mr Aldi reading them in Germany don't forget my idea to teach English via humour in www.michaelgcasey.typepad.com 

Free Software

Free Software ©

By Michael Casey

I don’t know about you but I do like a bit of free software, and no I’m not talking about ladies knickers either. I mean the programs that you can get off the Internet, the browsers and so forth. Some are faster than others and they have better defences from all the rubbish out there in Cyberland. An adblocker is so useful, as is the ability to click and make something your desktop background, in my case it’s a house from Rightmove.co.uk, I usually pick B17 with a radius of 1 mile, this is where I hope to live when my boat finally comes in, though in my case it’s the Titanic.

Word is like water for me being a writer, though some may choose another word beginning with W, yes Worker as Mr Corbyn would call me, what were you thinking of? I have  Word2010 we got it from a nice Northern Irish company, if anybody wants to give me the latest super duper version I will be very happy, though I did get Libre Office 5 off the Internet just in case of emergencies. You have to have another word package just in case your own package does not work.

You can also get photo viewing software off the Internet too such as Fuji MyFinePix Studio, if you have kids you will no doubt have 1000s of photos of their childhood. In the old days we all had bookshelves of photo albums, nowadays they are on a hard drive on the computer. Behind me up a corner on the bottom shelf of the book shelf are my own original photo albums, I even had dark hair they are so old, I was 20, really 20. I rescued them from a plastic sack under my bed to a place of honour at the bottom of the book shelf next to our Miele vacuum cleaner. We did have boring vacuums but they kept on breaking so in the end we upscaled to a Miele, though I am not allowed to use it as I am just a man.

   

With software you can have fun changing people’s faces and colours, nowadays on tablets you can do the same thing. See software is good, it makes you feel good about yourself, I am talking about the fact I wear women’s under-ware now, what I hear ½ of you exclaim, while the other ½ say I just threw that sentence in to see if you were listening. Maybe I was or maybe I wasn’t, cross dressing is fun after all, it makes my wife cross when I wear her clothes.

There is a bad side to everything, not just cross dressing, ask Eddie Izzard, I won’t speak to him myself. Where was I, I got lost on the page, perhaps I need some satnav to bring my sentence structures  back to where they should be, the point. Ok I’m back to the point now, if you download any rubbish you get a VIRUS, and that’s a right pain in the butt. You can lose everything, such as your mind, your work, your business.

So to start with an antivirus is a must, Avast, Avira, AVG are just three beginning with the letter A, Microsoft has its own one too. You can get free versions as well as full featured ones. 360Degrees  is a Chinese one, that’s super dooper but it has issues with some Microsoft programs, you can have fun trying the software and see if it does what you want it to.

As for browsers Firefox is nice but so in Safari and Opera, does anybody actually use IE or Edge. The thing about software is that it is monitoring you so that they can sell you stuff or advertise to you. Does that make Cortana the local gossip and spy, the little old lady at the back of the church who bitches about everybody as she queues for Confession. You have to make up your own mind on that.

 It’s the same with email, they don’t read it, but they scan inside it, just so they can advertise to you. Try sending a message with the subject line of Michael Casey Birmingham Comedy Writer On Amazon and put a few lines in the message content,  

 http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Casey/e/B00571G0YC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1     

then send it to a few friends.

Now this is two things, firstly you are spamming your friends telling them to buy my 10 books, that’s the joke within a joke. But it is also something which will be scanned by your email provider and within days you’ll get messages from them with some vague connection to me. I get messages about funerals, and life insurance, I don’t know which order they should really be in, all because they have scanned my emails.

So you get free email accounts that promise never to read your mail, but they all do, of course I would use Hillary Clinton’s server but there is no room on it, besides which as so many emails get lost, my local butcher may lose my order for a Christmas Turkey.

However the good part of free email is that you can store your words of wisdom on the cloud inside your email. So my books are in my email accounts, so if my PC gets hacked and some days it’s so slow I think it is being used as a BodNet, anyway my 10 books my 900,000Words plus are safe on the Cloud as a precaution.  I have to check the chicken in the oven I’ll be back.

Well my chicken is nearly cooked, 3quid  from Aldi, bird in a bag, just cook for 1hour 40, should feed 4 with loads left over. Free Software  is like the chicken it should feed your mind and provide amusing conversation while you consume it, you may argue over who has the leg and who pulls the wish bone. Most important of all scan it before you use any software, otherwise you’ll be stuffed like the chicken. Security is Everything.

Delusional Dreams

Delusional Dreams ©

By Michael Casey

Are dreams delusional or just an illusion or maybe a form of prayer or something to protect us through the Dark Nights of The Soul? Now if you have just done PPE at Cambridge  you may have had that question on one exam paper, and are you half thinking that I was the horrid examiner who set that question. 

Then we’d both be delusional, the very thought of me being a Cambridge Don, more like Don Camillo than Cambridge Don, though the question I would throw at you would be Why Oxford? And I’d ask for 15,000 words in answer to the question Why Oxford? If I were an Oxford Don I may ask you Why are Cambridge Students such drunks? For that I’d ask 30,000 words as there’s such a plethora of evidence to prove the case only 30,000 words would do it justice.

I hope the cat has been thrown amongst all the pigeons, though when me and Mary Beard were down the Trader in Old Forge and Singing Anvil she did let slip a few home truths, give her 2 pints of Irish Lemonade, the red one and a packet of cheese and onion crisps and her tongue is so loose. Though only folks with a degree in Latin can understand a word she says, the red lemonade makes her such a gossip, and there’s no stopping her.

She can give you 150,000 words on Why Oxford, though this scruffy guy with blonde hair did earhole us as we drank our drinks, I had my usual Stella Artois of course.  Somebody said the spy was Norris or whatever his name was, he was drinking shandy should I say no more. In the end he bought some pork scratchings for his pet Fox and was away, but he did stop to speak to Mary Beard, whatever he said made her blush and dance around the bar just like Joyce Grenfell in the original Saint Trinians film.

Now have we got to the point of today’s story? Maybe it’s just a dream, me aspiring to have clever friends, though my brothers did go to Oxford and Cambridge. My own seat of learning was Spring Hill Library and Hudson’s book store New Street Birmingham, as well as 20 years of BBC Radio 4, which is PSB if you are American. Though isn’t PSB something else in Russia, sorry FSB, I only bring it into the conversation because today my readership has extended into Russia, as well as China, and Saudi Arabia.

I don’t think Putin reads my stuff on my websites, though it could help with his English, perhaps he’s dreaming of retirement, Trump could have offered him a job as a pro player at his golf courses. It could be Putin’s dream being a golf pro. I played golf on holiday in Abergele Wales as a child, who knows one day me and Putin could play golf on one of Trump’s courses.

Dreams don’t have to be logical, they are hopes, they are not reality. A dream can be a target too, like dreaming of someday making money from your writing, while you shake the pram and make notes on the table of a café. It worked for Mrs Harry Potter didn’t it.

Planning Ahead

Planning Ahead ©

By Michael Casey

Planning ahead, or making a list is what we all should do, there is only so much you can keep in your head, so we put things down on paper or write in the sand if you are on a beach, or on a blackboard if you are a teacher, but best of all you can put it on your PC. I plan my stories in my head and then woosh I put them into Word, it’s a bit like the doors opening on the Metro and everybody spills out, or at Harrods Sale when everybody spills in, or Black Friday, whatever springs to your mind that’s how it is, a kind of explosion, like when you shake your Dr Pepper and then take the cork off, sticky ice cold drink everywhere. But you’re glad you have it on paper.

At the moment we are planning a few things, and we have a family discussion, what about his, what about that, and did you think of this and did you think about that. However on the other hand, what if this and what if that, and what will your friends say when they find out, will they help or will they say that they’d do anything for love but not that, never that, how could we expect them to support us if we did such a thing. They could not hold their head up high any more, they would be shamed by association, they could never go in the butchers and ask for two chops and a kidney, plus a few scraps for the cat.

Now what exactly are we planning? Are we going to go Vegan or vote for Corbyn or even for Trump? I cannot really tell you what the plan is as it’s so fluid, like my spilt coffee all over my printer yesterday, I had to mop it all up, and my plan has to be contained too, or the effect will be spoilt, like all good Theatre everything is in the timing, so you’ll just have to trust me I’m a writer, or trust me I’m a priest if that makes you more confident in me. See everything will be all right in the end, as my dad used to say When God Made Time He Made Plenty of It. Or as my mother used to say God is Good and With the Help Of God and Two Policemen everything will be ok. So trust my planning, if only I could find that piece of paper, did I use it to mop up my spilt coffee, no use crying over that.

When Will The Pain End?

When Will The Pain End? ©

By Michael Casey

Well I’m up again, I just could not sleep, the scars on my chest and legs are throbbing, and Arthur my arthritis has come out to play too. Two nights ago I had stabbing pains in my chest 8 or 9 in a row, not as bad as other times, which is not heart related, this time it seems to be below the shoulder socket or armpit area. Why am I telling you this, because if you think all I do is laugh all day then you could not be further from the truth, I laugh all day and Trump is still a billionaire.

In fact some days I’m in pain all day, just as Trump is nearly bankrupt if NYT is to be believed. The degree of pain varies too, it can be light or intense, getting off to sleep is a struggle until the pain is corralled out of the way. The irony is if I take my BP with the machine I have it tells me I have Ideal or Normal BP, so my heart has been fixed but the pain is an added “bonus”.

Reality and Hope are two different things, I may hope that the pain goes away but the reality is that it does not, so I get up at 2am and have a cup or two of green tea. It’s like hoping love will find you when in fact it always comes as a surprise, as the little old lady doing the snacks at the Waterworks Jazz club once told me maybe 25 years ago. So I’ll fill my cup again before continuing this conversation.

That’s better another cup of green tea, I have to be careful I spilt it all over my printer earlier today, but then the pain had not arrived, now it’s come out to play and it’s no fun at all.  I do appreciate the good days more than ever, just walking up to Aldi without any pain, a normal thing nobody ever thinks about, but when you have pain it’s another story.

Now let’s move on from all this talk of pain the school holidays are more than ½  over now so my girls are thinking about school again, my big daughter will be taking her GCSEs in this school year, Year 11 or fifth year as we used to call it. If she follows her dream to be a Doctor or MD as they say in USA she will have 10 years of studying before she gets there. I hope I’m here to applaud her and tell her that she will have a life of pain, fixing other people’s pain.

Before I go a big thank you to folks far and wide who are reading my words, I am told by Google Blogs which country you are in, I don’t know who you are or why you are reading my words, but thank you. If ever people buy my 10 books on Amazon I would use any royalties  to help move house, can you imagine the amount of books  my daughter will be reading to become a Doctor?