An American in UKm what did Hayley Bloomingdale Say? (c)

An American in UK, what did Hayley Bloomingdale Say? (c)

By Michael Casey

I was just having my daily scan of the newspapers and stumbled over Hayley Bloomingdale, SORRY, can I help you up. In USA I’d be sued for breaking anybody’s fingernail. In England it’s called Ambulance Chasing and is the lowest of the low of Law Firms. There were a few cases in the news recently where some Law Firms were chastised. Now to explain chastised is not Chastity Belt, just in case any American’s are reading this. But both mean stop reproducing while the Law, or the Husband is otherwise occupied.

This piece is not about Hayley Bloomingdale either, its inspired by the 90 seconds I spent glancing at the piece, 1,500 comments were made but I may be dead or dead bored if I read all of them. So how should I explain England to an American? There is London and there is the rest of the country, London is not UK, though Londoners may think it is. There are many regional accents, though a posh Scottish one is very nice and even very sexy, and no I’m not talking about Nicola Sturgeon, her accent is very harsh.

On the subject of accents I have a posh Birmingham accent, or even none at all depending if I am talking to my sister of not. Why, because I have a Shanghai wife and I had to speak clearly or she would never have understood me, and we wouldn’t have had any kids.

Here in England it rains all the time, this is not true, except in Manchester or in Scotland, I would tell you what they are swearing at me but I cannot understand their accents. Just a moment a Glasgow man wants to kiss me, he’s offering a Glasgow kiss. That’s very kind, very French of him, that hurt I can see stars in my eyes, a Glasgow kiss is in actual fact a violent head butt. So always ask where the person is from before you accept any kisses.  

Once you have made friends here in the uk they will take you down the pub, but beware as a pint in England is  20% larger than a USA pint. So you may think you can hold your drink but compared to the Brits, you will fall over drunk as a skunk in the gutter. By the way in England nobody calls themselves Brits, in tv land maybe, but the guy in the chip shop will think you are asking does he have a social disease if you ask about his Brits.

Yes it’s true over here people do queue, especially for buses, and buses do occasionally smell and the unopened windows steam up. Nobody ever seems to open windows, they are too polite to ask somebody to open them, cos that would involve  talking to strangers, and what did your mum say, never talk to strangers.

Football is very big in England, and if anybody calls it soccer then they are not from England. American Football is for girls, all the padding and timeouts and so forth, real men play Rugby which was invented in Rugby and played by men with oval balls, that’s why they walk the way they do.

We like films here in UK, and we call them Films, and we go to the cinema or to the flicks. We don’t go to the movies, we go and see a film, though Sky has so many films nowadays that we all stay home and watch them in HD on our telly. We do of course go to the off-licence first to buy a few cans of Stella Artois and crisps and Cadburys  Crunchies first. Then we all gather around to watch Americans with bad English accents in a new drama.   

We are not a Holy as Americans, church going has declined these past 40  years, though where I live there 4 or 6 churches nearby, and we do have Mosques and Temples. We have mainstream Faith. WE don’t have Bob’s Church for Left Handed Golf Swingers, as you do in USA, which may have more to do with Golf or Swingers that any real Faith.

Things are quieter generally than USA, but that’s the way I prefer it. WE celebrate all the different Festivals and Holy Days of All the Faiths in our Schools, that’s why the kids love going to school. We don’t have armed guards in our schools either.

So Haley Bloomingdale if ever we meet I’ll take you to Old Forge and Singing Anvil and introduced you to everybody, they have a great pub, and it is PUB not bar where you can drink real ale and eat cheese and onion crisps not to mention try pork scratchings a Black Country speciality, you won’t find in any Michelin star place. 

Other than that you follow the link below. 

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

And I forgot Have a Nice Day, which nobody ever says in UK.

A Straight Piece

A Straight Piece©

By Michael Casey

The Summer hols are over and my daughters are back at school, one is even a Prefect now, but I remind her that I was Head Boy at Primary school, fast approaching 50 years ago. Though I was really Head Jailer, locking up the school at dinner time while the caretaker had his dinner.

So you will have noticed how I wrote a large number of pieces over the holiday, in various styles as the mood or inspiration took me. Yes I don’t bother with stage layout, or script layout. Too many colons and speech marks just annoy readers. 

Yes, they do, don’t argue with me. What was that line in Amadeus, too many notes.

Go ask your kids and they will say they hate Plays because of the way they are laid out. I also write for your ears, remember my 20 formative years listening to BBC Radio4 , or BBC World Service if you cannot get BBC Radio4.You should be listening to me not reading me.

My point being purists will hate the way I write as in the technicalities of my writing, because they had to suffer English at Eton or wherever so I should suffer like them too. But the Jeremy Corbyn Grammar School did serve me well.

Which brings me on to today’s piece a Straight Piece, when I use the word Straight you the reader, yes you hiding under the bedclothes with your Tablet in hand.  You, immediately think of other words, and you are making up your own story before I have even started. Gill from StatsMR, this was my University by the way, far higher standard than Trump University, he will become President but will be impeached in 18 months is my  prediction. Not unless he suddenly gets a dose of Humility.

Sorry I got side tracked, anyway Gill with a G once said I led people up the garden path, but if the roses smell nice then I’ve done my job as a Writer. It’s the journey which matters that’s what story telling is all about, I have that in common with Jeffrey Archer, I am a Storyteller.  If only I had a photo copy of his Monet as well.

So the question is what do people prefer?  Do they want sauce, more sauce than HP, or do they want laughs, or do they want clever stuff, assuming you think any of my words are clever.  The story is as funny or as serious as the story allows it to be. It’s like a cake recipe, if there are no fruit in the recipe then there are no fruit, it will be fruitless, and it’s fruitless to suggest the story would be better with them in. 

I was once told by a reader that the funny stuff was better than the serious stuff. So should I just stick to that and not try and be a pseudo intellectual. Once I finish looking in the dictionary to see what intellectual means I’ll answer that question.

Now before I started I had the end sentence or two in my head, because tradition dictates the story ends with a joke or a reference to the beginning, that’s what Will Shakespeare told me. So as you read my stuff are you guessing what the end will be?

If you do and you get it right then you are cleverer than me by far, as I like to go with the flow and choose the end as I get there. A bit like being at a bus station and jumping on any old bus on a whim, rather like they vote in elections in USA perhaps, or am I being cruel or topical. I’m just helping Literacy Archaeologists so they know when this piece was written, or should I just cough a lot.

So the end is coming now, why because I need to go and eat, if somebody had left a Cadbury’s Crunchy on my desk then maybe you’d get a paragraph or two more. Just think of Mozart, what was left on his piano, I’m sure it wasn’t chocolate, and was Prince Mozart reincarnated.

Now that could be a very interesting story, so all you Eton boys out there, go write it, and the 3 winners get to visit the Jeremy Corbyn Grammar school.

You Never Know Who You'll Bimp INto in the Street

You Never Know Who You’ll Bump Into in the Street

You Never Know Who You’ll Bump Into in the Street ©

By Michael Casey

I was up the road doing my walk and ordering my medicine when who did I bump into? Only an old Chinese friend, she was in fact one of my wife’s old bosses. She looks very young but she told me that she had a 26 year old daughter who was now a teacher. That’s how young Chinese and other Oriental people look. My own wife looked so young when she had our first daughter they wrote her age all over the front of the chart. Or Lord knows what people would have thought. In fact once when I bought her new trainers in Clarks New St Birmingham store she told the assistant “He’s my dad” it amused her no end. So when we got home I sent her to bed without any supper.

Which brings me back to my topic, you really don’t know who you’ll meet when you are out and about. We all say we are bound to meet somebody we know when we are in such and such a place. And we are always in our scruffiest clothing, we hadn’t bothered to dress up, or to shave, or wear clean clothes without toothpaste down the front or paint on our shoes.

So it’s then that we meet Nosey Norris, who can and will tell the world that we looked like a bucket of sick when we met him in Aldi by the frozen food. And he always wears a suit, and is perfectly shaved, it’s just because his boyfriend insists on it, or he’ll run away again. Nosey Norris only got Boris to stay by promising on a copy of Vogue that he’d always look immaculate.

So Nosey Norris, or NN in shorthand, sneers at us as he looks down at us from his towering Cuban heels. How are you he asks as he makes a mental note of the number of dress crimes we have committed. Boris and NN enjoy laughing about normal people as they eat crumpets as they sit naked on their shag pile rug in their sitting room.

I only know this because Horace the window cleaner was about to ask for a refill for his bucket and to rinse his sponge when he stumbled over this vista. Of course he promised not to say a word in return for a squirt of Fairy Liquid and a bucket of hot water.  And obviously the whole world or rather everybody and their mother on his window cleaning round knew. Now every time NN and Boris are in Aldi the checkout staff just pray they don’t come to their till with Fairy Liquid and Crumpets. It’s too much to bear, so they have to think of something really really sad or they will burst out laughing. The Big Bake Off leaving the BBC and going to Channel 4 usual does the trick, it makes the checkout staff glum enough to remain serious, and not think of them naked eating crumpet.

However the younger Aldi staff did wonder what eating crumpet while naked on a shag pile carpet was like.  And what did you do with all the butter melted and dripping down their bodies. If you add Aldi wine to the situation what would happen. All I can say is that in 9 month’s time Aldi baby products will be very useful.

But where was I, I was in the street bumping into people I know, some who prefer they didn’t know me, see some people are so cruel. So what do you do when you meet that old nosey neighbour who knows your mother, or who you went to school with.  What you do is LIE, you say you are living in a 6 room detached house, in fact you are living in that house but only in an attic bedroom, you are sharing it with Cinderella and she is such a noisy bitch talking all night long to the rats and mice. You are going to sneak a cat into the attic to sort her out, then you’ll get some sleep.

You say you have a glittering career, you are in waste reclamation and disposal, no you don’t drive a skip you joke, you boast as if you are in the office and in charge of thousands of people. You are in fact a street cleaner with a litter picker in your hand and plastic sacks galore in your back pocket.
And are you married they ask sneering, just because you are fat and ugly with that horrid hair, and the birthmark does not mean God won’t sprinkle some Fairy Dust. And this is where you flatten them, where you demolish them. Oh actually I did meet somebody. The old nosey neighbour cannot wait to see the photo you are struggling to get from your back pocket, its bound to be a ginger, a fat and ginger English girl.

Slowly you hand over the photo and she drops it, you pick it up, not with a litter picker for you are no sanitation expert, you are a writer. And as for the family photo, you married a Shanghai girl , and yes the 2 girls are your daughters. God did not just sprinkle Fairy Dust, he threw in foolish Angels, because he treads everywhere, and He always has the last laugh.


my family April 2013 in Malta, I’m holding the camera

Funny Words finished version

Funny Words ©

By Michael Casey

Thank you all for coming back, I left a note on my site that I’d write a new piece 14 hours later, after I’d been to bed and got up again. So it’s almost High Noon now so I’ll make a start, Annie Lennox is singing to me as I talk to you all. If you have never seen the film High Noon, then do dig it out and you’ll be glad you did. As for Annie I’ve had the album Peace since 1999 and listen to it regularly. You can take my word as a Writer that both the film and the album are good.

Words are strange things, and some words do make us laugh immediately, such as FART. Ok I’ll start with the obvious and continue afterwards. We were all in Shanghai in 2007, our girls were very small. My small daughter was still only 3 and all the Chinese family wanted her to speak. We had a large room for maybe 40 or even 50 people, all the Chinese Paternal side of the family with their own families. My daughter did not say a word, finally after much coaxing she spoke to the world, to her Shanghai cousins.

 And what did she say in Chinese to them? Annie fan pi.  Which translated means Annie, her sister, had FARTED. Annie fan pi.

This of course broke the ice and a wave of laughter ripped around the room. So what does that prove that some words are internationally funny. Hello to my Chinese and Russian readers by the way it’s nice to know that my funny words reach all the way to the East. I would like some Korean and Japanese readers too, so tell your friends.

Words are funny, but it’s the way you put them together that makes them funnier still. I am of course an athlete, being 110kilos, means I am so fast. If you can put the cartoon of me in your head you’ll think of an elephant in shorts, leaving Hussain Bolt for dust, or rather battered on the track as I charge elephant like over him. I would of course try to eat his gold medals, thinking they are chocolate covered in gold wrapping paper. It’s such a disappointment when they are not.

Every profession has words that have double or triple meanings, multiple meanings have been used since Shakespeare and beyond.  You can be drunk because you have drunk too much, or punch drunk because you’ve been hit too much. You may even say let me drink in your beauty, but the barmaid replies by pouring your pint on your head and the bouncers throw you out for being a drunk.

Words can be used as put downs, he’s a Hobbit may mean he’s so small, or because he’s always on a quest to somewhere except to buy a pint when it’s his round, his turn to buy a drink. Or he’d need Satnav to get to the kitchen, or to find the bathroom, and judging by the state of his trousers he didn’t make it in time, and his shoes are always wet.

I was called a burnt out old has been, the person who spoke those words became a vagrant, a tramp. I went on to marry a Shanghai girl, and write 10 books, available on Amazon, and have 2 clever bilingual daughters. So if you do trash somebody beware that God is listening and you never know where you will end up.

Praise is a funny thing too, if you praise too much you devalue your words, just as kids in the street sometimes swear too much and devalue the weight of their swears. Saturday Night Fever is a great film, it was an 18 when it first came out, I watched it and thought there was no need for the excessive swearing, later the film was released with a lower certification, so loads more people could see John Travolta on top form.

In our house we hardly praise at all, because we know our girls are really clever, if you have seen Willy Wonka there’s a really annoying posh girl, the one who wants a pony and everything else, she is just so spoilt. The best thing to give her would be a bucket of water over the head. So praise your kids, keep the fridge stocked with chocolate, then you can save using a dictionary of words of praise. Love you kids that’s all you need, and love is cheaper than ponies.

Karl Lagerfeld, Theresa May and Me

Karl Lagerfeld, Theresa May and Me ©

By Michael Casey

First of all let me say that I am a gay dad, I have a Shanghai wife and 2 beautiful bilingual daughters. Before Google and lazy readers get the wrong impression, this means I know about fashion, as I have 3 girls in the house, 4 if you count Totoro our bilingual cat. I’m not Gay Gay, I did have a girl once say that another girl wanted to breed with me, because I had such pretty kids, yes really it was when I was working at a hotel, CPNEC Birmingham. 

I am available for breeding but not with test tubes, I can hear the laughter worldwide, but when you are screaming in pain in the middle of the night it’s good to dream that I could have been a contender as they say in all those Rocky films.

Now to today’s tale Karl is of course an old friend, in fact it was I who gave him his favourite thimble, so obviously this means we are close, I get postcards from him all the time. He also sends me photographs of fresh cream cakes and other creations which are beyond belief, Mary Berry is of course another friend of his. She did in fact break his heart, it was something to do with pastry and the secret signature on it.

Why does Karl keep on sending me these photographs? To prove he has NOT eaten them, he also sends me paper bags with the crumbs from these cakes, after one of his crew have eaten them. It’s a weekend thing they do, they down thimbles and have an exquisite cake and a pint of Stella Artois, Karl just has one small glass of champagne. Photos are taken and posted to me. It’s a kind of intellectual pastry torture.  

So Theresa May will be taking over the Fashion Week and Number Ten thing, not because she wants free shoes,  I do send her my used size Ten extra wide Clarkes, not for her to wear but to remind her Politics can be a smelly business. She puts them in shoe bank next door to Aldi, there is a branch  behind number 10 if you use the back door. She is right though Fashion is great and is a great Business, Red does suit her, if I may put my gay dad hat on. Though Karl might suggest 10 different shades of Red, but I’m still angry with him, today’s photo of a custard cream was the best cake I’ve never had. He is so cruel.

I will have my revenge, Fashion Week wants to find an uncool dad and dress him, little do Karl and Theresa know but it’s me they have to dress. It would be easier to dress Jeremy Corbyn, but now they have to make me look Cool, the Coolest of cool. All the teasing and sending me photos of cakes and their crumbs, ha, now see what they think.

We could just put him in a plastic bag. And throw him in the Thames. But that would pollute the river. We could call it Bio Degradable the New Fashion, and maybe sprinkle cake crumbs on his head.  But with his white hair people will think it’s just dandruff. We could put him in one of your skirts. Yes but he has scars on both legs where his veins were harvested.  If we drew  on his legs with a crayon we could turn it into Amazonian rivers. So what if we reverse the idea, we put trousers on him and expose his chest

He’s as hairy as a silver backed gorilla, see the hairy birthmark on his shoulder. I quite like all this hair, maybe we could add hair extensions.  Give him a new Romantic look. Nobody would want to romance with that look. I heard woman thought  he was really good looking, in the past. Maybe they should have gone to Spec Savers. What is Spec Savers is it a new Fashion House?

Maybe he should just be nude and walk the walk in the nude. Skin is the ultimate Fashion accessory after all. We could spray him with Deep Heat first. Is that a sexy perfume? Yes, but only on Michael Casey’s imagination.