It’s cold and damp Autumn is here

It’s cold and damp Autumn is here ©

By Michael Casey

Perhaps I should translate for my American readers, Fall has arrived here in Birmingham. It feels cold and damp and my washing is shrouded in mist on the washing line which covers our grass in the garden. A beautiful picture so different to those of you who  live in 90210 or even in DC, by the way Obama hurry up with the bubble wrap, you only have a month to pack.

Aches and pains beckon with the damp air, little wonder folks live till 300 years old in Hollywood thanks to the warm dry climate, whereas here in Birmingham we have to dig out our string vests, or put 3 jumpers on and an overcoat, just to stay warm, indoors that is. It’s warmer outside, if you call all your friends and flash mob the number 11 bus, this is a 20 mile circle of Birmingham, then you all stay warm like cattle in a shed.

Half way around you jump off and flash mob the Christian tea shop, it’s really really cheap and best of all it’s warm, if only you could carry the heat home in carrier bags. Once a month there is dancing, they always play ONJ’s Get Physical, 70 to 80+ year olds doing the naughty, well in their imagination anyways, everything is slow motion nowadays.

As they dance over the floor, tables and chairs pushed out of the way to allow their dancing and prancing. Imagine John Travolata and ONJ in Grease but substitute seniors with Arthritis and big woolly jumpers freshly bought from the Charity shop. Don’t mock them I’m nearly there, I have the Arthritis and Woolly jumper, all I need is the free bus pass. Though if you look into their eyes you will notice the spark the fire, just shake those embers and you’ll be amazed what you’ll find out. The top deck of buses hold many secrets and not just where Mr Jones went to have a pee….

The kids or grandkids will be home soon, you have to put on your best face, to lie to them and say you had a great day, and no the Autumn chill did not make your Arthritis worse today. You don’t put the heating on to save money so that you can buy them chocolate biscuits, you just shiver under a duvet waiting till 15 mins before the kids are due back before you switch the heating on, for them.  It’s an idea you will use for Mrs Murphy in Tears for a Butcher, she will get a space blanket as used by real life Astronauts, and get to make friends with a billionaire’s mum. But that’s another chapter in another book.

As for now I need a hot drink tea will be fine. I’m remembering when we were kids in the Winter ice was on the  inside of bedroom windows, we scrapped it off and may have even eaten it, that was 50 years ago before double glazing was invented. Everything was so innocent then.

So I’ve got my tea and Michael Jackson is singing  Remember the Time, memories  do keep us warm, we may be chilled to the bone, but our spirits are on fire with love and memories. Memory is my greatest companion, I seem to have been the Family Camcorder, I have no fancy exploding flaming phone, though it might have warmed me and my Arthritis up.

What I’m saying is I remember lots of stuff, it all goes into the “soup” and then I am able to write about it.  I sometimes cannot remember what I had for breakfast, but what happened 50 years ago I have near total recall. As I reach for my tea I hold the keyboard like an artist holding his palette, I slurp my tea and resume painting pictures with words. I’ve got my dressing gown on, the long one, have to stay warm without the central heating on. Then I’ll have a 2nd tea to keep my body warm and flush my cKd kidneys out, and then I’ll be off to Aldi to buy chocolate for the girls,  just in time to put the central heating on before they come home.

Feeding The Kids

Feeding The Kids 2016 ©

By Michael Casey

Some of us are housewives, I am a housewife, not just because I like cross dressing, with a piny and droopy stockings and only one suspender holding just the right leg up, and no its not some form of kinky Freemason initiation stuff. The Freemasons would never have me, as Groucho Marx said, any club with me in it is not worth belonging to. Though I am available for after dinner speaking, emphasis on the free dinner, just in case anybody out there needs a speaker, 300 And Not OUT has plenty of material for any after any dinner speaking as do the other books.

Now I was side-tracked, you lot would put any writer off his stride, I have to go and sharpen my pencil before  I resume, or maybe I’ll just switch to crayon. Being at home means  you get to spend more time with the kids. Personally I consider that to be a blessing, growing up my dad was always working in the steel works, so as children we didn’t see as much of him as we would have liked, though Love wise it was a Deep Love, my own dad was my best friend.

Dad could not boil an egg as mum was always there to look after his belly, and the bellies of all her kids and a cat and a dog. So now decades later I am feeding my 2 girls it makes me smile when I think back to my dad’s time. As always kids come home and look in the fridge and say there is nothing to eat and that I’m starving them. They eat rice daily as they are half Shanghai Chinese, so if there is nothing in the fridge, according to them , they immediately look up Amnesty International on the internet, so they can start a campaign to fill our fridge. And as I’ve forgotten to have chocolate in the house, can there be a torchlight procession through the streets.

I say you have eggs, we can have them scrambled or hard boiled, for perfect farting, they look at me in disgust as if egg was a dirty word. I say we can add beans, Heinz beans, the best beans to the eggs, for even better farting, they look at me as if Heinz is a dirty word. So I say I have some Polish bread from the corner shop, I could turn it into French toast, with Heinz beans on the side, they just look at me in disgust, they don’t want a geography lesson.

If they wanted a geography lesson they’d ask that Mr Corbyn on the telly, he IS a geography teacher after all. Or even Mrs May the PM, didn’t she do geography at Oxford, this enabled her to Navigate to Birmingham and the Party Conference, and then to Downing Street, wasn’t Downing where daddy’s brother went to Uni?

So eggs are out, at least they are not off. So I say I have fish fingers, I bet they are cold you should put gloves on daddy they say in unison. They are nice with peas and some bread and butter. I add nonchalantly I do have a new Aldi hot chocolate drink. Redemption, Amnesty International can cancel that street march, and stop weaving barbed wire into candles.

So fish finger sandwiches with peas are tonight’s dinner, the peas fall out of the sandwiches and bounce around the floor, Totoro thinks its great sport and she eats them too. So the cat is fed as well while I retreat to watch the news on the computer. Of course I have many menus I can exploit, and there is Iceland, the shop not the country. Cottage pie and lasagne are instant belly fillers, all you have to do is cook it slowly, it’s always 30 mins to an hour longer to cook than the packet says.

The trick in cooking is, just open the oven door and look inside and spin the food so all angles get cooked. If you follow this advice religiously then you too will have a Michelin star.  My  small daughter make it from an old toilet tube and silver paper, then she glued it to the fridge, only Totoro is addicted to glue so she licked it off. That’s why my Michelin star is not mentioned in The Times Best Eateries List.

Tomorrow they will have lamb chops, only because I found them in the wife’s side of the fridge, we are one family divided by fridge doors, and wrapping paper with Chinese writing on. I do of course have roast potatoes to go with the chops, all I have to do is to cook them for double the time it says on the wrapper, and remember to open the oven door often to keep an eye on them.

Sometimes mum takes us out for a meal at the weekend, and guess what she picks English Food.

enjoy the photos, with a face like mine I should be on Radio, www.michaelgcasey.typepad.com to HEAR ME reading my stories

Our Modern Familes

Our Modern Families ©

By Michael Casey

We all watch Modern Family on tv as well New Girl, these show us how modern families live and fight amongst themselves. Mum used the say the family that prays together stays together, or in the modern world the family that watches tv together stays together. Or so it used to be, I can still remember Channel4 arriving in UK, it was a big deal, this was when I was a kid 40 years and more ago.

Tv is a great unifier, we all watch our favourite soap together and it’s a main topic of conversation, as we share  out the biscuits and sweets as we watch tv, and scream don’t stand in front of the tv I’m watching it. Since the advent of SKY we have loads more tv to watch, and we can stop the shows while we dash to the toilet, or make a cup of tv.  Which is great in my opinion, Sky and Virgin fight it out for our tv pennies, and now we even have Sky Q which may have been named after Q from James Bond. Next time Bond and Q are down the Trader in Old Forge and Singing Anvil I will ask them.

 What all this tv does is split the viewers, mum and dad are watching 50 Shades of Grey and taking copious notes as they are decorating their bathroom and bedroom all next week. The kids thanks to Sky Q  can watch their shows on a tablet and even take it on a picnic with them, or sneak it into school in their lunch box.

 Then your tv has become an Internet TV too because of Sky Q, so Rupert must have “bribed” Q with a DB7 and season ticket for Manchester United or maybe just a box set of Home and Away when Kylie and Jason first appeared. All these things split the family, but also save the family as there are no tv clashes any more, years of tv can be recorded to watch in our 2^nd 3^rd or 4^th lives, I’m sure you would need to be a Buddhist to have enough  time to watch all your favourite shows. So does the Dali Lama watch Coronation Street, or does he watch all the box sets of Dallas.  Perhaps one day Michael Casey will be big on tv, if you don’t know who Michael Casey is it’s me, you really must start reading my titles.  

Food does bring families together, especially if its Chinese food, though in our Shanghai Birmingham family Chinese food is a thrice daily thing. And what do we watch on tv, food shows, we watch more food shows than actually preparing real food. I’m sure the next thing on tv will be a 3d printer attached to the tv so if you like somebody’s meat balls you can have them made by the tv and you just reach in and grab their balls.

All this is for the future I’m sure Rupert is already thinking of all this, once he finishes reading all 10 of my books on Amazon, though knowing my luck if he gives feedback he’ll say, Perfect for Radio.

Giving your rubbish away

Giving your Rubbish Away ©

By Michael Casey

We give away our rubbish, and people are glad to receive it, ok we don’t actually give away our rubbish, what I mean to say is that we don’t waste our rubbish, we put it to good use. We use Charity shops, it is a waste if your children’s clothes go in the bin with little wear on them.

So we bag clothes up and I walk up the road and hand it over to the Charity shop volunteer, over here it is volunteers only the manager gets paid. If you have young kids they grow so fast so it’s a pity to bin what could be used again, items are practically brand new. When I grew up I had 4^th hand clothes until I got too fat for hand me downs, though I did enjoy wearing my mother’s dresses, dad had a nice evening gown which he wore to the steel works. Am I joking or is the famous British steel workers sense of humour, is it the same in Pennsylvania?

If my girls have a massive clear out the sacks can be too heavy to carry so I have to improvise. So I lay the items on the garden wall and try and entice passing parents to take away the jeans or coats or tops or even shoes that no longer fit our girls. If the fashion has changed then some items are quickly despised and so are available for passing strangers. No our girls   are NOT like that spoilt brat Pony wanting girl in Willy Wonka.  If you have your own girls you will understand, girls just need more clothes more often, just as your wife does.

Sometimes you spot a child wearing your daughters’ old clothes, it’s nice that somebody had the wear of them, it’s a sin to waste clothes as it’s a sin to waste food, share and share alike. As far as my old clothes go, that is a sight to behold, I’m XXL so if I send something to the Charity shop, it will either be used by a fat but not as beautiful man, I have to be honest after all, I am a George Clooney look alike, ok I did work in a law firm for 3 years, that’s my only connection. Or the Scouts buy my old coats and use them as tents up in the woods, or as kites. But at least my clothes have a new life, a kind of reincarnation.

So don’t lazy, don’t throw clothes in the trash as you say in USA, pass them on, somebody will love your old clothes. So please pass on your old clothes even copy me and put them on your garden wall this Fall.  Who knows perhaps Bill Gates may pass by, for we all knows he could do with some new threads or maybe just have his inside leg measured properly. 

for the future

for the future

well i updated to windows 10 anniversary update on the familt computer and guess what my mouse would not work any more.

back in may, 100 stories ago i found a guy in aldi who fixed it for me.
my usb ports dropped out too but came back again a week later.
so i’m hoping that will happen again or i meet the big guy in aldi again.
other than that  when i go through the 1,000,000 words barrier i’ll release a book called THE  FIRST MILLION WORDS OF MICHAEL CASEY
THIS WILL BE AFTER STILL SMILING 2017 SO IT’LL BE MY 12TH BOOK
3600 PAGES PLUS    spring 2017 maybe