Changing Diet

Changing Diet ©

By

Michael Casey

Well its a sunny day here in Birmingham, and the Bank Holiday approaches so everybody is happy, apart from students taking exams everywhere. Life is changing for these students, my daughters included. As life changes so does our diet, we become more educated in what we eat. Sadly we have a Latte generation, generating plastic waste, why don’t they buy a jar of coffee and invite the friends over, much nicer than plastic coffee cups in plastic environments.

For the price of a Latte you can buy a jar of instant and instantly invite friends to come on over, with or without Shania Twain. Take it in turns and then you have a different life style, or maybe buy a thermos and a manbag and then you can meet somewhere to have a DIY Latte on the grass. My mother would think it stupid in the extreme to waste money on Latte Life, as you all know it’s a sin to waste food, and as my dad would say, a fool and his money is soon parted. Then you have politicians carrying a cup with them as they get into official cars. They think its glamorous, I’d say it’s stupid, didn’t their mum wake them up in time for breakfast, now they are taking their cuppas with them. Give me strength, but no sugar.

Yogurts are a big thing too, I was thinking today I can actually remember when my mum brought one home, over 40 years ago. It was a new thing in the shops, I only thought of this today but I can remember her taking it out of her red leather shopping bag, plastic carriers had not been invented then. Dad tried it, but they were expensive and tasted bad, the flavouring of yogurts had not been thought of then. In my job I can even remember Alistair McCallum saying Alcopops would not catch on, that was maybe 40 years ago too. So tastes and diet move on, Alistair was a computer programmer, he wrote in Cobol which was Latin for computers.

Tastes change but love of Sugar remains, now we have a nanny state telling us what to eat, whatever happened to self control and parents saying NO. Spare the rod and spoil the child maybe? No doubt the causal reader will deliberately misunderstand that sentence. But I’ve made a conscience decisions not to waste my life on negative people. That’s 2 sentences that they might not like, or maybe I’m just goading them.

Back to food, as a child we enjoyed loaves of bread, and sometimes 2 fishes, bread could be bought from the local shop and we’d eat all the crusts and just leave the middle. Then we’d be lashed by my mother, just her tongue, but a Kerry tongue can be very sharp. So the lump of bread from the middle was saved for soup.As time moves on so does bread,  or rather brown bread is introduced into the family diet. In the old days we just ate what we liked but as your children grow and interact with other kids at school. So brown bread raises it’s head and then margarine arrives, yes I can remember when margarine was a newish thing.

History can be told through food, what we eat and what we like.I can even remember my brother introducing us to Chinese and Indian food in a box, with curly noodles which always seemed to burn. My mother would scream at us to open all the windows, then we opened the windows and let the smell of burning out of our then small kitchen. This is what education had brought us, go to Oxford and bring back a stink to our Birmingham kitchen, higher education higher stink. When the same brother had gone to grammar school he brought back Nescafe, and that is why I’ve been drinking coffee these past 55 years. I can remember my mother moaning at the cost of coffee compared to tea, she even tried to poison me with chicory.

So you grow up and your tastes change or broaden, frozen food and processed food arrived. Nobody had a fridge when I grew up, yes really. I can remember when we got our first fridge, so we hid it in the pantry under the stairs with a hole drilled into the living room to access the power supply. We used to leave our daily 6 bottles of milk in the hall on the Minton tiling, this was our chiller. And a green tin bread bin by the side door under the coat hooks had the bread in, it’s now under my kitchen sink. Obviously everybody had a cat too, just in case mice came a calling. Jean our black cat with green eyes was rewarded with the giblets every Sunday. So Jean always knew for 20 years when Sunday arrived.

A meal freshly prepared with love, and lots of cabbage if you lived in an Irish household is always the nicest thing. Now a meal prepared with ginger and garlic is more common in our house, a Shanghai Chinese house. Fish galore too. Chinese people must always cook, its in their blood, and no matter how rich or successful they become it’s the love of food that marks them out. When my mother in law visited one very prominent member of the Chinese community wanted only one thing, the recipe for my mother in law’s chicken. And in the end that’s what life is all about, no matter how the diet changes. For the sharing of food and breaking of bread or rice, this is what makes us all happy. But make sure you open the kitchen windows first, or all our mother’s will be screaming. 


 https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Casey/e/B00571G0YC

A Glimpse Of Stocking ©

A Glimpse Of Stocking ©

By

 Michael Casey

Well yesterday was Ash Wednesday so I hope you are all still there, you may have given me up for Lent. I think we need a little levity so that’s what I’ll try for today. There may be pauses as the pain demands attention like a spoilt brat, or a North Korean leader, I’ve thrown in a political joke just for the journalists reading this. You think I’m a girl mentioning the pain, I’ll throw a few adjectives at you or even a metaphor if you are not nice to me, I’ll tell my Polish fans to come and hack you. 7000 plus hits in less than a week from Poland, maybe only they find me funny. So move to Poland, you really are so cruel, I’ll come a live next door to you. I knew that would shut you up, call yourself a sub editor, emphasis on the SUB.

Now that we’ve sorted out who is the boss shall I begin, and see I’m posh I use shall. We wish you used more deodorant. Silence in the ranks, I look like the Elephant in the Jungle Book, or is that just the smell. If any of you mutter anything again I’ll send you to Donald for a spanking.

Now spanking is a key word in English, those naughty boys, the SILENT naughty boys smile at the very mention of the word. If you have seen the Carry On Films then I need say no more. What I want to talk about today is how values have changed so much. Personally I think it’s all in the mind, what? It, it is all in the mind. You don’t have to lay it all on, or swamp everybody with it, it not IT, there is a difference. You know it, or shall I shout  IT, and I mean IT and not IT. Sometimes the Press pack are so deliberately boring. Donald give them a really  good spanking from me. I know MATT the cartoonist has whipped his crayons out already and you have a queue, or Line as they say in USA of journalists waiting to be spanked by Donald.

Ok I’ll leave that idea in your mind and I bet it’ll appear somewhere in cartoon form within a week, I am Mr Cartoons made from Words after all. Now where was I, yes I’m sat here talking to you all, and I have to confess I get Russian readers too, Putin reads me, yes he does, his MAD magazine got stuck in the post somewhere so he started reading my column, Nelson his press secretary put him on to me.  That’s what a bushy eyed man told me by the frozen peas in Aldi yesterday, or he may have been asking me to putin the peas into his basket. I just wish I was a linguist, LINGUIST, you lot are so slow sometimes.

Yes, what I really want to talk about today is the wanton use of sex in the media. In days of old a glimpse of stocking was classed as shocking but now anything goes. I think I saw it performed at the Good Old Days on tv. What is amusing us all at the moment is a feminist deciding to flash or half flash, her upper bits, I won’t use any words as it may upset nanny. I can hear the sound of the cane in the distance, Donald is spanking the journalists in the distance. They should have saved the DC Digger Metro Edition, not because its second hand bargains were the best in the whole of USA, and the supermarket coupons inside were always for the best shops. But because if you stuff it down the back of your trousers no amount of spanking by teacher will hurt.  

So rather than talk about the level of nudity, let’s look at this sideways, and sometimes you have to because the way things are published. Should I, moi Michael Casey from Birmingham England, should I have a shirt split to the navel to expose my quadruple heart bypass scar. Should I wear see-through pants, as you call trousers in USA, should I expose my short fat and hairy legs to show off my scars. The scars run from my socks and stop at my, well too high to mention, only my nurse has examined those regions. In today’s world the   Stars show everything, only a butcher shows more, laying in his shop window, and if the Stars were naked in a butcher’s shop window could you tell one piece of meat from another? And no I’m not suggesting the butcher lies naked in his shop window only holding his cleaver.

What if in the future the circle turns full circle. You wear a suit with cut outs exposing your elbows, just your elbows. The screams from women in the street as they faint with shock. Exposed elbows, terrible, shock horror. Somebody take him to Donald’s office for a spanking, he must be a terrible journalist or some such thing. Then even worse a suit with exposed knees, otherwise totally totally formal but the knees exposed, the utter depravity of it, exposing your knees in public. The absolute worse of the worse would be shoes, patent leather shoes with the big toe exposed and wiggling for the whole world to see. Off with his head, somebody call the executioner, what Mr Pierpont is on holiday. Donald will have to give him a double spanking instead. Where is Pierpont? Oh, he went on a Nudist holiday to Brighton in England.

Oh just for the record Donald is a She, in these days of gender equality anybody can be called anything they like. Donald is the President of the Bad Grammar Corrective Ink Party. A private members club for Journalists in DC. What were you all thinking, I told you it’s all in the mind.

 ****

 this is from march 2017, I may write something new later now that the windows10 update for April has finally finished

Heads up for Korean Soaps with English subtitles

Heads up for Korean Soaps with English subtitles.

Watched a few Korean soaps with English subtitles

You can catch them on Netflix

They are funny and  worth a try, obviously as we have an Eastern connection in our house we are

more open to watching them.

When we had Phoenix we used to watch Chinese soaps they are very good too.

So if you cannot find a film to watch don't say there is nothing on tv, switch over to Netflix and try a

Korean soap or a Chinese one.

You will not be disappointed.

And if you are then just buy all my books and read them

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-Casey/e/B00571G0YC


That's all for today, let's hope the pain monster stays away tonight.



And remember Kpop Saves the world....

 house where my mum was born, yes really

LOST

Lost ©

By Michael Casey

Well it’s the last day of April and tomorrow is another day, and when God made Time he made plenty of it. I can remember my dad saying this to cheer me up when I was unemployed and I was in a hurry for things to change. I have not had a starry starry life, quiet the reverse, I’ve lost my way a few times. Being LOST happens to all of us in a variety of ways. The thing is though that you can find your way back to wherever you want to be. You can go your own way as Fleetwood Mac sing in the background, but you can also return from being lost.

We have Cobwebs of Love to bring us gently home. As a child the furthest we go away is to the corner shop, our mum stands on the front door step to reassure us that we will not get lost. So we go to Off ye Goes and buy a loaf of bread and run back to safety of home and mum, as I did 55 years ago.

We grow up or wider in my case, and we lose our fear of getting lost, so we wander off on an airbed and drift out to sea, and could have even drown. So dad tracks us down by the sea wall, only the steps are too steep to climb out at Rhyll or was it Colwynn Bay, so that I had to paddle back again to the safety of the beach, I was 10 or so then. I suppose I could have become a tragic statistic, instead of a tragedy of a writer perhaps?

We lose things and sometimes they stay lost, my mother used to say that my brother would lose his arse if it was not tied on to him. I think I never lost anything in my life till I met an old friend on a bus and lost my gloves. But I knew where they were, they were on the bus, so I wish good luck to whoever found them.

You get older and you want to lose the influence of your parents. So you go to University to lose your accent, your inhibitions and your virginity. Only you discover its your naivety which was the biggest lost. At least you did not get any disease nor, get pregnant, your family would have killed you, and any unborn baby. They are so strict and you went to the University the furthest away from your home town, almost in another Time Zone.

So you have lost your naivety and become a Monk or a Nun, because at least now your know the difference between sex and love, even if you had to practice a bit before you finally realised. So you end up celibate, but at least you have now lost your innocent view of innocence. But you come top in Philosophy now, so it’s an ill wind that blows no good. But you cannot look grannie in the eye any more.

You lose your gran she was 91 after all, and you have lost a friend, and a private banker, she always gave you money and said don’t tell your dad, why should he waste her money after she was gone. Then as you scatter her ashes at the beach by Abegele you open a letter with instructions. Thanks for scattering my ashes here, I gave myself away to a Welshman here, but I did not marry him. Yes, your dad is a bastard, but a nice Coventry man took me in, I told him the truth, but we pretended I was a widow.

You gasp, grannie had a past, lost on the beach amongst the shingle. So she knew when you gave yourself away to that lad. She saw herself in you, that’s why she loved you so much. That’s why she gave you money. So you have lost a grannie and gained enough money to buy a car, and visit beaches galore, though not doing what grannie did, you have learnt your lesson, you are a nun now.

With time you pass those exams and then do even more, you , little you end up as a PhD, a Dr of something. Marine Biology, well it must have been grannie’s spirit in you. You lose you ignorance and become very very good in your field. But history does repeat itself, and the urge will out, so after years of being a nun your feel children would be good for you. So do you visit that beach near Abegele?

You like comfort when you are not in the field, so you seduce a farmer in his barn with cows looking on. The time was right, it was time to lose the nun, and get back in the habit, the habit of love. He was kind and gentle and with him you can lose all inhibitions. So you have 6 children and a sheepdog to keep them all in check. You are no longer lost, you are home, home with a family and 1000 acres to farm. There is a beach nearby and there the children learn to swim with the sheepdog in attendance.

Now I lost the direction of this story, as I often do with stories, but there is always something that guides us home to mum and dad. I could cry if I continued with a few other memories, but all I’ll say is that mum and dad , all mums and dads should be always there waiting on the doorstep with the light on ready to wrap us up in cobwebs of love. Just as my mum and dad always did for me, and I hope I will do for my own children. I will never lose them.