SPRING 2017 ARRIVES

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Spring 2017 Arrives ©

By Michael Casey

Well Spring 2017 is due to arrive, so I’m glad as it means I can park my very heavy Winter coat and wear something lighter. I hope it means I can go walkabout more, this I have to do, I need to do as we are still house-hunting. It really does drive you mad, especially where we live as houses go in a week, so you are perpetually disappointed. Though you can spot really really nice houses, only they are a lottery win away, or a publishing deal away, it’s more likely I die first before either of those things happen. Last night was a Pain Night too…

What else happens in the Spring? You have a tidy up and redo the decorating you did before. This time you really must do it properly, or pay somebody to cover up your mistakes. I can do a bit myself only my body lets me down, and I’m all tired out, and useless for days afterwards. In 2013 I had none of this, first the Arthur got me and then the Heart. I got the Arthur from my mother and the Heart from my dad, so wanting to be like your parents is a great thing, if only you don’t inherit their diseases.

My small daughter has hopes of being an interior designer is that Mary Stewart you had in USA? This is a good idea so long as my daughter doesn’t end up in Jail like Mary Stewart, she didn’t mismatch a colour scheme and got 30 years or whatever it was. Liking colours and matching this to that is fun when you have money to do so. However when you don’t have any money you have to improvise, buy the last pot of paint in a strange colour and use it to paint your bedroom, that’ll impress your boyfriend.

I can remember at the turn of the 1969/70 my brother painted everything in the room white. The wardrobe, the chest of drawers, the chair, the bed frame and the skirting board. I can’t remember what colour the wallpaper was, I do remember him telling me to shut up and go to sleep as he read a very large book, we were sharing the double bed at the time. When he wasn’t practicing to be a furniture painter he was at Oxford.  Our mother thought it very strange, this was decades before John Lennon’s Imagine video in the all white room.

In Spring you plant your spring flowers, or strawberries and rhubarb in my mother’s case. The cat used to love sitting in the shade of the rhubarb leaves, even if Jean our black cat never ate any of it, but she was no doubt a witch’s cat because she could always tell when it was Sunday as she always had the giblets from our Sunday roast. My mother had green fingers as far as her elbows and my brother the painter has inherited those from her.

In the Spring we might decorate a room in our house or in our lodging house next door. The air would go Blue as mum and dad decorated and I sometimes helped out when I was older. Then mum would go and put the spuds on the gas and get the dinner going while dad continued. This would be on a Saturday as dad was always working excessive hours during the week at the Steelworks. I can remember being sent around to the Off Licence to get a pint in a jug from the rather fat lady who used to run it, she sold sweets and pop too. Then at dinner mum and dad would praise themselves and dad had his pint of Mild, this is 40 years ago.

Spring now means watching my own children grow up, though for me Autumn approaches though the sudden curtain that is Death could have got me if the QE and City Hospitals hadn’t done their magic a couple of years ago. Pain is part of my life, in varying random amounts, just like the weather, sometimes we have 4 seasons in one day, sometimes it’s night time, sometimes the dark seems to last forever. But as Chancy Gardiner said in the Spring there will be growth. So all of us, not just me, we need to remember Spring always comes   and enjoy the spring scents and flowers.