The Student's Study

The Student’s Study ©

By

Michael Casey

Well it had to happen so it has, I have had to share my study with my daughter. Ok, its not a study its just me up a corner of our front room with a computer perched on a steel computer trolley thing. Its a bit like a giant cheese grater, I grate the cheese, the words to provide ingredients for my stories. If and when I make money I’ll have a desk like Charles Dickens had, I even have his picture as my screen saver.

For now we threw away an old 2 seater sofa to make way for a pine desk for my daughter to sit and study for her A levels at. Its not  really pine its cheap board with a veneer on top, but its a pulled square metre in size, so the future Dr Casey case study for her A levels behind me. If you have seen a previous picture then you’ll have seen her by my side at the piano, now she is behind me studying away with the aim of getting into Cambridge to do Medicine. My dad would have and will be so proud should she achieve this. Her uncle my brother was at Downing Cambridge back in 1975, and her other uncle is a Queensman from Oxford. A Queensman is not the female equivalent of a Kingsman, if you have seen that great film.

In a way I feel like Liberace now, we are back to back all we need is sparkly clothes, and music. We have music as we both like music while we work. I have 90 cds that I’ve bought over the years, mainly 20 years ago, and spotify is fun too. But now I have to suffer her music and she has to suffer mine, she may switch on her headphones and I lower the volume on my speakers on my cheese grater PC trolley. There are holes in the shelves to make it lighter, hence the cheese grater description.

In the next room abandoned in a corner is an old speaker, my biggest brother use to play Cream music through it while he was studying to get into Oxford, 50 years ago. I cannot believe where the years have gone. 15 years ago I met Eric Clapton while I was working at CPNEC Birmingham, so the circle was complete. Not unless Eric needs a backup speaker for his garden shed, I’ll swap the speaker for his back catalog on CD and USB stick, and I’ll throw in my back catalog of 14 books. A bargain.

Behind me my small daughter has migrated to the study table while her sister rests, my “study” has now been colonised by my daughters

But as we are looking in opposite directions we don’t disturb each other, hang on my small daughter has just started to chant the Periodic Table song, she shouts when did you learn it last, 1972 I reply, before your mother was born.

Luckily I am a very fast writer, hence the typos, so I’m normally done in one hour as far as the creative process is concerned, thereafter the noise of daughters’ does not matter. Though they might say the farts of father persist. Time for an ice lolly, so you have a cuppa while I devour my lolly.

Well I had my lolly and my big daughter put out the dustbins, its her job to make her realise Life is about the unglamourous things too. I remind her does she really want to put her finger up a strange old man’s behind to do rectal examinations, this is the Life of a Doctor after all. I just read that sentence to her, it was met by stony silence. The guard has changed now, she, the big daughter is sat at the desk doing her A Level homework. We are interrupted by little My in search of Polly Pockets, I never suffered this before, now it is my future. Perhaps I’ll have to write my stories earlier in the day to avoid study room congestion.

The printer at my feet is spitting out paper, I am a paper loader and handler again, just as I was back in 1978 at Stats MR, but now I have a daughter to help, just by passing the pages over my shoulder as they come off our printer. To be honest I am so proud, proud enough to cry, my dad would have been prouder still, and as for my mum, a Nuclear Bomb of Love is being detonated every day in Heaven. Her granddaughter planning to be a  DOCTOR.

The printer spews out more paper before I can be too sentimental, before I count my chickens before they are hatched, lets see where we are in 2 years time when the A levels are taken. I need a banana to ground me, so while I unzip a banana, you have an apple, we have Gala apples in our fruit bowl. Some Hippy music is playing in the corner, I couldn’t listen to it for long, so I’ll hurry with my banana.

So you get the picture, my inner sanctum is defiled by daughters, but they will achieve great things where I will not. My small daughter can write the International Best Seller , “My fat dad the writer”, I just hope she does it while I’m alive. Then maybe I get the Dickens Desk as I write on into my 90s, but really the only thing that matters is that my girls are happy, even if they just work in Woolworths.