Visitors Day and hello Belarus

 michaelgcasey  Uncategorized  23/07/2019 6 Minutes

Visitors Day and hello Belarus, we had several visitors today, and Belarus joined my Bemused Visitors Group.

My daughter’s Fairy Godmother dropped by with a card to remember my daughter’s Christening so many years ago. So thanks to her.

Then as I stagger up the hill with some milk today ahead of me was an old couple, so I walked behind with them as my pacemaker. I was really impressed. This hill is the steepest of the hills which form our Little Hillock community, a kind of Rome in the suburbs of Birmingham if you like

It turned out that the man was a Postman so he was a great walker, we got talking, mainly about how unfit I was compared to them. Then as we talked I pointed to our house. BUT it was their house, they had lived there 40 years previously. So obviously I invited them in for a cup of tea. The lady of the house, nee Rainbow told me what the house used to look like. And John her Husband wasn’t just a Postman, and he once has a cat called Jess as in Postman Cat the kids animation series. In fact John was a graphic illustrator and artist.  Was God playing tricks on me, an artist to illustrate my words,my cartoons made from words. Sadly John is far too busy to waste his time on me. He is 75 now. But we had a great natter for maybe an hour, before I send them on their way. He is also into Local History, so God really was having a laugh with me. As they headed for home,  just around the corner,I said he could always come back and paint my garden gate, if he he had the time. Just as I had a future Media and Art student paint my bathroom in the old house.

I bumped into a neighbour whom I did not recognise, she’s changed her glasses and looked like Tom Cruise’s girl in Top Gun. Turns out she and her husband our data analysts and at the back of my mind I remember a little guy from work 20+ years ago, so I need to ask did he used to work for our company on the 4th floor. Now that would be really spooky. Her daughter was too young to try on any of my daughter’s old but brand new condition clothes, so I had to bring them inside before the promised thunder. And yes I bored her too with details about the spread of my readers in 60 Countries plus, and sometimes reading 6 or 7 translations in a day. Maybe she’d buy and ebook, and then regret it, when she could have bought a sausage and chips instead. On Verra.

My next door neighbour also paid a  visit, he grandson had lost a shoe and a football over the garden fence. So as I had some teenage girls clothes ready to  give away, I tried a Chinese style jacket meant for a girl on this 8 year old boy. It almost fitted, but he didn’t like the style. I told him there was no shame in dressing up as a woman, Danny la Rue had made a living from it, besides I wore women’s clothes at the weekend. The 8 year old did not believe me, but his grannie chimed in she had to hide her clothes from grandad.

I retrieved his shoe and football and  bent down and said here’s  your slipper Cinderella, and told him this would be his nickname forever now. Imagine in the future he’s in a pub and his mates are waiting for  him, where’s Cinderella, in walks a beautiful girl, no I’m not Cinderella. Finally the 8 year old arrives, now a huge man like his granddad.  Then he gets the drinks in. Who is the girl, she is Prince Charming, his wife. Panto Rules OK.

I also bumped into my neighbour who used to be a  neighbour down the old house, he’s a retired Policeman, 30 years service. We nattered,ok I bored him. He now works at the local golf course. I told  him my current book that I’m writing is The 19th Hole.

So that was my day. I also stumbled over this:-

its from 2011 that’s 8 years ago

From Lenny Bruce to Innuendo ©

By

Michael Casey

I was thinking about words and their power the other night as I drifted off to sleep, Lenny Bruce’s name drifted through my mind. I was thinking about how we use words  and perhaps I was thinking about my next blog. How nowadays nobody has a vocabulary, just F(*&^ or &*^%, that’s what you get if you remonstrate with anybody under 30. I won’t bore anybody with my take on the past week’s mayhem.

I have a friend called Jim, we worked together at a 4star deluxe business hotel, Jim had worked very hard all his life,  he had a tongue on him and he knew how to use it.

The thing though was that he could say anything and could get away with it, why, because he had charm, an old rogue’s charm, so instead of getting the sack guests would say, a la Dick Emery, “you are awful”. So if you like his use of words was acceptable.

If you rarely curse then it has more power when you do. But 15 year olds can and do curse ad infinitum, so although we can say its bad in fact its more boring than bad.  In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Belgium is the worst word you can use. Perhaps we need to invent a few more words, Politician, NofW, Wall Street, Stock Market are just a few that spring to mind. If somebody has “stock marketed” you, its akin to some kind of rape, that has left you battered and bruised, spiritually, mentally, financially.

No doubt I’ll be criticised for my last sentence, which proves that people don’t bother to read things in context.

Over here in England we have Innuendo, we have camp and other styles of comedy. In USA Irony is not understood, and you even get attempts at using irony, and you get the joke backward telegraphed and the star saying “I was being Ironic”, when really they were getting it wrong. Innuendo is a good form of language. You can say so much while saying so little. I like the comedians who used it so well in the past, I like words used as weapons of laughter, think back to the Goons and Around the Horne. Kenneth Williams and Duncan and Sandy invented Camp humour BEFORE it was invented, I hope USA readers will Google all this they could make a comic discovery for themselves. 1950s, 1960s  were light years ahead of the game. You don’t need an overpaid fast talking guy looking at his own reflection, just go back to the old days, and they really were the good old days for comedy. I have been told myself that some of  my stuff leads people up the garden path, which is all you need to do.

Lenny Bruce said, “ have you ever Blaaaed a Bla, or have you ever Dooed a Do” I think that’s a line from the film. It makes me remember too just how good Dustin Hoffman was/is 2 Oscars and loads of other stuff. The point is though that you don’t have to curse all the time, I think it’s just boring and lazy. I did a post called Metaphor This a few weeks ago, that proves that language is a balloon that can be twisted this way and that way to form a giraffe.

A sex scene when written down does not need to be graphic, a metaphor can be far funnier. He touched the scales of justice, he adjusted the weights, he was pleased with the result, law was duly served, he pleaded his innocence, but he felt the full force of justice, and he was fully processed, then he was taken down to the cells, he was relieved. That’s how I showed Romance between a lawyer and a milkman/baker in my novel The Butcher The Baker and The Undertaker. I’m no Jilly Cooper you can go to Amazon Kindle and Judge Me for yourselves.

Yes I do curse on occasion and when I write my actors may curse too, but words are like a cloak, they are clothes for my actors, and words show more Fashion and Class than some moron who can only “Daa a daa,” and doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.

https://michaelgcasey.typepad.com/files/179.from-lenny-bruce-to-innuendo.mp3