All Steamed Up

All Steamed Up ©

By

Michael Casey

Well it’s a Friday night so some of you will be all steamed up by now, steamed up means drunk/tipsy or having had too much to drink. See I expand the Esol vocabulary for any students out there reading me. In the corner besides me I can hear French rapping, it’s une confiserie patisserie all wrapped up, ready for later. In reality it’s my small daughter dipping into her French, Lupin is back on tv soon, do watch it the black lead actor is extraordinary, and I’m sure the ladies get steamed up watching him.

I could segway into Steamy Windows and Tina Turner, and I passed several steamed-up car windows in the dark of the field,  on the way home on a Friday night, from the hotel to NEC train station when I worked there 20 years ago. But why have I pulled up on steamy windows? Well the whistle on our kettle has broken, and I just steamed up all the kitchen, if we had wall paper it would be rolling down like a lady’s stockings right now, which might be what still happens in the field on the way to the NEC train station.

Though whistling at ladies is not allowed any more, I used to get looks and many whistles on a Friday night, once a month as I dress in drag and go cruising down Broad street. I am a very big broad after all. With size ten dancing feet, in the street or anywhere else, who do you think taught Bowie and Jagger that dance? They never did return my flasher mac either, so I ran home naked like Lady Godiva, which is up the road from Brum in Coventry.

After all that explanation, should I put the kettle on and we can have a cuppa or a brew? Now I must confess I am a coffee drinker. Though I did give it up for a while after my heart bypass, but then I resumed, if you don’t have something nice in your life, then what is the point? You have to have rapport with your life. Which is the coffee I drink Kenco Rapport, instant with milk, which will make Americans puke at the very idea, that’s a strange way to drink coffee, I should be imprisoned for the very idea.

Back to the kettle, obvious growing up we had an enormous kettle, a gallon kettle, enough to make the tea and do the washing up after the dinner. There used to be a shop called Malcomb’s where all the pots and pans were sold, and obviously his children were percussionists, with that amount of metal it just had to be banged. So, my dad must have gone on an expedition to find a kettle big enough for the Caseys. Though back in Kerry at the family farm the fireplace was at least 10 feet wide, with a crane above the fire and a huge black kettle hanging there. You could actually sit in the fireplace on a chair next to the hanging kettle with the fire below. And I did indeed see my dad’s brother Danny sat right there. I believe Morris and his wife who run the farm now have boarded it all up.

Now does that story take the biscuit, speaking of which do you dunk your biscuits in your tea. There probably is a mathematical formula about the length of time a biscuit should be dunked. Then it’s soggy enough to eat, or if you dunk too long it drops off and floats in the tea, so you have to use your finger to scoop it all out, as you slurp. And memories of my brother doing exactly that come back to me. That’s how you put on weight, it’s all the biscuits with the tea. Though I gave up sugar in my coffee back in 1977, I know the date because I hit my head on the Kerry cow shed door in 1978, and my uncle Patrick said I’d grown 2 inches. Yes, that stone building that he and my mother were all born in became a cow shed. We never knew it was the original house till 1994 maybe, when Uncle Danny back from Boston, replied poking his finger in reply, that was the house. It had a well just a few feet away too, perfect for water for the pot.

Yes, a kettle is a fine thing, it brings family together, for tea and Madeira cake on a Sunday, and the cake would be gone by Monday, especially if I found it. Though for most of my life I’ve just drunk coffee, it’s been only a few years that I’ve added tea to my repertoire. And dad would come home from the steel works and wash his feet in the washing up bowl, and have his dinner sometimes in the living room on a chair, so he could watch the news and heckle the Politicians there, who could not organise a Tea Party, let alone run a country. 

So a boiling kettle brings back many memories to me, something simple like me, it reminds of love and laughter, and a family watching tv together at the weekend. If a film was too touching, my dad would say he was getting a cold and blow his nose, as he excused himself saying he’d put the kettle on for the tea, for this is Family.